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On a cold December night in 2000, federal prosecutor John Durham showed up at a Medford lawyer's office with secret FBI documents he had uncovered that indicated four men had been framed for murder and wrongly imprisoned.
"He found out the truth that was hidden for so many decades, and he was honest enough to bring it forward so that innocent men could leave prison as free men," said the Medford lawyer, Victor Garo, recently recounting how the documents convinced a judge days later to toss out the 1968 murder convictions of his client, Joseph Salvati, and an alleged accomplice, Peter J. Limone. Last year, those documents helped Salvati, Limone, and the families of two other men - who died in prison - win a $101.7 million civil judgment against the government.
He has detractors, but lawyers and law enforcement officials say Durham's combination of honesty and tenacity help explain why Attorney General Michael Mukasey tapped the deputy US attorney from Connecticut last week to lead a Justice Department probe into the 2005 destruction of CIA videos of officers interrogating two Al Qaeda suspects.
Durham's former colleagues say he is driven by facts and will not be swayed by politics.
"He is one of those people who always does the right thing," said Warren T. Bamford, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office, who has known Durham since they teamed up in 1992 on a task force that targeted gangs in Hartford. "He kind of has blinders on in the sense that he doesn't worry about the politics and all the other stuff that might be swirling around, and I think that's really what makes him so successful."
During 30 years as a prosecutor, Durham, who spent most of his career building and supervising cases out of the US attorney's office in Connecticut, made an impact in Boston.
Amid allegations that longtime informants James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi had corrupted their FBI handlers while working as informants against the Mafia, US Attorney General Janet C. Reno named Durham special prosecutor in 1999 to oversee a task force of out-of-town FBI agents brought in to investigate the Boston office's handling of informants.
In 2002, Durham helped secure a conviction on federal racketeering charges against retired FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr., who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for protecting Bulger and Flemmi from prosecution and warning Bulger to flee just before the gangster's 1995 indictment.
That case and the accompanying investigation earned him a reputation as a tough and honest prosecutor, former colleagues said.
"I think that he proved that he wasn't there simply to whitewash the FBI misconduct," said Boston criminal defense lawyer Anthony M. Cardinale. "If it's the right call, he's going to make it no matter who it hurts or helps."
While assigned to Boston, Durham worked extremely hard between commutes back and forth from his home in Connecticut, said Assistant US Attorney Brian T. Kelly, a member of the team that built the case against Bulger and Flemmi.
"It was obviously a very important case," said Kelly, referring to the prosecution of Connolly. "He handled it professionally and did an excellent job under very difficult circumstances."
During his career, Durham also led a series of high-profile prosecutions in Connecticut against the hierarchy of the New England Mafia and a number of corrupt politicians, including the state's former governor John G. Rowland.
He is also known for his avoidance of the media, and seldom comments publicly on cases.
In a rare appearance at a press conference, on the day he secured Connolly's conviction, Durham told reporters, "Nobody in this country is above the law, an FBI agent or otherwise, and ultimately the ends do not justify the means."
In addition to Connolly, Durham prosecuted Richard Schneiderhan, a retired Massachusetts State Police lieutenant, who was sentenced in 2003 to 18 months in prison for conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
Durham's task force also gathered evidence against another retired FBI agent, H. Paul Rico, who was indicted in Oklahoma on state charges that he helped Bulger and Flemmi kill a Tulsa businessman in 1981. Rico died in 2004 before the case went to trial.
Although evidence was introduced at Connolly's 2002 federal trial that other FBI agents and as many as 20 Boston police officers routinely accepted payoffs or gifts from Bulger's gang, federal officials said it was too late to prosecute them because the statute of limitations had run out.
Retired State Police Colonel Thomas J. Foley said Durham's investigation did not go far enough and that if it was too late for indictments against other suspects, Durham should have issued a report detailing all of his findings.
"He came in here with good intentions, I just think more could have been accomplished there and hasn't been," Foley said.
Durham, 57, declined to comment, according to a spokesman for the US attorney's office in Connecticut.
But during a 2002 press conference, Durham said that if he found cases that were outside the statute of limitations, then prosecutors would detail the alleged wrong- doing in a report to the Justice Department.
US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan would not say whether Durham had filed such a report. But he said Durham was extremely thorough, and followed every lead and shared information with his office.
"There was nothing that John left undone," Sullivan said.
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