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A high school graduate with no trade skills, Joseph Salvati put in ten-hour days, six days a week, working three jobs to support his family. "It was casual labor," he says. "You got what you could. I'd run down to the pier and help unload the fish. Lumpin', it was called. It was dog's work. But you could make $60 a week. I unloaded trucks in the meat market. I worked as a doorman. The hours were late, but $40 in tips was $40.""We lived from week to week," says Marie. "It wasn't easy, but Joe provided for us the best he could. We'd take the kids out once a week for a pizza, sometimes a movie. It was good, but there was no money to spare."
Their budget could barely stretch for unexpected expenses, like medical care for their daughter Lisa Marie, who was born with Down syndrome in 1959 and died two months later from a heart condition.
"You had good times and bad," says Salvati, who, like his neighbors in the predominantly Italian American North End, occasionally borrowed from the local moneylender, a man who trusted them to pay him back when they could. One day, the lender told Salvati that his accounts had been taken over by a Mob-connected loan shark: Joseph Barboza. He needed Salvati's debt of $400 paid immediately, but Salvati didn't have the money.
When Barboza sent two enforcers to collect, one armed with a baseball bat, Salvati grabbed the bat midswing and sent the two goons running. This, evidently, was the source of Barboza's grudge against Salvati, whose next visitor was a Mob attorney. "I have a message from Joe Barboza," the lawyer told Salvati. "He says to tell you he will take good care of you. Very good care."
Mob wars had been raging in nearby Charlestown and Somerville's Winter Hill section for years; Deegan had fallen victim in one of the frequent bloodbaths. In October 1967, two years after Deegan's murder, Salvati was helping a friend move furniture into a bar in the working-class neighborhood where he lived, when Frank Walsh, a police sergeant he'd known since the man was a newly minted beat cop, approached him.
"Joe, I have a warrant here for your arrest," Walsh said, then began reading: "Murder one, Teddy Deegan."
"Who the hell is Teddy Deegan?" a stunned Salvati asked. Before anyone answered, he was taken into custody.
Marie was walking with her youngest, five-year-old Anthony, when the case made news. "People on the street stopped me and said, "Marie, there's been a big crime raid, and Joe got arrested,' " she remembers. "No one knew the details, just that it was an organized-crime case."
Terrified but sure her husband would call and tell her it was all a mistake, she collected the other children from school and hurried home. "Joe sent me word through a friend," she says. "He said not to worry, he'd soon clear this up and be out." But, remanded without bail for ten months before the trial, he didn't come home. "It was a nightmare that went on for 30 years," Marie says.
A friend organized a raffle and raised $1,100 for Salvati's defense. What that bought was a fresh-out-of-law-school attorney whose name Salvati can't remember. "He kept asking for my alibi, and I kept telling him I didn't have one," he says. "Innocent people don't need alibis." Salvati's story -- that Barboza had made good his threat by falsely implicating him in Deegan's murder -- fell on deaf ears in court.
"Barboza had his own gang," says Victor Garo, who took Salvati's case on appeal in 1977 and grew old with his client, fighting for his exoneration without charging a penny. "He was a loan shark, a receiver of stolen goods, a leg breaker. He'd shoot you in the head, puncture your eardrum with an ice pick, disembowel you with a knife. But the FBI wanted everyone to believe he would never, in a court of law, lie to save himself. And it worked."
The first visitor to Salvati's cell at Walpole was Albert DeSalvo, accused of being the Boston Strangler. "He brought me two sandwiches, which I didn't eat," Salvati says. "They could have been poisoned." He learned survival tactics from the men who carried out the Great Brinks Robbery, then the largest heist in U.S. history. "They said that if you mind your business, the other prisoners won't bother you. But they also said you can find trouble if you want it."
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