This is a languishing headache that simply won’t go away for the Justice Department and the Boston FBI. In June, a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to pay $6.25 million to the widow and children of a night club owner whose slaying was linked to FBI informants/mobsters Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi. Now more people want the government cash and say they were victims of these FBI informants and FBI should have done something to prevent these guys from murdering people.
By Shelley Murphy
Boston Globe Staff
BOSTON — A Justice Department lawyer argued yesterday that the common-law wife of Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi lived on “blood money” from the gangster for years and cannot blame the FBI for the murder of her daughter by longtime informants Flemmi and James “Whitey” Bulger.
“She protected, nurtured” Flemmi, Justice Department attorney Lawrence Eiser said during opening statements on the first day of trial in a federal wrongful death suit brought by Flemmi’s longtime companion, Marion Hussey, and the families of two other victims.
“She washed his clothes after he cut the teeth out of these people,” said Eiser, referring to Flemmi’s admitted practice of pulling his victims’ teeth so they could not be identified. “And she’s going to blame the FBI on this theory. . . . You can’t hold the government liable for failing to arrest people.”
But lawyers for Hussey and the families of the other victims, Debra Davis and Louis Litif, said the FBI is liable because it knew Bulger and Flemmi had committed prior murders and should have prosecuted them, but protected them because they were informants against the Mafia. The agency also thwarted efforts by other law enforcement agencies that targeted Bulger and Flemmi, attorneys said.
