‘Dogged persistence,’ says the man who took down the mob
BOSTON — Behind the convictions of Boston’s most powerful mobsters over the past 30 years, there has been one constant: federal prosecutor Fred Wyshak.
For the dauntless assistant U.S. attorney, last month’s murder conviction of former New England Mafia Boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme likely closes the book on a lengthy saga that exposed the FBI’s overly cozy relationship with its gangster informants and decimated the region’s organized-crime underworld.
“It has been, to some extent, dogged persistence to get where we needed to get to bring these organized crime groups to the end,” Wyshak said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Wyshak, 65, arrived at Boston’s U.S. attorney’s office 1989 after pursuing mobsters in New Jersey and was recruited by state police investigators to help do what no one else seemed willing to: go after notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger and his Winter Hill Gang.