The FBI, Whitey Bulger & Robert Mueller

Mueller’s Role in Keeping Four Innocent Men Behind Bars

The Justice Department recently announced the indictment of three men alleged to have participated in the 2018 brutal murder of James “Whitey” Bulger while in federal prison. Bulger’s odd relationship with the Justice Department went back nearly 50 years.

For nearly 20 years, the FBI allowed informant Whitey Bulger to continue his crime spree. His criminal activity included countless murders. Bulger was the head of the Winter Hill Gang, a criminal syndicate that operated in the Boston area for decades. The federal law enforcement agency let the Irish mobster and his crime family do as they please in return for tips on the Italian mafia. Dismantling the mafia was the FBI’s highest priority. Bulger only passed on worthless information.

FBI Special Agents John Connolly and John Morris were accomplices to Bulger’s criminal activity, including murder. The Bureau’s complicity with Bulger became public in 1997. The lone FBI agent who tried to end the Bureau’s ties with Bulger was ignored and drummed out of the agency.

The FBI involvement with Bulger was so corrupt that the agency permitted the murder conviction of four innocent men, Peter Limone, Joe Salvati, Henry Tameleo, and Louis Greco, by allowing a witness to lie, and by withholding exculpatory evidence in order to protect another informant, the actual killer, and Bulger criminal accomplice. Three of the four men were given death sentences. Their sentences were later changed to life imprisonment.

A decade-and-a-half after their convictions, the FBI and the Justice Department lobbied state authorities to keep the four men incarcerated in Massachusetts State Prison at Walpole. Such heavy federal involvement in a state criminal case was curious in and of itself.

In 1983, FBI agents visited Massachusetts Parole Board member Mike Albano to intimidate him when the four men were being considered for parole by the board. “They told me that if I wanted to stay in public life, I shouldn’t vote to release a guy like Limone,’’ according to Albano. Those FBI agents were Connolly and Morris.

Connolly was later convicted of several crimes, including murder, in both federal and Florida state courts. He was released from state prison in 2021. Morris was given immunity from prosecution in return for testifying against Connolly. It was Morris who tipped off Bulger through Connolly that another informant was possibly providing the FBI with information on Bulger. That informant was later gunned down. Morris retired from the FBI.

In the 1980s, the acting US Attorney for the Massachusetts District launched an aggressive campaign to pressure the Massachusetts Parole Board to keep the framed men imprisoned. That federal prosecutor was Robert Mueller, who would become the FBI Director two decades later. Mueller was the Justice Department’s chief prosecutor in Massachusetts when Bulger was at the height of his criminal spree, including murder, and was being shielded by federal authorities.

The four innocent men were exonerated in 2001 after serving more than three decades in prison, and after secret FBI files revealed the bureau’s corruption.

The wrongly-convicted men were paid a settlement of nearly $102 million, although only two received the money directly, since Tameleo and Greco died in prison.

The level of Mueller’s knowledge of and involvement in the FBI and Whitey Bulger corruption scheme has never been fully explained. In 2007, while serving as FBI Director, Mueller dismissed the matter commenting, "I think the public should recognize that what happened, happened years ago."

Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, and Parler at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.

His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).