Ex-FBI agent charged with aiding mob hit in Boston

BOSTON -- Boston's FBI scandal was already disturbing enough: agents taking bribes, shrugging off gangsters' crimes, and shielding informants from police. Now, it has turned almost unthinkable: A retired agent is charged with aiding a mob hit on a reputable businessman.

"I think this does take things a step further, despite all the problems the FBI has had," said Ronald Kessler, a journalist and historian of the FBI. "I think murder is the ultimate crime."

The arrest of H. Paul Rico is likely to complicate FBI efforts to shake off its legacy of missteps with violent mob informants in Boston, said several experts on the bureau. The arrest could further dent the agency's reputation and supply more fodder for roughly $2 billion in lawsuits accusing the government of wrongdoing in the scandal.

"This is an ugly affair in the FBI's history, probably the worst," said Allan May, who writes for the Web site Americanmafia.com. "I think the most important thing for the FBI to do is to deal with this and get this thing behind it."

The nation's leading police agency has suffered embarrassments in the past when agents were exposed as wrongdoers. They have broken into homes of social activists in programs like the discredited COINTELPRO, and they have occasionally acted as enemy spies, most notoriously in the case of Robert Hanssen. In Boston and elsewhere, agents have let violent informants run amok in exchange for their tips.

Rico's arrest is something different.

"What ... hasn't happened in the past is a (former) FBI agent that is charged with colluding with the wiseguys in a murder. That doesn't happen -- and that's shocking," Fitzpatrick said.

One of the architects of the FBI's mob informant program, Rico helped the agency make some of its first Mafia cases in New England in the 1960s -- with the help of violent informants. When he retired in 1975, he did not entirely abandon his old collaborators: He went to work instead for a mob-connected company that sponsored jai alai games, where players fling balls at high speeds with wicker baskets. A new company head there, Roger Wheeler, wanted to root out the mob influence. In their charge against Rico, Oklahoma prosecutors say he fed information that helped his old mob sources in Boston's Winter Hill Gang find and kill Wheeler in 1981.

Rico was arrested on the first-degree murder charge Thursday at his home near Miami. A brief bond hearing was held Friday as a technical requirement, since he could not have been released on bail for the charge. Another hearing was set for Tuesday in Miami on sending him back to Oklahoma to face the charge.

"He flat-out categorically denies this," said Rico's attorney, William Cagney III. "He never assisted the Winter Hill Gang in trying to get inside information so they could ... do away with people."

FBI leaders and many outside experts on the bureau said the vast majority of agents are honest and well-intentioned.

Bureau representatives in Washington and Boston downplayed the significance of the arrest. They said the agency has already taken steps to control corruption since the scandal broke.

"No one in this office has ever worked with Paul Rico. They don't even know him," added Gail Marcinkiewicz, a spokeswoman for the FBI office in Boston, where Rico has been gone for a generation.

However, Kessler, who has written widely about the FBI and its history, said, "It certainly turns your stomach to think that someone who spent his life in the FBI would be allegedly involved in murder, and you have to blame in part ... the FBI's supervision in Boston, which let all this seamy corruption go on for so long."

"I think this guy will be seen as a retired FBI agent who just went beyond some of the other agents ... who did corrupt things," said Robert Bloom, a Boston College law professor who has studied informant abuses.

Victor Garo, a lawyer for a man wrongly imprisoned in a mob case that Rico helped build, said the ex-agent's arrest may open new dimensions in the Boston scandal, which has been unfolding since one of Rico's old mob informants was arrested in 1995 and began ratting on his former FBI protectors.

"I would imagine that right now, many people are concerned about what he knows and what he will say," the lawyer said of Rico.

They include members of the House Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating Boston's FBI scandal.

However, U.S. Rep. John Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat on the committee, said he hopes Rico's arrest, in the end, "will be part of the path toward ... good credibility by the FBI."

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EDITOR'S NOTE -- Jeff Donn has covered the FBI's informant scandals as the AP's Boston-based Northeast regional writer.