-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Thugs of South Boston and The Revenge of the Bandit Princess The Geodesic Economy Robert A. Hettinga Sunday, August 25, 2002 (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 1960'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 et.al 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 20th 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 20th 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 - --------- http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/25/national/25FBI.html?todaysheadlines= &pagewanted=print&position=top The New York Times August 25, 2002 Hoover's F.B.I. and the Mafia: Case of Bad Bedfellows Grows By FOX BUTTERFIELD BOSTON, Aug. 24 - It was March 1965, 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 1967, 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 30 years in prison, filed notice with the Justice Department last week that he planned to sue the F.B.I. for $300 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 1965 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 $400 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 4, 1965, 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 69, had his sentence commuted in 1997 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 $375 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 1974. 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 30 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 7.5 iQA/AwUBPWmB2sPxH8jf3ohaEQL9qgCgxHq0ee06UEsNv8u8wgvmjf9K7S4An3Rb 3srsGomWjNDwIaKoEHOfNHpI =OELD -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 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'