'Torture goes on' for North End man
FBI denies blame in wrongful jailing
As he sat in a federal appeals courtroom yesterday listening to a government lawyer argue that the FBI was not to blame for the wrongful conviction that put him and three other men behind bars for decades, Joseph Salvati said it was like being subjected to "waterboarding" - the tactic used during some government interrogations.
"The torture goes on," said the 76-year-old Salvati, who served 29 years and five months in prison for a 1965 gangland slaying in Chelsea while secret files that would later clear him remained buried at the FBI. "The federal government and the Justice Department has been torturing us for 40 years . . . they just don't stop."
His wife, Marie, who raised their four children while he was in prison and has remained by his side through every proceeding, said: "The FBI is still trying to make believe that they didn't do anything wrong. They are still in denial."
In July 2007, US District Judge Nancy Gertner found that the FBI was responsible for framing Salvati, Peter J. Limone, Louis Greco, and Henry Tameleo for the murder of Edward "Teddy" Deegan, a small-time criminal, and ordered the government to pay them a total of $101.7 million for the decades they had spent in prison.
She concluded that the FBI deliberately withheld evidence of the four men's innocence and helped hide the injustice for decades as the men aged behind bars. Tameleo and Greco died in prison.
The discovery of secret FBI files that were not turned over during the men's 1968 state trial for Deegan's slaying prompted a state judge in 2001 to overturn the murder convictions of Limone, who was immediately freed after 33 years in prison, and Salvati, who had been paroled in 1997. The convictions of Tameleo and Greco were later set aside.
Documents showed the FBI knew hit man Joseph "The Animal" Barboza, the key witness in the case, may have falsely implicated the four men while protecting Deegan's true killers, including Vincent "Jimmy" Flemmi, who was an FBI informant.
Yesterday, Justice Department lawyer Joshua Waldman urged the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to overturn Gertner's ruling, arguing the FBI could not be held liable for the malicious prosecution of the four men because they were prosecuted in state court by state authorities. But Judge Juan R. Torruella, a member of the three-judge Appeals Court panel, noted that the FBI played a key role in the trial. "The state had no case until you provided Barboza," he said.
Waldman said the government disputes Gertner's findings that the FBI knew Barboza was lying and that the bureau failed to turn over documents that could have helped them prove their innocence.
"Even if you concede the information wasn't disclosed, which we dispute, we think it does not prove that the FBI knew that Barboza was lying about these plaintiffs," Waldman said.
Attorney Michael Avery, a Suffolk University Law School professor who argued on behalf of the four men, said there was overwhelming evidence the FBI knew Barboza was lying when he implicated the four men in Deegan's slaying.
He urged the Appeals Court to affirm Gertner's decision. The court generally takes at least a few months to render a decision.
Salvati, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Boston's North End with his wife and lives on Social Security and his wife's small pension, said he hopes he'll win on appeal. But he said he's never received an apology from the FBI for the time he spent in prison.
"They just don't care," he said. "That's the bottom line. They'll never say they're sorry."
Shelley Murphy can be reached at shmurphy@globe.com. 