Bull Durham Retires His Connecticut Law Enforcement Horns

Corrupt pols, crooked FBI agents, violent drug gangs, mobsters, tramps, thieves, demagogues, assassins: John Durham was the prosecutor defense attorneys didn’t want probing their targeted clients.

At 70, he’s decided to hang up his law enforcement horns that gored a whole bunch of bad guys here, there and everywhere.

In his early state and federal law enforcement career, John Durham spent a lot of time in Bridgeport. As a young reporter I covered many of his investigations. About 30 years ago I was the publisher of a community weekly The Bridgeport Light with a talented group of scribes including OIB friend Bob Fredericks who recently retired as a senior reporter for the New York Post. We wrote regularly about desperadoes who loved dumping on Bridgeport that amassed mountain ranges of debris across the city landscape. Nothing like a good public shaming to clean it up.

With some it stung. A reporter for another news organization overheard in a restaurant the offended dumper promising a bomb into The Light’s newsroom. Blowing smoke, right? Who wanted to take the chance.

I called Durham who notified the guy’s lawyer: if anything happens, guess what?

The Hartford Courant’s Ed Mahony provides a nice overview of Durham’s extraordinary career.

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.

… 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.

Full story here.