Opinion ID: 202112
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Application of Accrual Analysis

Text: 58 Connolly's corrupt relationship with the FBI received widespread publicity prior to May 11, 1999, the date two years before the date on which the plaintiffs filed their claims. On the basis of this publicity, we have no difficulty in concluding that Rakes and Dammers should have filed their administrative claims earlier, and that by not doing so they lost the opportunity to present those claims, which are now forever barred. The district court correctly concluded that the discovery rule did not sufficiently delay accrual of the claims in this case. 59 We begin, as we have just explained, by asking what generally available information the government reasonably ought to have expected the plaintiffs here to have had. The trail of newspaper articles that began in June 1997 and continued through September 1998, offering coverage of the events surrounding Stephen Flemmi's testimony in the Salemme case, is the foundation of our conclusion. That trail begins with the revelation that Flemmi testified that he and Bulger were all but given carte blanche to break the law. Nealon, Boston Globe, June 26, 1997, at A1. The Herald followed up in January 1998 with an article noting Flemmi's more shocking assertion that he had been rewarded for his work for the agency with a free pass on murder. . . . Ranalli, Boston Herald, Jan. 7, 1998, at 6. The Globe then reported that the FBI had been reluctant to assist another law enforcement agency in its attempts to go after Bulger and Flemmi on drug trafficking charges. See Nealon, Boston Globe, Jan. 9, 1998, at B1. Most vitally, the Globe ran a comprehensive article in July 1998, which accused the FBI, and Connolly in particular, of looking the other way while Bulger and Flemmi committed crimes. See Murphy et al., Boston Globe, July 22, 1998, at A1. That front-page article specifically discussed the extortion of the liquor store as one of the crimes the FBI had known of but declined to do anything about. See id. 60 We do not know whether Stephen Rakes and Julie Dammers read any of these articles, and indeed they claim that they did not. The question here, however, is whether the government was entitled to expect them either to have read them or to otherwise have become aware of their general purport. While the government was not entitled to expect that Rakes and Dammers had read every article or knew, initially, of the details related in every piece published in any locally available paper, see Cascone, 370 F.3d 95, we conclude that the government was entitled to expect that, through the channels of communication that run among people connected through ties of neighborhood, community, friendship, and family, the general purport of these important and widely circulated articles would become known to people in Rakes and Dammers' positions. This means that Rakes and Dammers should have had at least some notion that strong accusations of wrongdoing by Connolly had been made by Flemmi and others. 61 During the same period, a number of articles also appeared in the papers detailing Julie Rakes and Joseph Lundbohm's testimony during Rakes' perjury trial. There is, of course, every chance that all of the information that came out during Rakes' trial was actually known to Stephen Rakes, and a good chance that all or some of it was known to Julie Dammers. In any event, the proceedings in that trial and media coverage of it are chargeable to both parties: the government was entitled to expect both Rakes, the subject of the prosecution, and Dammers, a key witness, to be generally aware of the goings-on at trial. Among the pieces of information of which the government could reasonably have expected both parties to learn were Lundbohm's apparent speculation that it was Connolly who had tipped off Bulger to the fact that the Rakeses were seeking police assistance, and Julie Dammers' own statement that Bulger had been under the government's protection. 62 For these reasons, both parties are charged with the knowledge that prior to September 1998, there had been much speculation that Connolly had sheltered Bulger and Flemmi and thereby emboldened them to commit crimes they would not otherwise have committed. Knowledge of this speculation, both in the press and at Rakes' own trial, was enough to trigger a duty to inquire. A claim does not accrue when a person has a mere hunch, hint, suspicion, or rumor of a claim, but such suspicions do give rise to a duty to inquire into the possible existence of a claim in the exercise of due diligence. McIntyre, 367 F.3d at 52 (quoting Kronisch v. United States, 150 F.3d 112, 121 (2d Cir.1998)). Given a suspicion that Connolly was partially to blame for their woes, it was incumbent on Rakes and Dammers to search out relevant information about Connolly's role in emboldening Bulger and Flemmi, or risk losing their claims. 63 Had Rakes and Dammers undertaken such an inquiry, they would easily have found all of the newspaper accounts summarized here. Under these circumstances, we are compelled to conclude that their claim accrued by late 1998, after Rakes' own trial and the publication of the articles surrounding Flemmi's. This conclusion is supported by McIntyre, where, in the second of two consolidated appeals, we encountered a very similar set of legal claims, brought forward by the family of a man who had allegedly been murdered by Bulger. See McIntyre, 367 F.3d at 58 (plaintiffs assert that the United States is vicariously liable for the actions of Connolly, Morris, and other agents, which provided Bulger and Flemmi with a `protective shield' against prosecution and investigation that gave the two criminals the opportunity to commit crimes and emboldened them to do so, proximately causing the harm alleged). We found the voluminous media coverage of many of the same events that concern us here, standing alone, enough to trigger the accrual of the plaintiffs claims by May 11, 1999, precisely the same date as is relevant in the present case. 64 We are convinced that, prior to May 11, 1999, Rakes and Dammers ought to have been aware of the speculation surrounding Connolly's relationship to the FBI, and that almost any inquiry on the question would have turned up enough information to convince them that this was likely the case. A reasonable person in either of the plaintiffs' positions, armed with this much knowledge, would believe both that he was injured and that the government caused the injury. We therefore hold that Rakes and Dammers' claims accrued more than two years before the date on which they filed their administrative complaints.