House Opens 30-Year-Old Mob Investigation
WASHINGTON, Feb. 13–Thirty years after the 1971 murder of New Bedford’s mob assassin Joe “The Animal” Barboza, the House Committee on Government Reform began hearings yesterday on whether the federal government withheld evidence in the 1960s and 1970s, allowing Barboza to testify falsely against innocent men.
“We don’t have a democracy if we have a justice system whose integrity is at risk,” said William Delahunt, (D-MA.), who was invited to attend and question the committee’s witnesses on behalf of his constituents.
In 1967, Mr. Barboza was a cooperating government witness whose false testimony to a jury resulted in sending a number of innocent men to prison and some to death row. After his testimony, the Witness Protection Program was established and Mr. Barboza was relocated to Santa Rosa, Calif., where he soon committed a murder of a small time crook, Clay Wilson
Of the men sent to jail because of Mr. Barboza’s testimony, two died in prison, one served 34 years before being cleared and Joe Salvati served 30 years before he was cleared. Mr. Salvati, his family and his lawyer, Victor Garo, were in Washington yesterday.
“Today we’re actually seeing what the federal government did to help Joe Barboza,” Mr.Garo said in an interview, “and the question presented is this – why is the federal government helping a murderer while he is in the federal Witness Protection Program?”
In his opening statement, committee chairman Dan Burton (R-IN.) said: “For decades, federal law enforcement did terrible things up in New England, and they were successful in covering it up. The FBI knew Barboza was lying, and they covered it up.”
For 20 years, Mr. Garo fought on behalf of the Salvati family, without the help of federal officials, to get parole for Mr. Salvati.
“The evidence shows that the government has known since 1965 that Joe Salvati was innocent of these charges,” Mr. Garo said. “We hope that this committee will be able to do things legislatively so that another family will never have to endure the tragedy and the nightmare that the Joe Salvati family has had to endure.”
The three witnesses at yesterday’s hearing were: Marteen Miller, the former public defender who represented Mr. Barboza in the California murder; Ed Cameron, a former investigator in the Santa Rose District Attorney’s office; and Tim Brown, a former detective sergeant in the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office. All said they did not know that the FBI in the mid-1960s had described Mr. Barboza “as the most dangerous individual known” when it relocated him to California.
“It is more than fair to say that we did not get cooperation from the FBI,” Mr. Cameron said. “When you’ve been a cop long enough you get a gut feeling, and I had a feeling that something was wrong. We never got so much as a return phone call from the FBI.”
Mr. Garo, in the interview, said, “The testimony of the federal government officials at the trial of Barboza was so colored that the government did not believe they could get a first-degree convictioná, and Barboza was out after less than four years in prison.”
As for Mr. Salvati, he said in an interview, “I just want them to stand up and say they are sorry.”
Written for The New Bedford Standard-Times in New Bedford, Mass.
