Record
Court opinion
2003-08-14
CourtListener (Free Law Project), text of the opinion
United States v. Connolly, 341 F.3d 16 (1st Cir. 2003)
First Circuit opinion of August 14, 2003 affirming former FBI agent John J. Connolly, Jr.'s convictions for racketeering, obstruction and a false statement, and his 121-month sentence.
- Date
- 2003-08-14
- Kind
- court-opinion
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Docket
- No. 02-2201
- Rights
- Opinion of a United States court. Works of the federal judiciary are in the public domain in the United States. The text was read on CourtListener.
United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit, August 14, 2003. (CourtListener’s header carries a misprinted hearing date; the decision date is from the opinion.) A jury convicted John J. Connolly, Jr. after a May 2002 trial of one RICO count (18 U.S.C. § 1962(c)), two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of making false statements. “The district court subsequently imposed a sentence of 121 months of imprisonment.” The court affirmed.
The opinion states that Connolly joined the FBI in 1968 and served in the Boston office from 1973 until 1990, where he handled Bulger and Flemmi as informants, and that “Shortly after Connolly retired from the FBI in 1990, however, Bulger and Flemmi were ‘closed’ as FBI informants.”
It continues: “at some point in the early 1990s, Flemmi, working with the ‘boss’ of La Cosa Nostra’s Boston family, Frank Salemme, ran an illegal ‘numbers’ operation in the Boston area. On January 10, 1995, a federal grand jury indicted Bulger, Flemmi, Salemme, and several other persons.” Bulger and Salemme, “forewarned of the pending indictment, disappeared a few days before its issuance. The authorities apprehended Salemme eight months later.” The quotation marks around “boss” are the court’s.