Harold Paul Rico (April 29, 1925 – January 14, 2004) was an FBI agent. Indicted for murder in 2003, he played a significant role in the 1968 framing of four men for murder, unjustly imprisoning them for decades.
Rico was born in 1925 in Boston. He graduated from Boston College with a bachelors degree in history. Rico joined the FBI in 1951 at the age of 26 and worked in the Boston area. He used members of the Winter Hill Gang as informants. In 1956 he recognized a disguised James "Whitey" Bulger in a Revere bar and arrested him. In 1965 Rico received word that gangster Edward Deegan was going to be killed by members of the The Winter Hill Gang but did nothing. He then watched as Joe Barboza testified in court against four men they both knew to be innocent of the crime: Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, Joe Salvati and Louis Greco. Tameleo died in 1985 in prison and Greco died in 1995 in prison, too[1]; Salvati was released in 1997, and Limone in 2001. During U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearings in October 2003 looking into the Deegan killing, Rico responded to questions about the innocent men imprisoned with "What do you want, tears?"[2]
The two survivors and the estates of the deceased were awarded $101.7 million by U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner in Boston on July 26, 2007. [3]
On October 9, 2003 Rico was indicted for murder in Oklahoma and Florida for the assassination of the millionaire Roger Wheeler on May 27, 1981. He died on January 16, 2004 in a Tulsa hospital where he was moved to from prison. He was still under indictment for the 1981 murder.[4]