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The Pact
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."
In the late 1980s, a few months before she died, Garo's mother, Kay, who worked as one of his secretaries, made her son promise he would represent Salvati until he won his freedom. A solo practitioner, Garo repeatedly filed for appeals, and Salvati, by now a grandparent, clung to the hope that justice would prevail.
Salvati's oldest grandchild, Jennifer, now 35, remembers waiting at the Boston courthouse in 1989 in the hope that a commutation request would be granted. "My grandfather came off the elevator," she remembers, "with shackles on his wrists, waist and feet. He just looked down, and they rushed him away. You don't want to see anyone, let alone a family member, in shackles, especially when he's innocent. Not only was my grandfather robbed of his life, we were robbed of him."
At one point, Salvati offered Marie a divorce. "If you want one, I won't contest it," he told her. "I'm not in here for a year or two. This is for the rest of my life."
"Are you crazy?" Marie responded. "I took a vow for better or worse. We love each other."
Just as she never missed a weekly visit, her husband never failed to send a weekly greeting card, purchased with his 15-cents-a-day prison wages. "Next year, maybe we will be together," he would write. Or, "My every thought is of how much I love you, so I'm never alone." Each card sat on top of the television until the next arrived.
Marie stored her precious collection in shoe boxes, tied with red ribbon. On their 25th wedding anniversary, feeling lonely, she went through them. "I realized my marriage," she says, "had been lived in a shoe box. I wasn't a widow. He was still part of my life. But he was not with me."
Garo figures he spent 30,000 hours digging into Deegan's murder. A breakthrough came when he obtained a long-suppressed police report written shortly after the crime indicating that an informer with Mob ties had named Barboza and Flemmi as the men who left a restaurant that night intent on killing Deegan. The report made no mention of Salvati. "It was more important to the FBI to protect their murderous informants," says Garo, "than to protect an innocent man who had a young family."
In 1997 Garo finally won his client a parole commutation and walked him out of prison, where three generations of Salvatis waited for him. Before heading home, Salvati and his attorney stopped at the Oak Grove Cemetery to place roses on Kay Garo's grave. "Mom, I kept my promise," Garo said.
It would be another four years before all charges against Salvati were dropped, and six more before a judge would determine what 30 years of his life was worth in dollars.
The $101.7 million awarded to Salvati and his codefendants is believed to be the highest ever for wrongful conviction and imprisonment. (Henry Tameleo, a codefendant in the murder trial, died in prison in 1985, as did Louis Greco, a decorated World War II veteran, in 1995; their awards go to their estates.) The Department of Justice is expected to appeal the case, despite an apology to the Salvati family by Congressman Dan Burton, who spearheaded a three-year investigation as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. No such apology was forthcoming from FBI Agent H. Paul Rico, who, when asked during the hearings if he felt remorse, answered, "What do you want, tears or something?" The agent, who died in 2004 awaiting trial on unrelated murder charges, was never disciplined for his role in the Deegan case.
Burton, an Indiana Republican, was so outraged by the government's conduct that he battled the Bush Administration over Department of Justice documents, which White House lawyers initially tried to keep from Congress on claims of executive privilege. And Rep. Bill Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat, has introduced a bill imposing criminal sanctions on federal authorities who hide evidence the way they did in the Deegan case.
Salvati, now 75, knows he may not live long enough to see a penny of the award. But a month after his release, he began making up for lost time, assisting with the birth of his ninth grandchild, Michael. "He'd missed out on so much," says Marie. "It was a miracle for him to be able to cut the cord."
Shortly thereafter, he had a little chat with his wife, who, after three decades of being solely in charge at home, kept trying to take charge of Joe as well. "Marie, you can't keep telling me what to do," he said.
"It had become second nature after all those years," she says.
Salvati still gets a kick out of choosing what time he gets up and goes to bed. "I enjoy just being able to walk anywhere whenever I want to," he says. He admits that he often reverts to pacing, as he did when he was locked up, for exercise. He irons his own clothes because in prison everything was wrinkled; these days, he prides himself on being a sharp dresser. Mostly, he and Marie relish being together and with their family—able to finally hold each other and hug their kids.
"We're simple people, not materialistic," says Marie, now 73. "It was never about the money. It was about proving Joe's innocence, about getting our good name back. If we ever get that money, it won't mean much to us personally. It will go for trust funds for the kids and grandkids so they can go to college and have a better life, get all the things that they didn't have while Joe wasn't here."
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