Time to end blight of mobsters’ reign
The last Boston mobster goes on trial April 23.
Francis P. Salemme and a co-defendant are accused of murdering the owner of The Channel, a onetime concert hot spot in Southie, in 1993.
It’s Cadillac Frank’s long overdue day of reckoning.
Salemme,
84, was living free under the federal witness protection program for turning on disgraced FBI agent John “Zip” Connolly, who was James “Whitey” Bulger’s infamous handler. That’s all over now.
Frank is next to go before a jury where his life as a mafia godfather will be an open book. And it’s a horror story.
His federal indictment tells of Salemme “extorting bookmakers and loan sharks” and plotting to place “illegal ‘video poker’ machines in bars and restaurants.”
It states he watched as the alleged murder victim was being strangled while his co-defendant held the man’s “legs off the ground.”
All this while Salemme solidified his top post in the New England branch of La Cosa Nostra.
But finally, the United States v. Francis P. Salemme and Paul M. Weadick will place another aging Boston bad guy before the court. The reign of Bulger, Salemme and the Patriarca crime family, et al., remains a blemish on the city’s history. Justice has been delayed in too many instances. Bringing Bulger before the court took too long. The same is true for Salemme.
Salemme and Weadick are accused of murdering Steven DiSarro because DiSarro knew Salemme and his late son Francis Salemme Jr. shared a hidden financial interest in The Channel during a time when father and son were the targets of a mob-crushing federal investigation.
DiSarro, 43, was missing for 23 years until his remains were unearthed in Providence in 2016.
It’s an embarrassment — and fodder for Hollywood — for how long Bulger, Connolly, Salemme and others ran around. That’s why this case deserves all the professionalism prosecutors can muster.
Jurors need to finish this sad story of the old mobsters who once ruled Boston.