Behind the convictions of Boston’s most powerful mobsters over the past 30 years, there has been one constant: US federal prosecutor Fred Wyshak.
For the dauntless assistant US attorney, last month’s murder conviction of former New England mafia boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme likely closes the book on a lengthy saga that exposed the FBI’s overly cozy relationship with its gangster informants and decimated the region’s organized-crime underworld.
“It has been, to some extent, dogged persistence to get where we needed to get to bring these organized crime groups to the end,” Wyshak said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Photo: AP
Wyshak, 65, arrived at Boston’s US attorney’s office in 1989 after pursuing mobsters in New Jersey and was recruited by state police investigators to help do what no one else seemed willing to: Go after notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger and his Winter Hill Gang.
It was Wyshak and his colleagues’ impending racketeering indictment against Bulger, Salemme and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi in 1995 that caused Bulger to disappear for the next 16 years, thanks to a tip from corrupt FBI agent John Connolly.
Wyshak spent the next three decades securing convictions against Flemmi, Connolly and finally Bulger, who was captured in California at age 81 in 2011. All three men are likely to die behind bars.
And last month, Wyshak took down the last man standing from organized crime’s heyday in Boston and its environs when a jury convicted 84-year-old Salemme, once the head of the New England family of La Cosa Nostra, of killing nightclub owner Steven DiSarro in 1993.
“He has steamrolled organized crime, the Italian and the Irish mob — with help, but he was the centrifugal force,” said Dick Lehr, a former Boston Globe reporter and coauthor of Black Mass, which inspired the movie with the same name. “Who knows if not for him what it would look like today, the landscape.”
Many law enforcement officials who pursued mobsters alongside Wyshak in the 1990s have since retired or moved onto cushier jobs, including his long-time partner, Brian Kelly, who went into private practice after Bulger was sentenced to two life terms in 2013.
Wyshak, now head of the public corruption unit at the US attorney’s office, said he was determined to stay because he loved it.
That does not mean it was easy.
Wyshak’s voice cracked with emotion and tears filled his eyes as he described threats against him that put state troopers outside his house for weeks at a time or forced him to park in the courthouse garage.
His own neighbors eyed him skeptically when they heard his name in the same breath as mobsters and corrupt agents when Judge Mark Wolf held hearings in 1998 that revealed how the FBI protected Bulger and Flemmi, he said.
“People read the newspapers and don’t really understand what’s going on. All they know is that the FBI and the government is corrupt and they’re in bed with these mob guys, and Fred Wyshak has the case and he must be in trouble, too,” he said.
In the beginning, Wyshak had to fight not only mobsters, but also the FBI, which wanted to keep Bulger and Flemmi’s role as informants under wraps, he said.
Countless hours listening to mobsters matter-of-factly describe committing grisly murders as easily as others would talk about going to a baseball game takes a toll.
“It’s almost like an out-of-body experience sitting there listening to this stuff,” Wyshak said.
After Salemme’s conviction last month, US Attorney Andrew Lelling declared it the end of a “long and dark chapter” in Boston history.
However, Wyshak is hesitant to say he is sure it is really the end.
More remains are out there in secret graves, he said.
He thought the saga was over before, and was proven wrong.
“Unless we catch Whitey Bulger, this marks the end of what is really a sad chapter for federal law enforcement,” Wyshak said in 2008 after Connolly was convicted of second-degree murder.
“It has been a long haul,” he said at the time.
He had no idea.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was