Peter Limone, Joe Salvati, Henry Tameleo, and Louis Greco
Back in 1976, as we were celebrating the 200th birthday of this republic, Congress passed a law limiting the tenure of the FBI director to 10 years.
This was done because, after the scandalous findings of the Church Commission, Congress realized that letting J. Edgar Hoover serve as director of the bureau from its founding in 1935 until his death in 1972 had only confirmed Lord Acton’s maxim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Hoover was a power unto himself, and the FBI that was created very much in his image sometimes acted more like the secret police of the totalitarian regimes Hoover regularly denounced: running rogue wiretaps, harassing political dissidents, using illegal means to collect evidence. Hoover’s FBI wasn’t accountable; it was untouchable.
So now, just weeks after the FBI’s worst nightmare, a gangster and FBI informant by the name of Whitey Bulger came strolling back into town, Congress is about to ignore its own wisdom and let Bob Mueller, the FBI director and former US Attorney in Boston, stay on an extra two years.
President Obama says he needs Mueller to stay because there’s been so much turnover in the national security teams at the CIA and Pentagon, and that’s all well and good.
Mueller has wide, bipartisan support in Congress. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I know Bob Mueller and he’s no J. Edgar Hoover, though the folks at the ACLU might take exception to that.
The recent FBI targeting of antiwar and labor activists in the Midwest has a disturbing echo of the days when the bureau considered Martin Luther King Jr. a sinister threat to national security.
But Mueller’s a Marine veteran and tough enough to take a question or two before Congress gives the president what he wants, and Mike Albano is just the guy to ask it: What did you know about Whitey Bulger, and when did you know it?
Back in the 1980s, when he was serving on the Massachusetts parole board, Albano expressed some sympathy for a group of men who had always maintained they had been framed for the 1965 gangland murder of a hoodlum named Teddy Deegan in Chelsea. The FBI had been instrumental in seeing that the men – Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, Joe Salvati, and Louis Greco – were convicted. The FBI contended that Tameleo was the consigliere of the Mafia in Boston, and that Limone was a Mafia leader. There is no question that both men were bad actors, and Mafia players, but the evidence showed that neither had anything to do Deegan’s murder. read the rest Click here: A lingering question for the FBI’s director – The Boston Globe
