 begin pgp signed message hash shaNUMBER thugs of south boston and the revenge of the bandit princess the geodesic economy robert a hettinga sunday august NUMBER NUMBER boston when you think about it one way the fbi winter hill vs patriarcha angiulo cosa nostra fight was just another race war between thugs put crudely and at its most racist the fbi and the winter hill gang were the mostly irish thugs and patriarcha s family were of course the mostly italian thugs think scorsese s upcoming gangs of new york only with counter reformatory overtones hoover s south boston social club putsch starting in the mid NUMBER s was particularly audacious in hindsight the u s federal government actually decided to underwrite a reversal of the prohibition era capture of the nation s rackets by the italians from the irish the fact that the plot was hatched not for new york but for south boston the most irish place in the us only makes even more gigantic the big lie that was told by the fbi to its ostensible political masters about bringing down organized crime there once and for all the result as we all found out wasn t swapping the heroin of italian boston mob violence for irish methadone hoover was posthumously swapping it for oxycontin or crystal methamphetamine or more properly pcp the absolute psychopathology of violence in whitey bulger s crack cocaine era reign of boston s drug markets like the identical fbi sponsored reigns or violent horror by other also rans in cities across the us as a whole went up whole orders of magnitude not mere percentage points as stalin said once quantity has a quality all it s own and make no mistake j edgar hoover was directly responsible that quality of carnage nation wide so yes on paper at least it really was just the swapping of one gang of racist thugs for another and the result was on paper at least business as usual same stuff different century with apparently decent people like mr salvati URL accidently ground on the gears of justice like so much hamburger however to be much more macabre about it that hamburger was greasing if you will an auto de fe only a homicidal lunatic could love a perfectly functioning market legislated out of existence on paper if nowhere else by government fiat and the back door but still elitist will to power of h l mencken s famous bluenoses and busybodies it all starts like all true evil does from the most innocent of beginnings what she couldn t do to alcohol teatotaling mrs grundy then tried to do to anything else she could think of that had a smaller manageable demand the bloody result was like nine more heads of the hydra an increasingly ubiquitous universal prohibition in more markets and for more things as the NUMBERth century wore on every time some recreational drug was found to be addictive or harmful or physically distasteful or carcinogenic or now apparently fattening and then prohibited exactly the same thing happened to its markets that happened to alcohol during the volstead years a larger market than before the prohibition hugely lucrative profits for anyone with the moral stomach to violently scale newly legislated barriers to competition imposed on them by the state increasingly violent attacks by the government on users of those substances and finally the ultimate in evil the kind of evil this country actually fought wars to end increasingly coercive axe handle beatings by our own government of the sacred liberty of the average but now unavoidably law breaking citizenry as ayn rand cynically observed a long time ago you don t need government if nobody s breaking the law in some twisted corollary to parkinson s law governments to survive need more people breaking more laws or they can never justify the money they confiscate at tax time and to bring us back to the point david friedman would probably echo here his father milton s famous observation that government regulations only benefit the regulated sellers in a given market and never the consumer much less the economy as a whole even especially if those sellers are breaking the law as they are in the increasingly ubiquitous prohibition of risky behavior that our government now imposes on us and there absent the apparent grace of mr hoover went mr salvati in fact hayek himself in the road to serfdom couldn t have predicted any better the gory consequences of hoover s blatant imposition for our own good of vietnam era statist power at the neighborhood level and furthermore stalin couldn t have had better useful idiots than hoover did and neither by an absolutely literal extension did whitey bulger after hoover useful idiots on both sides of the congressional aisle idiots who were eating out of hoover s power craven hand for the entire middle of the NUMBERth century and whitey bulger s hand whether they knew it or not until the end of the millennium a time you ll notice which saw the increasingly steady imposition of mob violence and market control from both state and illegal interests way beyond the imaginings of even the most power mad rum running stock kiting movie flopping bureau pumping nazi appeasing irish bostonian little caesar or as for that matter his safely trust funded and now strictly political descendents in terms of actual financial economics think of what happened to mr salvati and the others dead or alive as a transfer price in human lives of the inevitable consequence of macnamara style vietnam era keynesian social cost input output accounting at its most despicable and you can almost begin to fathom the atrocity that was committed by hoover and his co religionists in state economic control in the name of what really was as you ll now agree just a race war between thugs up in boston this shouldn t be a surprise really all race wars are at least fought by thugs though they re usually conceived elsewhere and endorsed at the time by all the right people for all the right reasons as far as the fbi itself goes remember mancur olson s observation that a prince is just a stationary bandit though given his penchant for women s clothing for other men and what s actually obscene for violently hypocritical treatment of people of his own affectional preference i suppose we can call j edgar hoover a bandit princess instead bandit queen of course would be a grievous insult to queens and real bandits everywhere cheers rah URL pagewanted print position top the new york times august NUMBER NUMBER hoover s f b i and the mafia case of bad bedfellows grows by fox butterfield boston aug NUMBER it was march NUMBER in the early days of j edgar hoover s war against the mafia f b i agents say congressional investigators eavesdropped on a conversation in the headquarters of new england s organized crime boss raymond patriarca two gangsters joseph barboza and vincent flemmi wanted mr patriarca s permission to kill a small time hoodlum edward deegan as they were having a problem with him according to an f b i log of the conversation patriarca ultimately furnished this o k the f b i reported and three days later mr deegan turned up dead in an alley shot six times it was an extraordinary situation the federal bureau of investigation had evidence ahead of time that two well known gangsters were planning a murder and that the head of the new england mafia was involved but when indictments in the case were handed down in NUMBER the real killers who also happened to be informers for the f b i were left alone four other men were tried convicted and sentenced to death or life in prison for the murder though they had had nothing to do with it one joseph salvati who spent NUMBER years in prison filed notice with the justice department last week that he planned to sue the f b i for NUMBER million for false imprisonment his is the latest in a series of lawsuits against the f b i the justice department and some f b i agents growing out of the tangled corrupt collaboration between gangsters and the f b i s boston office in its effort to bring down the mob the lawsuits are based on evidence uncovered in the last five years in a judicial hearing and a justice department inquiry but some of the most explosive evidence has only recently come to light including documents detailing conversation in which mr patriarca approved the murder they were released as part of an investigation by the house committee on government reform which has pressured the department into turning over records about the f b i in boston the documents show that officials at f b i headquarters apparently including mr hoover knew as long ago as NUMBER that boston agents were employing killers and gang leaders as informers and were protecting them from prosecution j edgar hoover crossed over the line and became a criminal himself said vincent garo mr salvati s lawyer he allowed a witness to lie to put an innocent man in prison so he could protect one of his informants mr barboza was a crucial witness at trial against mr salvati and may have implicated him because mr salvati owed NUMBER to a loan shark who worked for mr barboza asked about the documents showing that mr hoover knew of mr salvati s innocence when he was put on trial gail marcinkiewicz a spokeswoman for the f b i in boston declined to comment citing the pending litigation a justice department task force is continuing to investigate misconduct in the boston office in one of the first results of the investigation one retired agent john j connolly is awaiting sentencing next month after being convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice for helping two other mob leaders who were f b i informers james bulger and stephen flemmi vincent and stephen flemmi are brothers the government reform committee led by representative dan burton republican of indiana has uncovered memorandums from the boston office to headquarters in washington revealing the bureau s knowledge that vincent flemmi and mr barboza were involved in killing mr deegan a memorandum a week after the killing described the crime including who fired the first shot then on june NUMBER NUMBER mr hoover s office demanded to know what progress was being made in developing vincent flemmi as an informer in a reply five days later the special agent in charge of the boston office said that mr flemmi was in a hospital recovering from gunshot wounds but because of his connections to mr patriarca potentially could be an excellent informant the agent also informed mr hoover that mr flemmi was known to have killed seven men and from all indications he is going to continue to commit murder nevertheless the agent said the informant s potential outweighs the risk involved a congressional investigator called the exchange chilling the most frightening part is that after being warned about flemmi s murders the director does not even respond the investigator said there is no message not to use a murderer as a government informant the origin of the corruption scandal was public and political pressure on mr hoover to move more forcefully against the growing power of the mafia which he had largely ignored in boston f b i agents recruited mr barboza and mr flemmi and developed close ties to a rival criminal organization the winter hill gang led by mr bulger both sides got what they wanted according to the investigations and the trial of mr connolly the f b i got information that eventually helped destroy the patriarca and angiulo families which controlled organized crime in new england mr bulger s gang was able to take over the rackets in boston sell drugs and even commit murder while the f b i looked the other way one reason the f b i may not have used its information about mr patriarca s involvement in the deegan murder congressional investigators say is that it came from an illegal listening device in his providence r i headquarters the f b i agent who transcribed the conversation made it appear that the information was coming from unnamed informants to disguise the use of the device the investigators say mr salvati a former truck driver now NUMBER had his sentence commuted in NUMBER by gov william f weld last year while he was still on parole his murder conviction was dismissed by a massachusetts state judge after the justice department task force made public documents suggesting his innocence two of the other wrongly convicted men died in prison their survivors have joined the fourth man peter limone in a NUMBER million lawsuit against the justice department mr limone was sentenced to die in the electric chair his life was spared only when massachusetts outlawed the death penalty in NUMBER mr salvati lives in a modest apartment in boston s north end with his wife marie who visited him in prison every week during those NUMBER years each week mr salvati sent her a romantic card which she put on the television set it was mr garo said all they had of each other begin pgp signature version pgp NUMBER NUMBER iqa awubpwmbNUMBERspxhNUMBERjfNUMBERohaeqlNUMBERqgcgxhqNUMBEReeNUMBERuesnvNUMBERuNUMBERwgvmjfNUMBERkNUMBERsNUMBERanNUMBERrb NUMBERsrsgomwjndwiakoehofnhpi oeld end pgp signature r a hettinga mailto rah ibuc com the internet bearer underwriting corporation URL NUMBER farquhar street boston ma NUMBER usa however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity predicting the end of the world has not been found agreeable to experience edward gibbon decline and fall of the roman empire URL 