A law enforcement ‘hero’ stepping down
US Attorney John Durham resigns; prosecuted mobsters, drug kingpins, politicians
U.S Attorney John H. Durham, who built an extraordinary record over more than four decades as a Connecticut prosecutor, is leaving office this weekend, part of President Joe Biden’s plan to quickly replace top federal prosecutors around the country with his own appointees.
Durham has played a leading role in some of the most compelling criminal and political cases in Connecticut and elsewhere in the country since the 1970s and his departure has judges, lawyers and law enforcement officers of all stripes reflecting on his contributions to the state’s criminal justice system and his absence going forward.
“I’m biased,” said Robert Devlin, a senior state appellate judge and Durham’s partner 40 years ago on the federal justice department’s super-secret organized crime strike force. “But if you look at it objectively, how can you not say that John Durham is the most consequential federal prosecutor ever to come out of the District of Connecticut, maybe even broader than that. Look at the cases he made and pushed
“Look at the cases he made and pushed across the finish line. One after the other, huge and difficult and complicated cases.”
— Robert Devlin, a senior state appellate judge and Durham’s partner 40 years ago on the federal justice department’s organized crime strike force
across the finish line. One after the other, huge and difficult and complicated cases.”
As a mob prosecutor, Durham, now 70, convicted the leadership of the Patriarca crime family, then New England’s most powerful criminal outfit, riveting mob watchers across the country by playing for a Hartford jury — the first time anywhere, ever in public — a recording of notorious gangsters munching on prosciutto while new inductees burned images of the crime family’s patron saint during the mafia’s secret initiation ceremony.
He was an architect of the federal law enforcement strategy — still in use — that made Connecticut a national leader in reducing the drug violence that had left bodies in the streets of cities in Connecticut and elsewhere in the 1990s. He supervised the convictions of a long line of corrupt politicians — among them, a pedophile mayor, a state treasurer and a governor — twice. And he was assigned by successive U.S. attorneys general of both parties to investigate gangster James “Whitey” Bulger’s hold on law enforcement in Boston, the CIA’s post-911 interrogation tactics and the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion allegations — a matter in which he remains involved.
“He is a hero in the law enforcement community in Connecticut and across the country,” said Christopher Droney, who worked with Durham when Droney was U.S. attorney in the 1990s and who later reviewed Durham’s work, first as a U.S. District Court judge and later on a federal appeals court. “He has taken on nearly impossible tasks and has done a terrific job with all of them. I am just very thankful that I had a chance to work with John and learn from him.”
Durham was nominated by President Donald J. Trump to be U.S. attorney, the state’s top federal law enforcement officer, in November 2017 and was confirmed and sworn in in February 2018. He is the first assistant U.S. attorney from Connecticut to become the state’s presidentially-appointed top federal prosecutor.
Within weeks, then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr asked Durham to put together a team and move to the nation’s Capitol to look for criminality in decisions by the FBI to eaves drop on Trump 2016 campaign aides and investigate since-discredited allegations of a connection between the campaign and Russian election meddling. In October, with the 2020 election approaching, Barr quietly appointed Durham as a special counsel, something Barr said would allow Durham to complete his work “without regard to the outcome of the election.”
Two weeks ago, Biden asked for resignations from all the nation’s U.S. attorneys, but allowed Durham to continue the collusion probe and David C. Weiss, U.S. attorney in Delaware, to continue a tax investigation of Biden’s son Hunter. Durham has been asked to leave his office by Feb. 28 and will be replaced as U.S. attorney on an interim basis by his chief deputy, longtime state and federal prosecutor Leonard C Boyle.
Associates said Durham made an emotional farewell to his staff in a video conference Friday, between calls from well-wishers. Later in the day, he stepped out of his office on the New Haven Green to acknowledge 300 or so masked and socially distanced judges, prosecutors and law enforcement officers who gathered in the windy courtyard behind the federal district courthouse for what amounted to a pandemic retirement send-off. He said he has been inspired by their public service, but much of the rest of his remarks were lost to his mask and the wind.
Durham began his career in 1977, prosecuting career criminals as an assistant to legendary New Haven State’s Attorney Arnold Markle, after graduating from the University of Connecticut School of Law and two years as a VISTA volunteer on the Crow Indian reservation in Montana.
He and Devlin partnered as the Connecticut office of the federal justice department’s organized crime strike force in 1977, prosecuting a pair of notorious Bridgeport gangsters, brothers Gus and Francis “Fat Franny” Curcio. The Curcio case was a battle that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. But it was a sideshow compared to the Patriarca mob case that unfolded in Hartford in the late 1980s.
The aptly nick-named William “The Wild Guy” Grasso of New Haven was the crime family’s always-angry and, at the time, seemingly untouchable Underboss. The FBI hadn’t been able to make anything stick to Grasso since the 1960s, when he bought a truck and tried to muscle his way into the garbage business.
Durham was making another run at Grasso. His team of investigators had set-up an elaborate surveillance system when, in July 1989, a couple of fisherman found the Underboss beside the Connecticut River in Wethersfield. He had been shot in the in the back of the head and dumped in a patch of poison ivy.
The wiretaps produced an intelligence bonanza. Nervous mobsters watched over their shoulders while gossiping on payphones about who blasted the Underboss. But the break that unraveled the Patriarca Family, according to Devlin, was Durham’s success in persuading one of Grasso’s henchmen to cooperate with the FBI and join the witness protection program.
John F. “Sonny” Castagna, described by a pal as “the most treacherous man in Hartford,” persuaded his son John “Jackie” Johns to join the witness program with him. Both admitted being part of a plot against Grasso. Castagno eventually testified that mobsters in Boston, Springfield and Hartford planned Grasso’s assassination as the opening move in a coup that would seize control of the Providence-based crime family from Grasso and boss Raymond “Junior” Patriarca.
Continuing investigation enabled the FBI to bug the mafia initiation, or “making” ceremony outside Boston. And that contributed to the convictions of eight members of the Providence, Hartford and Springfield wings of the family after a sensational, months-long trial in Hartford. Among those convicted in Hartford was Grasso’s replacement as Underboss, Nicolas Bianco, who, while on trial, had cannoli delivered from Providence.
It turned out that Durham got Castagna out of prison and into the witness program just in time. Inmates at the Hartford jail became suspicious when the 260-pound Castagna, complaining of a mysterious illness, began being moved from jail around lunchtime and returned later, ostensibly for medical appointments.
“You could smell the scampi on his breath,” Joe Rocco, one of the inmates, said.
Said Devlin: “I mean you’ve got the making ceremony for the Cosa Nostra, rolling Sonny and Jackie ... All of that was John.”
Durham’s contribution to combating the drug violence that continues to plague Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven was to federalize investigations. For years, drug offenses were state crimes. Local and state police agencies would make arrests for sale or possession, and suspects were quickly bailed out of detention and back in business on the streets. Upon conviction, drug dealers regularly were given relatively short sentences in state jails and prisons, from which they were able to continue to direct their businesses.
The new approach established federally-deputized, multi-agency task forces that were able to work with the federal law enforcement tools the state legislature — then and now — will not authorize for state and local police agencies. Those tools include efficient means of using subpoenas, wiretaps and other investigative weapons created to penetrate sophisticated criminal conspiracies. Federal defendants also can be denied bail as threats to public safety. And upon conviction, they face relatively severe sentences in out-of-state prisons under federal racketeering laws.
When then U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno sent Durham to Boston in 1998 a the head of the Justice Task Force to investigate law enforcement corruption, he walked into a hot war between the FBI on one hand and the Massachusetts State Police and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on the other. The state police and drug agents were convinced that someone in the FBI was tipping gangsters James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi to their investigations.
They were right.
The state police and drug agents figured Durham had been sent by Washington to white wash the FBI. And the FBI resisted Durham to minimize damage to its institutional reputation.
The Courant had, at the time, obtained secret FBI memos suggesting Bulger, Flemmi and their Winter Hill Gang were involved in a murderous conspiracy to take over World Jai Alai, a pari-mutuel gambling business that operated venues in Florida and Connecticut. One memo raised questions about FBI involvement in the murder of Roger Wheeler, the Oklahoma tycoon who owned World Jai Alai.
Durham, with a team including colleagues from Connecticut, made cases against supervisory FBI agent John Connolly and Massachusetts state police Lieutenant Richard Schneiderhan. Durham tried and convicted Connolly in Boston of racketeering, bribery and other charges on evidence that portrayed him as a closet member of the Bulger gang. Witnesses tied Connolly to the jai alai murders - although he wasn’t convicted in Wheeler’s death until later.
An often overlooked aspect of Durham’s time in Boston is his discovery of internal FBI documents showing that FBI agents engaged in unsavory relationships with Boston gangsters dating to the 1950s. He produced memos that resulted in the release of two Boston men who had been wrongly convicted and served 30 years in prison with the connivance of corrupt agent H. Paul Rico. The men sued and won a $100 million judgment against the government.
Successive Republican and Democratic administrations appointed Durham to examine politically fraught allegations that the CIA tried to cover-up the torture of Muslim detainees in the aftermath of the 911 attacks. The George W. Bush administration asked him to examine the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes and, a year later, the Barak Obama administration asked for an investigation of whether U.S. operatives violated federal law, or otherwise tortured detainees, at overseas locations.
After reviewing the interrogations of 110 detainees, Durham recommended opening full criminal investigations regarding the death of two in overseas custody and closing the remaining matters. The Obama administration ultimately closed all cases without bringing charges.
Across his tenure as a federal prosecutor, Durham has held a variety of positions in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven, among them counsel to the U.S. attorney, deputy U.S. attorney, acting and interim U.S. attorney and chief of the criminal division.
Colleagues say much of his success can be attributed to a gift for inspiring loyalty - and unusual investigative efforts among the army of investigators with whom he has worked.
When a scrap of paper with which Durham’s home address was found in part of the Hartford jail holding a group of mobsters in the 1990s, word spread through the law enforcement grapevine. Armed officers converged on the home and when he arrived, Durham was greeted in his own driveway by a shotgun-carrying agent.
Don Brutnell, an FBI agent who, with Durham, persuaded Castagna and Johns to join the witness protection program, retired not long afterward and has since moved south.
“You really have to wonder what things will be like when he leaves,” Brutnell said last week.