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July 31st, 1968. Suffolk Superior Court, Boston, Massachusetts. Four men stood in a courtroom as a judge read the words that would bury them alive. Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, Louis Greco, Joseph Salvati, guilty, first-degree murder. Three of them received death sentences. Salvati got life. Their families screamed. Their wives collapsed.
And somewhere in that same city, two FBI agents named H. Paul Rico and Dennis Conden sat in their office on the fourth floor of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building knowing the truth that nobody else in that courtroom knew. Those four men didn’t kill anybody. The FBI knew who the real killers were. They had known before the murder even happened.
They had the names, the weapons, the motive, and they buried all of it. They let four innocent men get sentenced to die so they could protect their informants. Two of those men would never come home. They died behind bars for a crime the FBI watched happen and then covered up. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Because what happened in that Boston courtroom was just one chapter in a decades-long scandal that would claim over 60 lives, expose the most corrupt FBI operation in American history, and cost the federal government more than $101 million
in damages. This is the story of how the FBI didn’t just fail to stop a mob war, they started one. They fed it. They armed it. And they used it to build careers while bodies stacked up across Boston, Somerville, Charlestown, and every neighborhood in between. This is the Boston Mafia War. And the criminals who ran it were wearing badges.
But to understand how the FBI turned Boston into a killing field, you need to go back to a beach party, Labor Day weekend, 1961. A group of low-level hoods from the Boston underworld rented a cottage on Salisbury Beach for a holiday blowout. Guys from different crews, different neighborhoods, everybody drinking. And that’s where George McLaughlin made the mistake that started everything.
McLaughlin was 22 years old, the youngest of three brothers who ran a crew out of Charlestown. He was wild, reckless. And on that night, after drinking all day and into the night, he grabbed a woman at the party and disrespected her in front of everyone. Two guys at the party took offense. Accounts differ on exactly who threw the first punch.
Some say it was Bill Hickey, others say Bobo Petricone, a tough kid from Somerville who would later become the actor Alex Rocco. Either way, they beat George McLaughlin so badly that they thought they’d killed him. Left him on the floor of that cottage, unconscious and bleeding. George survived. But the McLaughlin brothers didn’t forgive.
Bernie McLaughlin, the oldest and most feared of the three, went to Buddy McLean. McLean was a former truck driver who ran a crew out of Somerville. Quiet, respected, the kind of guy who settled things without raising his voice. Bernie told McLean to hand over the men who beat his brother. McLean refused. He told Bernie he wasn’t giving up his guys over a drunken fight.
That refusal changed everything. Within days, someone wired a bomb under Buddy McLean’s car. His wife found it. McLean’s world went cold. The man who didn’t want a war now had no choice but to fight one. You have to understand the geography to understand the bloodshed. Charlestown and Somerville sit right next to each other, separated by a few blocks.
The The gang controlled Charlestown. Numbers running, loan sharking, bookmaking, truck hijacking. Buddy McLean’s Winter Hill gang ran the same operations out of Somerville. These weren’t separate worlds. They were neighboring streets. Guys who grew up playing ball together were now hunting each other with shotguns. Halloween, 1961.
Buddy McLean, along with Bobo Petricone and an off-duty cop named Russ Nicholson, drove a black Oldsmobile in the Charlestown. McLean got out, walked up to Bernie McLaughlin in broad daylight in front of the Morning Glory bar, and shot him in the back of the head. Bernie died on the sidewalk. The war was on.
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And it wouldn’t stop for 6 years. Here’s where it gets interesting. Because while these Irish gangs were slaughtering each other over a beach party insult, the real power in New England was watching from Providence, Rhode Island. Raymond Patriarca. The boss of the New England mafia. Patriarca ran everything from his office on Atwells Avenue in Providence.
His underboss, Gennaro Jerry Angiulo, controlled Boston’s gambling and loan sharking operations out of a storefront at 98 Prince Street in the North End. Patriarca didn’t start the Irish gang war, but he saw an opportunity in it. If the Irish crews destroyed each other, the Italian mafia could absorb their territories without firing a shot.
So, Patriarca fed the flames. He had his people pass information between the gangs. He played both sides, and the FBI did the exact same thing. For the exact same reason. This is where H. Paul Rico enters the picture. Rico was born in 1925 in Belmont, Massachusetts. Son of a Spanish father and Irish mother. He joined the FBI in 1951 and worked his way into the Boston Organized Crime Unit alongside his partner, Dennis Condron.
They became the two most senior agents investigating the mob in Boston. Rico was smart, calculated. His Spanish features let him pass for Italian when working undercover. But Rico didn’t just investigate criminals, he cultivated them. He recruited members of the Winter Hill gang as informants, including Buddy McLean himself.
And Rico discovered something valuable. If he protected one side of a gang war and fed them information about the other side, his informants would survive. His case stats would look incredible. And J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would shower him with praise for taking down organized crime figures. It didn’t matter that his methods were creating the very violence he was supposed to stop. What mattered was the numbers.
Remember the name Ronald Dermody. He was a small-time hood connected to the McLaughlin gang. By 1963, the war had gotten so hot that Dermody wanted out. He decided to turn himself in. And he chose to surrender to FBI agent H. Paul Rico. He picked the wrong man. Rico had already recruited Buddy McLean as his informant.
So, instead of bringing Dermody in safely, Rico called McLean and told him exactly where Dermody would be standing and exactly what time he’d be there. McLean drove to the rendezvous point and put three bullets in Dermody’s head. An FBI agent set up the meeting. An FBI agent made the call. And an American citizen was executed because of it. The body count climbed.
By 1965, Life magazine reported that people in Boston were afraid to leave their homes after dark. The war had already taken over 40 lives. Punchy McLaughlin, the middle brother, had survived an earlier shotgun attack that cost him his hand. But on October 20th, 1965, while waiting for a bus to Suffolk Superior Court, Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi and Cadillac Frank Salemme walked up and shot him dead.
10 days later, on October 30th, Stevie Hughes, a lethal McLaughlin enforcer, ambushed Buddy McLean outside an abandoned movie theater in Somerville and shot him with an automatic rifle. McLean died 30 hours later in the hospital. Both gang leaders were now dead. But the killing didn’t stop. And here’s what the history books often miss.
The FBI wasn’t just watching this war. They were managing it. Stephen Flemmi, the man who helped kill Punchy McLaughlin, was a decorated Korean War veteran. Silver Star, Bronze Star, two tours with the 187th Airborne. He came home from Korea and became one of the most dangerous men in Boston. And by the fall of 1965, FBI Agent H.
Paul Rico had designated Flemmi a top-echelon informant. That’s the highest status an FBI source can achieve. It meant Flemmi could provide intelligence on the Patriarca crime family leadership. It also meant the FBI would protect him from prosecution, from rival gangs, from everything. Flemmi was murdering people during the gang war while simultaneously feeding information to Rico.
The FBI knew he was killing. They didn’t care. He was too valuable. Now, here’s where this story takes its darkest turn. March 12th, 1965, Chelsea, Massachusetts. Around 9:30 at night, a low-level hoodlum named Edward “Teddy” Deegan was shot six times in an alley next to a finance company building. Three different weapons were used.
A .45 caliber and two .38 caliber pistols. Deegan died in that alley. The FBI knew about the murder before it happened. They had advanced intelligence. They knew the hit was coming. They knew who was going to pull the triggers. The actual killers were Joseph the Animal Barbosa, Vincent Jimmy the Bear Flemy, Ronald Cassesso, and Wilfred French.
FBI agents Rico and Condon had this information in their files. They did nothing to stop the murder. And then they did something far worse. In 1966, Rico and Condon approached Barbosa, a violent enforcer who had already committed at least 20 murders, and recruited him as a cooperating witness. But here’s how the scheme worked.
Barbosa had been arrested on weapons charges. He was facing serious time. Rico and Condon offered him a deal. Testify about organized crime and we’ll protect you. Barbosa agreed. But instead of telling the truth about who killed Teddy Deegan, Barbosa committed perjury. He pointed the finger at four men who had nothing to do with the murder.
Peter Limone, a bookie and nightclub manager. Henry Tameleo, an associate of the Patriarca family. Louis Greco, and Joseph Salvati, a working man with a wife and four kids. The FBI knew Barbosa was lying. Rico and Condon knew every word of his testimony was fabricated. They had documentation proving these men were innocent, and they buried it.
They let the trial proceed. They watched four innocent men get convicted and sentenced to death. Because protecting their informant network was more important than four human lives. You know what makes this even worse? Henry Tameleo died in prison in 1985. He spent 20 years behind bars for a crime the FBI knew he didn’t commit.
Louis Greco died in prison in 1995, 30 years inside. Gone. Joseph Salvati didn’t get out until 1997. He served 30 years. 30 years away from his wife. His children grew up without him. His grandchildren were born while he sat in a cell. Peter Limone wasn’t released until 2001, 33 years.
More than three decades of his life stolen by men who swore an oath to uphold the law. And when H. Paul Rico was dragged before the US House Judiciary Committee in October of 2003 and asked about those wrongful convictions, about the men who died in prison for crimes they didn’t commit, Rico looked at the committee members and said five words, “What do you want? Tears?” But that’s not the crazy part.
Because while Rico and Condon were framing innocent men and fueling a gang war, a new generation of corruption was already taking root. In the Old Harbor housing project in South Boston, a kid named John Connolly grew up a few doors down from the Bulger family. James “Whitey” Bulger was 11 years older than Connolly.
The neighborhood legend, the tough guy who bought the younger kids ice cream and chased away the bullies, Connolly idolized him. He went to Boston College then earned a graduate degree from Harvard. He became an FBI agent. And when he was assigned to the Boston office, Connolly had an idea that would become the worst decision in FBI history.
He would recruit his childhood hero as an informant. Whitey Bulger was born September 3rd, 1929 in Dorchester. He grew up in the Mary Ellen McCormack housing project. His father lost an arm in an industrial accident. The family lived in poverty, While his brother Billy went on to become president of the Massachusetts State Senate, Whitey chose the streets.
Bank robberies in the 1950s landed him in federal prison. He did time at Alcatraz starting in 1959. When he got out, he partnered with Stephen Flemmi in 1974, and together they took control of the Winter Hill Gang. By 1975, Bulger was officially an FBI informant. His handler was John Connolly. Here’s how the arrangement worked.
Bulger and Flemmi provided Connolly with intelligence on the Patriarca crime family and Jerry Angiulo’s operations. In exchange, Connolly protected them from prosecution. He tipped them off about investigations. He warned them about wiretaps. He told them which associates were cooperating with authorities. And Bulger used that information to kill.
Acting on tips from Connolly, Bulger lured suspected informants to a house at 799 East 3rd Street in South Boston. He chained them to chairs. He interrogated them. Then he shot them in the head and buried them in the basement. That house became known as the death house. Deborah Davis was 26 years old when she was strangled to death on September 17th, 1981.
In the basement of Flemmi’s mother’s home in South Boston, Flemmi claimed Bulger did it. Deborah Hussey, Flemmi’s own stepdaughter, was garroted at the death house in 1985. Her body was buried under the basement floor. These weren’t mob rivals. These were women connected to the men the FBI was protecting.
The corruption ran deeper than just Connolly. His supervisor, John Morris, admitted to accepting $7,000 in bribes from Bulger and Flemmi. Morris later testified that Connolly delivered a case of wine and an envelope stuffed with $1,000 in cash from the pair. Connolly falsified FBI reports to cover Bulger’s crimes. He alerted Bulger and Flemy to pending investigations.
He told them which associates were talking. Every person Bulger killed based on those tips is a death the FBI helped cause. Connolly even told Bulger about the FBI’s investigation into the murder of Oklahoma City millionaire Roger Wheeler who was shot on May 27th, 1981 outside a country club. That murder was connected to Bulger, Flemy, and the retired H.
Paul Rico who had left the FBI in 1975 and gone to work for World Jai Alai. When the investigation started getting close, Connolly warned Bulger. Bulger had John Callahan, a key witness, murdered in Miami. Another death the FBI’s corruption made possible. In 1994, John Connolly did something that would make him a fugitive’s accomplice.
He told Whitey Bulger that state and federal officers were about to arrest him. On January 10th, 1995, the racketeering indictment came down, but Bulger was gone. He vanished from Boston and became one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives. For 16 years, the most wanted man in America was a criminal the FBI had created, protected, and then allowed to escape. The reckoning came slowly.
In 2002, John Connolly was convicted on federal racketeering charges and sentenced to 10 years. But, the state of Florida wasn’t done with him. In 2008, a Florida jury convicted Connolly of second-degree murder in the death of John Callahan. The sentence was 40 years to run consecutively with his federal time.
We got 42 stone criminals by giving up two stone criminals.” Connolly told the Boston Globe in defense of his relationship with Bulger. “What’s your return on investment there? Show me a businessman who wouldn’t do that.” That’s what he said. About a deal that cost over 60 lives. H. Paul Rico was indicted for murder on October 9th, 2003 for his role in the Roger Wheeler assassination. He was 78 years old.
He died on January 16th, 2004 in a Tulsa hospital, still under indictment. He never stood trial. He never faced a jury. He never answered for any of it. Except for those five words before Congress. “What do you want? Tears?” Whitey Bulger ran for 16 years. Reported sightings came from London, South America, Europe. All wrong.
On June 22nd, 2011, federal agents found him living in a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica, California, two blocks from the Pacific Ocean. He’d been hiding in plain sight with his long-time girlfriend, Catherine Greig. He was 81 years old. Inside the apartment, agents found over $800,000 in cash hidden in the walls.
At trial, Bulger was charged with 19 murders. A jury found him guilty of participating in 11 of them. He received two life sentences, but prison had one more chapter. On October 30th, 2018, just hours after being transferred to the United States Penitentiary at Hazelton in West Virginia, Whitey Bulger was beaten to death by fellow inmates.
He was 89 years old. He was in a wheelchair. According to news reports, the attackers gouged out his eyes and attempted to cut out his tongue. The traditional mob punishment for a rat. Stephen Flemmi is still alive, serving a life sentence. He cut a deal in 2003, pleading guilty to 10 murders in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.
He testified against both Bulger and Connolly. The man who helped kill Punchy McLaughlin in 1965, who murdered his own stepdaughter, who buried bodies in basements, became the government’s star witness. The FBI’s most protected informant became the prosecution’s most important tool. On July 26th, 2007, US District Judge Nancy Gertner issued a ruling that shook the federal government.
She found that the FBI had knowingly assisted Joseph Barboza in framing four innocent men for the 1965 murder of Teddy Deegan. She found that the Bureau had withheld exculpatory information for decades. She ordered the United States government to pay $101.7 million to the surviving victims and the families of those who died behind bars.
At the time, it was the single largest sum ever awarded under the Federal Tort Claims Act, $101 million. That’s what the government paid for protecting killers and framing innocent men. Let that number sit with you because behind that number are real lives. Henry Tameleo’s children grew up visiting their father through prison glass for a murder he didn’t commit.
Louis Greco never saw the outside of a prison again. Joseph Salvati missed 30 years of his family’s life. Peter Limone lost 33 years. And the FBI agents who did this to them retired with pensions, received commendations, and built careers on the bodies of the people they were sworn to protect. The Boston Mafia War killed over 60 people between 1961 and the late 1970s.
But the war itself was never purely between criminals. It was manufactured, managed, weaponized by federal agents who decided that certain lives were expendable if it meant better statistics, bigger cases, and promotions. H. Paul Rico chose sides, Dennis Condon chose sides, John Connolly chose sides, John Morris chose sides, and every time they chose, somebody died.
This isn’t a story about the mafia, not really. It’s a story about what happens when the people who enforce the law decide they are above it. When the badge becomes a weapon instead of a shield. When fighting organized crime becomes a justification for committing it, 60 people dead, four innocent men framed, two died in prison, a hundred and one million dollars in damages, multiple FBI agents convicted or indicted.
And the mob boss who ran free for 16 years because the FBI valued his information more than his victims’ lives. The next time someone tells you the FBI always gets their man, remember Boston. Remember the four men who went to prison so the bureau could protect a killer. Remember Ronald Dermody who walked into a trap set by the agent he trusted.
Remember the death house at 799 East 3rd Street. And remember what H. Paul Rico said when they finally asked him to explain. What do you want, tears? If you found this story as shocking as we did, hit subscribe. We drop new mob documentaries every week. Leave a comment below. Should the FBI agents who covered this up have received life sentences? We want to hear your take.
