BOSTON — Francis Salemme leaned forward in his chair and craned his neck to get a better look at the photo being shown to jurors. On the computer screen was Salemme with brown curly hair, at the time the New England Mafia boss known as “Cadillac Frank,” holding court outside a hotel under the watchful eye of the FBI.
Almost three decades later, the 84-year-old Salemme, on trial in the strangling of a nightclub owner in 1993, would fit in better at a nursing home than at the helm of a Mafia meeting.
For prosecutors, Salemme is perhaps the last man standing from an era when organized crime flourished in Boston and its environs. The geriatric mobster who was wheeled into the courtroom on the trial’s first day is a shell of his former self — much like the New England Mafia he once led.
“It’s the end of an era — at least this chapter of organized crime in the Boston area,” said Brian Kelly, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Salemme in prior cases and helped secure a conviction against notorious gangster Whitey Bulger .
The Mafia still has a presence in cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit, but it’s not nearly as powerful or violent as it was decades ago, said Scott Burnstein, who has written books about the mob. When the upper echelons, like Salemme, started cooperating with authorities, it opened the floodgates for members to turn on one another, Burnstein said.
And as the oath of omerta — the code of silence — went out the window, the men left on the street stopped taking care of the families of those behind bars, which pushed angry members to make deals with the government, said Thomas Foley, a former Massachusetts State Police colonel who wrote a book on the pursuit of Bulger.
“The last part of the golden age of American organized crime went down with people like Cadillac Frank,” Burnstein said. “The city will never see a mob trial like this again.”
Salemme’s baggy suits hang on his frail frame, and gray wisps that are slicked back over his balding head replace his brown curls. Before leaving court one day in May, his lawyer had to remind him not to forget the inhaler he had left on the table.
Salemme, who headed the New England family of La Cosa Nostra, shuffles in and out of the courtroom, hunched over, only occasionally lifting his head to wave and wink at a reporter who has covered him for decades. Salemme looks so different that his former partner in crime, 84-year-old Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, initially couldn’t even recognize him sitting just a few feet in front of him in court.
Salemme’s trial has transported jurors back to a time when the Mafia was a force to be reckoned with. And the parade of old allies who have marched in to testify against him shows that the oath of omerta is long dead.
