As a result of the good work of Federal District Judge Mark Wolfe, which this Committee continued under Chairman Burton and now Chairman Davis, we have elicited and catalogued a forty-year history of unspeakable crimes and atrocities, which were condoned, conducted or materially assisted by the Boston office of the FBI.

These atrocities include the murder of at least 19 individuals, 17 men and 2 women.  Some of whom have been retrieved from hastily dug graves.  Others have yet to be found.

The trail of law enforcement misconduct also includes the wrongful imprisonment of innocent men who spent thirty or more years in prison for crimes that they did not commit.  Yet they were allowed to remain in prison because to expose the false testimony given of government informants like Joe Barboza and others would have jeopardized the convictions obtained against the New England La Cosa Nostra and more importantly it seems, would have jeopardized the careers of those law enforcement officials who advanced their careers during the efforts to dismantle the New England mafia through the use of these same informants.

The FBI, in league with their government informants, set forth a chain of events that spans forty years.  This crime spree saw the case of Brian Halloran, who had turned to the FBI for protection in fear for his own life and was turned away by the FBI. While a short time later, he and his friend Michael Donohue, an innocent bystander who had merely given Mr. Halloran a ride, were gunned down in cold blood in my own South Boston neighborhood. 

 Two other victims, Debra Davis and Deborah Hussey were only twenty-six years old when they were murdered by the very men that the FBI had chosen to protect. The record is replete with documented attempts to obtain evidence against Whitey Bulger, Stephen Flemmi and their cohorts but time and again, wiretap location and surveillance attempts were thwarted by Agent John Connolly, FBI Supervisor John Morris and others who gave notice to their government informants of these attempts to bring them to justice.  And so the killings continued.

The reach of this group was extensive, reaching to Florida and Oklahoma, where businessman Roger Wheeler was shot in the face at point-blank range in a parking lot leaving behind a wife and young children.

The families of these victims have come to these hearings regularly.  Seeking justice where justice can be done. Others are hoping for the mere chance of giving their loved ones a decent burial.  For most, especially for those who were merely children when their family members were taken, justice under any fair description is simply beyond reach.  Lives have been destroyed and in some cases stolen.

This is true for Joseph and Marie Salvati and their children as well as the Limone, Greco and Tameleo family.  These families had to look on while their loved ones were sent to jail for a crime the FBI knew they did not commit. 

I would be remiss if I did not note the good work of Vincent Garo, legal counsel for the Salvati family who for these many years has maintained the highest standards of professionalism and vigilant legal advocacy on behalf of a man who was wrongly convicted.

The American public has yet to grasp the depth and breadth of what really went on during this course of FBI misconduct. In fact, it is perhaps hard to grasp precisely because what has happened is so unbelievable.

Nevertheless, we only compound the injustice when we seek to avoid the conflict of these offenses with the highest expectations of American democracy.  When we simply wish it all to be over with because some of these wrongs have been so long concealed.  It remains essential to the highest ideals of our system of justice and to the fabric of constitutional democracy that the Congress and this Committee fulfill its responsibility to the victims in this case and also to the institutions of government that have been so maligned.  We must continue to address this outrage honestly and in a spirit of justice that has been for so long denied.

It is an admitted fact that certain agents and supervisors at the FBI recruited and employed criminal informants in order to undermine the New England La Cosa Nostra.   And that in the course of cultivating and employing these criminal informants, these FBI agents became corrupted themselves.

It is important for the Members of this Committee to be mindful that the Justice Department is itself charged with upholding and enforcing the laws and that we as lawmakers have passed laws and supported regulations which have given the FBI an enhanced ability to operate in secrecy.   Moreover, we have so empowered the FBI and the Justice Department that local and state authorities can and have been intimidated and obstructed in the pursuit of justice when, as in this case, the FBI asserts its jurisdiction.

In the course of this investigation, we have seen citizens murdered because they had turned to the FBI for protection.  If we were examining the work of the KGB against the citizens of the former Soviet Union during the Cold War or if we were condemning the butchery of the secret police of some struggling third world country…we would instinctively take comfort in the protections of our constitutional government.  We would silently, almost reflexively, say to ourselves… thank God that doesn’t happen here.

Well it happened here.

The American public has yet to wake up to the fact, but we have witnessed in these Committee hearings a collapse of certain constitutional protections.  In constitutional terms, this is like a forty-year sinkhole.  A period and region where the underpinnings of democracy were allowed to decay; in which the individual protections guaranteed by our constitution were subverted in the interest of pursuing La Cosa Nostra, and in furtherance of individual careers, and in the ongoing effort to protect criminal informants who by their testimony had enhanced the careers of those in law enforcement. 

Ultimately, this investigation is about actions taken by the Justice Department and the FBI.  It is not about the particular witness before us.