The fascination with ex-FBI agent John Connolly, convicted in a mob murder, continues. Newsweek visited him in a Miami jail to get his take on his conviction in a mob murder.
By Suzanne Smalley and Evan Thomas
Newsweek
For many years, John Connolly was the FBI’s most effective Mafia investigator in Boston. He has a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard. He says his “hero” is Bobby Kennedy and points to his family’s devotion to public service (his brother is a retired DEA agent, and his sister became a teacher). But when he met last week with a NEWSWEEK REPORTER at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami, he was wearing shackles around his ankles. Once dashing and athletic, the 68-year-old Connolly was stooped and pot-bellied in his bright-red prison jumpsuit. His skin was paper-thin and white from lack of sunlight. For the past three and a half years, he has lived in a tiny, 10- by 12-foot cinder-block cell; his food is slipped to him through a slot in the heavy metal door. He is kept in solitary confinement for his own protection: a few years ago, Connolly says, another former FBI agent was badly beaten by inmates in the same jail.
Speaking with the reporter in a holding room, Connolly was grandfatherly, intelligent, emotional. “Believe me, I am innocent!” he declared, pumping his fist in the air. “I’m a Catholic. I say the rosary every day and pray for my innocence. I pray to Saint Jude, the saint of hopeless causes, and to Saint Rita, the saint of the impossible.”
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