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Walpole, a maximum security prison 25 miles outside Boston, was notorious for brutality. Inmates were subjected to beatings, deprived of heat, fed food with bugs in it, even threatened with death. Riots routinely broke out, and lockdowns lasted for weeks on end. For lifers like Salvati, the place was hell on earth.He routinely retreated to his tiny cell, just big enough for a bed, a sink and a toilet, to escape the cacophony and frequent violence. Alone, he often wept with worry over Marie and the kids. "I cried a lot," he says. "Who wouldn't?"
Joe never told Marie what life was like on the inside. She, in turn, sheltered him from her problems on the outside. "We had a pact," says Marie. "You do the time, and I'll take care of our family." She took a job at the local Head Start office. At first, she barely earned enough to put food on the table. "At Christmas, when donated clothes and toys came in, I asked if I could take some for my kids. Otherwise they wouldn't have had anything." Eventually, she rose to the position of director.
Every Saturday, no matter the weather, she made the trek to the prison, usually with the kids in tow. It was an all-day trip by bus. When they got there, the guards could be tough, sometimes strip-searching the children, humiliating and terrifying them.
Two years into her husband's sentence, Marie bought a worn-out Oldsmobile with a rusted-through hole under the backseat and bald tires that made it skid dangerously when it snowed. Not surprisingly, she soon grew phobic about driving. "I'd be holding the wheel like it was my life, breaking out in hives, praying we wouldn't have an accident," she says. "All I knew was we had to get to Joe."
During one visit, Salvati's youngest daughter, Gail, then eight, greeted him by asking, "Daddy, what's an electric chair? Are you going to get it? The kids in school say you are." Shaken, he explained that it wasn't true, that her classmates were just trying to scare her. "I went back to my cell," says Salvati, "and asked the guard to lock me in. They can tell when you get a bad visit. I sobbed off and on for a week. I felt like somebody had kicked me in the stomach. And to think, all this was happening because the FBI wanted it to."
Salvati was ten years into his sentence when Victor Garo heard about him. At first, he didn't want to get involved. He was a white-collar criminal defense attorney who handled insurance fraud and political corruption, not organized crime. "Don't tell me you're innocent," he said at their first meeting. "Just tell me the facts." The men talked for three hours. After hearing that Barboza was the only eyewitness at the trial, and concluding the evidence was full of holes, Garo agreed to take on Salvati's appeal.
He asked for a $1,500 retainer but, discovering Marie had to borrow the money to pay him, decided to take the case pro bono. "Friends called me nuts," the lawyer recalls. "They told me, "You're gonna have to take on the entire federal government -- the Boston FBI office, the Department of Justice, the attorney general, FBI headquarters.' I'm not the sharpest, best trial lawyer in the world, but I believed in what I was doing."
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