Joseph Barboza spent the 1960s collecting debts and settling scores for the Mafia in and around Boston, and he spent the last decade of his life as the FBI's star witness against it. In 1968 a Suffolk County jury, persuaded chiefly by his testimony, convicted four men of the March 1965 murder of Edward Deegan in Chelsea who had played no part in it. Three of the four were sentenced to death. The FBI, which had cultivated Barboza as its witness, held information from the weeks around the murder that pointed elsewhere, and it kept that information to itself for thirty-five years.
Barboza, who had taken part in the killing, received a one-year sentence for his role in it. In California, where the government relocated him under a new name, he was convicted of the 1970 murder of Clay Wilson in Santa Rosa and sentenced to five years to life. He was paroled in 1975 and killed in San Francisco on February 11, 1976. The men he had accused waited far longer for an ending. Two died in prison. The last of the four was not formally cleared until 2007, and that July a federal judge in Boston ordered the United States to pay more than $100 million for what the FBI had done. The federal appeals court that upheld the award in 2009 called the record one of "egregious governmental misconduct."
Barboza was born in 1932 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He tried to make a living as a prizefighter and did not succeed. Arrests for burglary and other crimes as a young man led to about eight years in prison during the 1950s. In 1964 he legally changed his surname to Baron, the name that would follow him through the courts of two states, although the old name was the one Boston remembered.
By about 1961 he had found steadier work as an enforcer and loan collector, first with a group known as the Dudley Street Crew and then for larger interests. The loans carried ruinous interest, and the collection was done by intimidation and violence. In court in 1968 he claimed to have been taking in about $5,500 a week from that interest alone. In 1965 he was recruited by Raymond Patriarca, the head of the New England crime family, whose base of operations was an office in Providence, Rhode Island. He was never admitted to the family as a full member. He remained an associate, useful and feared, but outside the circle that made its decisions.
Those were the years of the war between the McLean and McLaughlin gangs, a conflict that ran for more than three years and cost nearly 50 lives. Barboza later claimed to have killed 26 people during that war. The figure is his own, and no court ever weighed it.
Edward Deegan, known to his friends as Teddy, was killed in Chelsea on the night of March 12, 1965. He had angered men with influence in the underworld, and in the days before his death two of them sought the New England boss's permission to kill him.
The FBI heard them ask. Since early 1962 the Bureau had kept an illegal listening device in Patriarca's Providence office, and it stayed in place until July 12, 1965. On March 10, 1965, two days before the killing, it recorded Barboza and his closest associate seeking the boss's sanction for the murder, and receiving it. The FBI was at that moment trying to recruit that associate as an informant. It had formally targeted him for its Top Echelon Criminal Informant Program three days before the murder, and it officially assigned him to an agent in the Boston office on the very day Deegan died. The Bureau did nothing to warn Deegan or to stop what it knew was coming.
After the killing, the information kept arriving. The listening device and the Bureau's network of high-level informants named five men as the participants: Barboza, his associate and three others. A memorandum written by an agent on March 15, 1965, set out the same five names, and the head of the Boston office repeated them on March 24. Not one of those sources, then or later, suggested that any of the four men Barboza would eventually accuse had taken part.
Local police suspected the same group from the start. Witnesses had seen the group together that evening, leaving shortly before the murder and returning soon after it. But the inquiry went cold within weeks, and the police could not gather enough evidence to charge anyone. The FBI's director had told the Boston office to share what it knew with local authorities only as far as that was consistent with keeping the Providence device secret. Whatever was passed to the state in 1965, the federal courts later found, was general and already known to the local investigators. The reliability of the FBI's sources was never conveyed.
By 1966 Barboza was in serious trouble of his own. After an arrest that year he was facing state charges under the Massachusetts habitual-offender law that exposed him to as much as 89 years in prison. He was held in state custody. Two Boston FBI agents saw an opportunity. They began cultivating him in the hope of turning him into a cooperating witness against the Mafia.
Barboza was willing to deal, but he set one condition that he would not bend. He would say nothing that implicated his closest associate. The agents accepted the condition without putting it in words. Through the spring of 1967 they worked on him with promises and pressure. They held out favorable recommendations and the prospect of a light sentence, and they told him a story of their own invention: that the Mafia was working on state prosecutors to have him locked away for life.
Over months of interviews Barboza told the agents about many crimes. He mentioned the Deegan murder, though at first without detail. Because the killing was a state matter, Massachusetts investigators asked to speak with him, and on September 8, 1967, two Suffolk County detectives questioned him with the two FBI agents in the room. It was then that Barboza gave his account.
In that account the murder had been a business arrangement among men well above him. One man had hired him to carry it out. He had sought and received approval from a senior figure in the Patriarca organization. He had then worked out the plan with another man, and the killing was to be carried out by a group that included three men he named alongside himself. The account placed four men at the center of the crime who, on everything the FBI had heard in 1965, had played no part in it. And it left out his associate.
Barboza revised his account over the meetings that followed. The changes were at the edges rather than the core, but they were telling. When investigators could not confirm his claim that one of the accused had been with the others that evening and had left with them, he suddenly "remembered" that the man had joined the group later. When he learned that a police officer had seen a balding man who matched his associate's description with the group that night, he "remembered" that one of the men he had accused had been wearing a bald wig.
The federal district court that examined the case decades later found that Barboza made these adjustments because the FBI had let him know what evidence the state held that contradicted him. The appeals court agreed that there was no evidence the agents had fed him the names of the men he accused. The tale, it wrote, appeared to have sprung from Barboza himself. But once he had given those names, the FBI helped him make the story more believable, and then helped sell it.
The agents told the state prosecutor that Barboza's account had "checked out." Barboza testified before a Suffolk County grand jury on October 25, 1967, and indictments followed for the Deegan murder: against the four he had falsely accused, and against others among the five men the FBI's sources had actually named. His associate, whose part in the killing the FBI had known from the beginning, was never prosecuted for it.
The Deegan prosecution was not Barboza's only appearance as a witness. In 1968 he testified against Patriarca himself and against the family's underboss. He was the first associate of the Mafia in America to take the stand against the organization in a criminal trial, and he testified in three criminal trials in all. In 1970 his testimony helped convict Patriarca of conspiracy to murder Willie Marfeo. Patriarca was sentenced to ten years and was released in 1974.
For the FBI, those cases were the point of the whole exercise. The Bureau had stepped up its campaign against the New England family in the early 1960s, and Barboza was the first insider it put in front of a jury. That purpose shaped everything the agents did with him, including what they chose not to say about the Deegan case.
The defendants went on trial together in Suffolk County in the summer of 1968, with Barboza as the main witness for the Commonwealth. One of the two FBI agents who handled him testified for the prosecution. He told the jury that he had always been careful to keep information about the murder investigation away from Barboza, because he was concerned about the "purity" of his informants' testimony. In 2007 the federal court rejected that testimony and found that the agent had known at the time that Barboza was lying about the four men.
On July 31, 1968, the jury convicted them all. The four men whom Barboza had falsely implicated were convicted on first-degree murder and murder-conspiracy charges. The trial judge sentenced three of them to death. The fourth was sentenced to life in prison. The other defendants, all of whom the FBI's own sources had placed among the killers, were also convicted on charges related to the murder.
Barboza's reward was substantial. The habitual-offender charges that had first brought him to the table were dropped. For his own part in the Deegan murder he received a one-year sentence. The FBI pledged to bring his cooperation to the attention of the authorities who mattered, gave protection to him and his family, and promised him money and a fresh start on the other side of the continent.
The convicted men appealed, and their appeals failed.
Barboza tried to take some of it back. In mid-1970, represented by a new lawyer, he signed a sworn affidavit, dated July 28, 1970, stating that four of the convicted men had not been involved in the murder. His lawyer asked that he be allowed to take a lie detector examination on the point. Shortly afterward two federal prosecutors went to see Barboza, and he withdrew the recantation. The FBI agents did not investigate the recantation or tell their state counterparts about it.
In 1972 the Supreme Court of the United States decided Furman v. Georgia, and the three death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. That removed the threat of execution but not the sentences themselves, and for men serving life for first-degree murder in Massachusetts, the only door out was a governor's commutation.
The government kept its promise of a new start. Barboza was relocated to California and placed under federal witness protection. He lived as Joe Denati and as Joe Baron, and the FBI arranged for him to attend a culinary school in Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County. He found work in a freighter's kitchen and, for a time, at a restaurant in San Francisco. The menial work did not hold him.
In the summer of 1970, Clay Wilson was killed in Santa Rosa, and Barboza was charged with his murder. His true identity came out in the course of the California proceedings. The case was handled in Sonoma County, and the federal government did not stand aside. The two FBI agents who had handled him in Boston, together with the United States attorney in Massachusetts at the time, assisted his defense with character testimony and consultations. The United States attorney wrote in a memorandum that the government had to honor its commitment to the man it knew as Baron.
In 1971 the case ended in a plea bargain and a conviction for murder. The sentence was five years to life. Barboza served just over three years and was released on parole in 1975 from a minimum-security institution. He moved to San Francisco.
Barboza was killed in San Francisco on February 11, 1976. Local police had no idea at first that the dead man had been a federal witness, and the FBI and the United States Marshals took over the case. The killing was later attributed to men sent on behalf of the Patriarca family, which Barboza had betrayed in open court, and their identities were confirmed through FBI recordings made in 1981.
Two months later, on April 9, 1976, a lawyer who had worked with Barboza signed an affidavit stating that Barboza had admitted to him that his testimony about one of the four men had been false. Other witnesses and lawyers came forward over the following years to say that they had lied at the trial or knew that Barboza had.
The four men kept petitioning. Over many years they filed numerous requests for commutation and for parole. State authorities asked the FBI for all relevant information. The Bureau never handed over what it held. On some occasions it went further, telling state officials who were considering the men's petitions that three of them had continuing ties to organized crime, and on others it took steps to head off challenges to the convictions.
The senior Patriarca figure among them died in prison in 1985, after 18 years in custody. A second man died in prison in 1995, after 28 years. A lawyer had begun working to clear him in 1977 and had failed. The fourth man of the four, the one originally sentenced to life, obtained a commutation from the governor and was released on parole in the spring of 1997, after 29 years in prison. The last of them was still behind bars as the century ended.
The truth surfaced through a much larger inquiry. A federal judge in Boston had uncovered misconduct in the FBI's handling of its organized-crime informants serious enough to prompt a Justice Department task force. In the summer and fall of 2000 a special prosecutor leading that investigation found the 1965 documents: the reports, some sent directly to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, showing that agents had known Barboza and his associate carried out the murder without the four men. In December 2000 a Superior Court judge held a hearing on whether the last imprisoned man should be released on the strength of those memoranda.
He was released on January 5, 2001, after more than three decades in prison. On January 31, 2001, all charges against him and against the man paroled in 1997 were dismissed.
The case kept unwinding. On December 19, 2001, the same judge, sitting in Middlesex Superior Court, vacated the sentence of one of the two defendants the FBI's sources had always placed among the killers. Convicted as an accessory before the fact, he had served 34 years. Prosecutors had agreed to drop the charges after reviewing the documents. The district attorney's office later cleared the two men who had died in prison: the convictions were vacated after their deaths, and the charges against them were dismissed, in 2004 and in 2007.
The House Committee on Government Reform investigated the FBI's use of informants in New England. In December 2001 President George W. Bush invoked executive privilege to keep the committee from seeing Justice Department memoranda related to Barboza. At a committee hearing in February 2002, members heard how the FBI had supported Barboza in his California case. One of the two agents who had handled him refused to testify before the committee, citing his protection against self-incrimination. In 2003 the committee condemned the FBI for failing to turn over the documents that would have cleared the imprisoned men.
The two surviving men, the estates of the two who had died, and members of their families sued the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Claims against the individual agents and state officers were eventually dropped, and the case went forward against the government alone. After a 22-day trial without a jury, the federal district court in Boston ruled on July 26, 2007, in a decision 228 pages long.
The court found the government liable for malicious prosecution, coercive civil conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, negligent supervision and loss of consortium. It found that the Boston agents had known Barboza's story about the four men was false, that they had encouraged his perjury, and that he had named the four rather than give up his associate. "The FBI's misconduct was clearly the sole cause of this conviction," the judge wrote. She called the government's defense, that federal authorities had no duty to share information with the state officials who prosecuted the men, "absurd." "It took 30 years to uncover this injustice," she said, "and the government's position is, in a word, absurd."
Damages came to about $101.7 million, built on a baseline of $1 million for each year of wrongful imprisonment. The awards were $29 million to the man paroled in 1997, $26 million to the man released in 2001, $28 million to the estate of the man who died in 1995 and $13 million to the estate of the man who died in 1985, with separate awards to wives and children. The smallest award reflected that he had served the first five years of his sentence alongside earlier sentences in unrelated cases, and the court awarded nothing for that period.
The government appealed. On August 27, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed. It held that the district court had erred on malicious prosecution, because the false information had been given to state investigators pursuing a state crime and the FBI had not itself instituted the prosecution. But it upheld the finding that the government was liable for intentional infliction of emotional distress, rejected the government's argument that the agents' choices were protected discretionary functions, and let every damages award stand. The awards, it wrote, were higher than any of the three judges would have ordered sitting as trial judges, but not so excessive as to shock the conscience. "In its zeal to accomplish a worthwhile objective (stamping out organized crime), the FBI stooped too low," the court concluded. In 2012 the Justice Department dropped its appeal of nearly $1 million in costs and fees awarded to the plaintiffs' lawyers.
Several features of Massachusetts and federal law shaped how this case began and how long it lasted. The habitual-offender statute, chapter 279, section 25 of the Massachusetts General Laws, was what exposed Barboza to as much as 89 years in 1966 and gave the FBI its leverage over him. Its charges were dropped once he testified.
The death sentences imposed in 1968 fell with Furman v. Georgia in 1972 and became life terms. Under Massachusetts law as it then stood, a prisoner serving life for first-degree murder could not be paroled at all unless the governor first commuted the sentence. State officials weighing those petitions asked the FBI for what it knew, which is why the Bureau's silence, and its warnings about the men's supposed criminal ties, carried so much weight for so long.
The federal suit depended on the Federal Tort Claims Act. When the men were charged and convicted, the Act excluded claims arising out of malicious prosecution. Congress lifted that bar for federal law enforcement officers in 1974. The government argued that the claims arose before 1974 and so could never be brought. The district court held that a malicious prosecution claim does not arise until the criminal case ends in the accused's favor, which here happened no earlier than 2001. The appeals court set the malicious prosecution finding aside on other grounds and rested the government's liability on intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Barboza's claim to have killed 26 people during the gang war was his own. The only killing for which he was convicted of murder was that of Clay Wilson.
For the Deegan murder itself, Barboza received a one-year sentence for his role; the precise charge is not on record. The federal courts found, on the FBI's own records, that the murder was committed by Barboza, his associate and three others, with the sanction of the Patriarca leadership. His associate was never prosecuted for it.
No conviction for Barboza's own death is on record. Its attribution to the Patriarca family rests on information the FBI developed years afterward.
1932: Joseph Barboza is born in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
1950s: Serves about eight years in prison after burglary and other convictions.
1964: Legally changes his surname to Baron.
1965: Recruited by the Patriarca organization.
March 10, 1965: An FBI listening device in Providence records Barboza and an associate seeking sanction for the killing of Edward Deegan.
March 12, 1965: Edward Deegan is killed in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
1966: Barboza is arrested and faces habitual-offender charges carrying up to 89 years.
September 8, 1967: Gives his account of the Deegan murder to Suffolk County detectives, with two FBI agents present.
October 25, 1967: Testifies before the grand jury; indictments follow.
July 31, 1968: The defendants are convicted; three of the four innocent men are sentenced to death and the fourth to life.
Summer 1970: Clay Wilson is killed in Santa Rosa, California.
July 28, 1970: Barboza signs an affidavit recanting part of his testimony, then withdraws it.
1970: His testimony helps convict Raymond Patriarca of conspiracy to murder; Patriarca is sentenced to ten years.
1971: Convicted of murder in Sonoma County; sentenced to five years to life.
1972: Furman v. Georgia; the three death sentences become life terms.
1975: Barboza is paroled.
February 11, 1976: Barboza is killed in San Francisco.
April 9, 1976: A lawyer who had worked with Barboza swears that Barboza admitted false testimony.
1985: One of the wrongly convicted men dies in prison.
1995: A second wrongly convicted man dies in prison.
1997: A third is released after the governor commutes his sentence.
December 2000: A Superior Court hearing weighs the 1965 FBI memoranda.
January 5, 2001: The last of the four is released.
January 31, 2001: All charges against the two survivors are dismissed.
December 19, 2001: A Superior Court judge vacates the sentence of an accessory before the fact who had served 34 years.
2004 and 2007: Charges against the two men who died in prison are dismissed.
July 26, 2007: The federal district court holds the United States liable and awards about $101.7 million.
August 27, 2009: The First Circuit affirms the liability finding and the damages.