Connolly’s glory days mean Zip in parole bid
What goes around comes around, as Zip Connolly is now finding out the hard way — the very hard way.
The most corrupt FBI agent ever was informed this week by the parole board in Florida that he won’t be up for parole until 2039 — when he’ll be 98 years old. And that’s if he keeps his nose clean.
Happy 77th birthday, Zip! Has Whitey sent you a card yet from his prison in Florida?
Zip is locked up for the 1982 murder in south Florida of John Callahan, a crooked businessman from Boston. Of course, when Callahan was capped, Zip was in Massachusetts, not Florida. He never even met the hit man, Johnny Martorano, who got the assignment from Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi — Zip’s paymasters in the Winter Hill Gang.
Given the odd circumstances of the evidence, Zip’s few remaining friend(s) have been whining about the harshness of his sentence in Florida — that he’s in prison on the word of serial killers and equally crooked fellow G-men. Even if he did pass on some untoward information about John Callahan to his gangland bosses, Zip’s apologists seem to suggest, a life sentence seems a bit excessive. Total BS, and here’s why. Back in 1983, at a time when the bow-tied bum kissers of the Globe were falling all over themselves to lionize Connolly as “the Prince of the City,” four North End hoods were doing life in state prison for a 1965 murder they did not commit.
They had been framed by the Boston office of the FBI. Everybody knew they were innocent; I remember reading about the frame in a best-selling tell-all Mob book by Vincent Teresa … in 1973!
One of the framed guys was Peter Limone, who in 1983 was seeking a commutation. His petition was pending before the state Parole Board. So Zip paid a visit to a new parole board member named Michael Albano.
In 2013, Albano told the Springfield newspaper what happened next:
“Connolly came in and starts saying, ‘ You can’t do this, it’s not good for you, this guy is going to go out on the streets,’ and, ‘I understand you want to go into politics and have a political future, this will not be good for you ….’ Typical Connolly — arrogant, know-it-all, all of that.”
Think about that — Zip was threatening a guy not to release somebody whom he knew was innocent, who’d already served 15 years for a crime he didn’t commit. And this was a year after Zip set up not just Callahan in Florida, but also a double hit by Whitey Bulger on Northern Avenue in Southie … while going to Harvard University full-time.
And now all these years later Zip’s basic complaint appears to be he doesn’t deserve to be doing life. Hey, tell it to Peter Limone. Oh, that’s right, he just died, at age 83, after spending 34 years in prison for that murder he didn’t commit.
Zip was handpicked for the FBI by an earlier generation of Boston G-men, the ones who framed Peter Limone and the others. They needed a new generation of corrupt agents to keep their lucrative crime family going. They saw something in Zip — a malleable, amoral punk, an ethical cipher, totally corrupt.
So they convinced John McCormack, then the speaker of the U.S. House, to write a letter to his dear pal J. Edgar Hoover on Aug. 1, 1968, asking the director to appoint their underworld acolyte to the FBI.
I mention this only because a new biography of John McCormack came out this year — 910 pages. It’s a hagiography, and all Zip rates is a few paragraphs in the epilogue on pages 78182, much of which questions the “true authorship” of the devastating letter from Speaker McCormack asking for Zip’s appointment.
“While John may not have written the letter himself,” the worshipful author concludes, “it is clearly consistent with John’s general sentiments about struggling Irish-descended Southie kids who aspired to a better life.”
So that’s all Zip wanted — a better life. Well, he got his wish. He’s doing life.