Free Last Rites by William J. Craig Page B

“J.R.” Russo.
    In the late 1990s, the Boston FBI office was in shambles and under scrutiny for its handling of Whitey Bulger. The men who were convicted for the Deegan murder had always claimed that they were innocent and had been set up by Barboza. Even when Winter Hill hit man John Martorano became a federal witness, he informed a DEA agent that Barboza had admitted to framing the men convicted of the Deegan murder. “The mafia screwed me and now I’m going to screw as many of them as possible,” said Barboza, according to Martorano. Obviously, he was referring to the fact that the mob had wanted him out because of his renegade behavior.
    Around this same time, the Chelsea Police headquarters building on Broadway was undergoing a complete renovation. At one time, the building housed the police station and the district courthouse. In recent years, a new courthouse had been built across the street, and now the police were taking over the entire building. While construction crews were ripping up the former chief of police’s office, the men found a thirty-year-old file that was hidden under the floorboards. The file was for the Edward Deegan murder. Documents in the file stated that Chelsea Police detectives assigned to the case had known the identities of the men involved with the murder within twenty minutes of receiving the case. It stated that Joseph Barboza, Stephen Flemmi, Vincent Flemmi (who died of a drug overdose in 1979) and Roy French (who was actually convicted of the crime) were all responsible for the murder. Meanwhile, Louie Grieco, Henry Tameleo and Ronald Cassesso—who were all innocent—had died in prison. Joseph Salvati and Peter Limone were released in 1997 and 2001, after serving more than thirty years in prison. The FBI had allowed two innocent men to waste away in jail and three known killers to continue to walk the streets of Boston because they were FBI informants. The FBI had even intimidated the chief of police in Chelsea into obstructing justice in order to protect its informants. This type of behavior was an ongoing practice with the Boston FBI office until it was exposed in 2000 because of agent John Connolly and Whitey Bulger.
    Barboza had also testified against Bernie Zinna, another Revere mobster, concerning the killing of an ex-boxer in 1968. In April 1969, someone tried to kill Zinna with a shotgun on Route 60 in Malden, but they missed. Zinna was not so lucky on Christmas Eve in 1969, when he was gunned down on Ocean Avenue in Revere with a .38 caliber. He was shot four times in his Cadillac and left behind a widow and three children. Zinna was a low-level mobster whose only claim to fame was that he was tried and acquitted with Angiulo.
    After Barboza was killed, J.R. Russo was promoted to capo. Joseph Russo was from East Boston. In the 1950s, he was employed as a taxicab driver and worked with the Taxi Cab Drivers Union in New York. His unofficial job was with the Lucchese crime family, the mob crew made famous in the movie Goodfellas . He served under the very powerful capo Paul Vario. Russo stayed with the Vario crew until the 1960s, when he moved back to Boston and served under the Patriarca crime family. After he killed Barboza in 1976, he returned to East Boston, took over a crew and ran most of the rackets around Eastie. Every afternoon, Russo would go into a butcher shop on Revere Street, in the shadow of Saint Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, and eat veal cutlets in the back room.
    The two player-victims in this Greek tragedy against a background of violence with Italian and Irish participants were Richard and Carlton Eaton, who were born and raised in Revere. Carlton, who was always in trouble, became an associate of the Winter Hill Gang and close personal friend of Stephen Flemmi during the 1950s. On September 25, 1964, Carlton was sitting in his 1957 customized Cadillac Eldorado on Mingo Road in Malden when he was shot and killed by Stephen