Copyright The Boston Herald
Doddering retired US District Court Judge Mark Wolf has always been an insufferable loud-mouthed jerk, and if you don’t believe me, just ask mobster Stevie Flemmi. Flemmi was a snitch for the FBI, and back in 1983 Wolf’s big mouth almost got him whacked by the Mafia. Wolf, then an assistant US attorney, was incessantly name-dropping to anyone who’d listen about all the wonderful cases he was working on. Wolf, a spoiled rich kid from Weston, didn’t care who he blabbed to as long as he was impressing his listener as a Very Important Person. His loose lips almost sunk Flemmi’s ship. Not that that would have necessarily been the worst thing in the world, but anyone who’s as streetwise as Wolf so obviously thinks he is should know better, don’t you think? I mean, didn’t he ever hear about dummying up? Don’t put the family business out on the street, capeche? Maybe Wolf never saw all those Mob movies in Weston, or Yale, or at Harvard Law School – he’s a real street kid, you know. Let’s go straight to Flemmi’s FBI file from August 1983. He’s listed by his informant number, BS 955-TE, and he expresses his “extreme concern” about being outed as an informant because of the leaks in the US attorney’s office. “(Flemmi) advised that the leaks are coming from two sources, Howie Rubin’s girlfriend who works for the US attorney’s office and Mark Wolf, the assistant US attorney. “Source advised that Wolf is very close to an unknown Jewish male who is married to the sister of Bruce Swerling. “This unknown male who is close to Mark Wolf is also close to Howie Rubin and everything that Wolf tells this unknown Jewish male is relayed automatically to Howie Rubin, who then runs to Prince Street to provide Gerry Angiulo and Larry Zannino with the information.” Gerry Angiulo used to have a disparaging phrase to describe babbling, garrulous fools like Wolf – “unconscious stool pigeons.” Funny how Wolf didn’t mention any of this when he was virtue-signaling this week in a regime-controlled tract about retiring at age 78 to protest the “existential threat” that Donald Trump somehow poses to the nation. If all you know about this obese, bald clown is his slobbering self-portrait, you’d never know about his former career as an unconscious stool pigeon for the local Mafia. Inside of mentioning his whispered law-enforcement leaks to “unnamed Jewish male,” Wolf bragged about how “my assistants and I won more than 40 consecutive corruption cases.” Consecutive? I seem to remember one City Hall case Wolf lost when it turned out that his star witness had been shaking down the defendant, demanding a $200,000 bribe for… not lying on the witness stand as Mark Wolf’s top witness. After that Mark Wolfe extravaganza imploded, the appeals court threw out one of Wolf’s earlier convictions of the guy. The unconscious stool pigeon was very unhappy, I’m reliably informed. I had more direct involvement with another one of Wolf’s “L’s” as a prosecutor, involving my state rep in Somerville, Vinnie Piro. Vinnie was lugged on an attempted-extortion charge after taking a $25,000 payoff from an undercover FBI agent, which he later returned. Vinnie’s lawyer was Bob Popeo from East Boston. I was covering the trial for Ch. 7. One day I obtained transcripts of the FBI-recorded meeting where Piro gave back the money. It was going to be the lead story on the 6 o’clock newscast. I was with a female editor putting the final touches on my piece when the phone rang in the booth. It was Mark Wolf. He started screaming at me. He threatened me if I ran the story. I laughed and hung up. My editor asked me who’d just been yelling at me on deadline. “Just another candy-ass ruffian,” I told her, “from Weston.” The next day, after the story ran, I was back in court exchanging high-fives with the crew from the Hill when Wolf swaggered up to me. “Do you still live in Somerville?” he sneered. I shrugged. It wasn’t a secret. Three days later, at my address on Spring Hill, I got my first-ever audit notice from the IRS. I took it to court that morning and showed it to Vinnie’s lawyer, Bob Popeo. He read it and then showed me an envelope of his own. “Looks like we got the exact same letter,” he said with a smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll handle it for the both of us.” Popeo wrote the IRS a letter so scorching that I think I burned my hands just reading it. The IRS never returned a single call from my accountant – that time anyway. When Wolf was nominated for a judgeship, I asked Bob if we should try to alert anybody to this bum’s m.o. “Let’s keep it to ourselves,“ he said. “There are worse things, you know, than having something on a federal judge.” Until he died, Popeo and I would occasionally call one another about Wolf’s latest idiotic stunts, like when he said in open court that he wanted to share a glass of chianti or two with some local wiseguys. Or the time he ordered the state to pay for a sex-change operation for a wife killer. Even Gov. Deval Patrick was outraged by that one. We’d always chuckle – we’d known Wolfe before he became Oliver Wendell Holmes. Now he dreamed of becoming a male Nancy Gertner, woker than woke. Then COVID struck and he was totally terrified for years. He became the Howard Stern of the courthouse. Nobody could go near his courtroom without four or five masks on. And now at age 78, he’s gone, to track down Orange Man Bad. You know the old joke about the difference between federal judges and God. The difference is, God doesn’t think he’s a federal judge. Mark Wolf is a legend in his own mind. Just read his piece in The Atlantic. As for me, I remember an old saying we used to have in the neighborhoods where Mark Wolf never ventured to set foot. Once an unconscious stool pigeon, always an unconscious stool pigeon. (Order Howie’s new book, “Mass Corruption: Vol. 1, The Cops,” at howiecarrshow.com/store.)
