HARTFORD COURANT | FEB 26, 2021 AT 6:10 PM

U.S. Attorney John Durham resigns;

led prosecution of mobsters, drug kingpins and corrupt politicians.

‘A hero in the law enforcement community.’

U.S Attorney John H. Durham, who has 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 important criminal cases in Connecticut and elsewhere in the country since the 1970s and, as his departure from office approached, judges, lawyers and law enforcement officers reflected on his contributions to the state’s criminal justice system and his absence going forward.

“I’m biased,” said Robert Devlin, a senior state appellate judge and Durham’s partner 40 years ago on the federal justice department’s super-secret organized crime strike force. “But if you look at it objectively, how can you not say that John Durham is the most consequential federal prosecutor ever to come out of the District of Connecticut, maybe even broader than that. Look at the cases he made and pushed across the finish line. One after the other, huge and difficult and complicated cases.”

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 — for the first time ever in public — a recording of vicious gangsters pricking their trigger fingers and burning 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 left bodies lying 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, two mayors, the state treasurer and a governor — and 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.

“He is a hero in the law enforcement community in Connecticut and across the country,” said Christopher Droney, who worked with Durham when Droney was U.S. attorney in the 1990s and who later reviewed Durham’s work, first as a U.S. District Court judge and later as a federal appeals court judge. “He has taken on nearly impossible tasks and has done a terrific job with all of them. I am just very thankful that I had a chance to work with John and learn from him.”

Durham was nominated by President Donald J. Trump to be U.S. attorney, the state’s top federal law enforcement officer, in November 2017 and was confirmed and sworn in in February 2018. He is the first assistant U.S. attorney from Connecticut to become the state’s presidentially-appointed top federal prosecutor.

Within weeks, then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr asked Durham to put together a team and move to the nation’s Capitol to look for possible criminality in decisions by the FBI to eaves drop on Trump 2016 campaign aides and investigate since-discredited allegations of a connection between the campaign and Russian election meddling. In October, with the 2020 election approaching, Barr quietly appointed Durham as a special counsel, something Barr said would allow Durham to complete his work “without regard to the outcome of the election.”

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https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-news-john-durham-leaves-office-20210225-20210226-oiha3hmoljab3pq7rfniiqyltq-story.html

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>U.S. Attorney John Durham resigns;

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Two weeks ago, Biden asked for resignations from all the nation’s U.S. attorneys, but allowed Durham to continue the collusion probe and David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware, to continue a tax investigation of Biden’s son Hunter. Durham has been asked to leave his office by Feb. 28 and will be replaced as U.S. attorney on an interim basis by his chief deputy, longtime state and federal prosecutor Leonard C Boyle.

Associates said Durham made an emotional farewell to his staff by video conference Friday, between calls from well-wishers. Later in the day, he stepped out of his office on the New Haven Green to acknowledge 300 or so masked and socially distanced judges, prosecutors and law enforcement personnel who gathered in the windy courtyard behind the federal district courthouse for what passed as a COVID-19 retirement affair. He said he has been inspired by their public service, but much of what he said was lost to his mask and the wind.

Durham began his career in 1977 prosecuting career criminals as an assistant to legendary New Haven State’s Attorney Arnold Markle, following his graduation from University of Connecticut School of Law and two years as a VISTA volunteer on the Crow Indian reservation in Montana.

He and Devlin teamed up on the federal justice department’s organized crime strike force in 1977, prosecuting brothers Gus and Francis “Fat Franny” Curcio, notorious Bridgeport gangsters, in a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Durham’s contribution to combating the drug violence that continues to plague Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven was to federalize investigations. For years, drug offenses were state crimes. Local and state police agencies would make arrests for sale or possession, and suspects were quickly bailed out of custody and were back on the streets. Upon conviction, drug dealers regularly were given relatively short sentences in state jails and prisons, from which they were able to continue to participate in illegal actively.

The new approach established federal, state and local task forces that were able to work with federal law enforcement tools that the state legislature — then and now — will not authorize for state and local police agencies. Those tools included efficient means of using investigative subpoenas, wiretaps and other investigative weapons created to penetrate sophisticated criminal conspiracies. Defendants could also be denied bail in federal court. Upon conviction, they faced far more severe sentences under federal racketeering laws and out of state imprisonment.

Across his tenure as a federal prosecutor, Durham has held a variety of positions in the U.S. attorney’s office in New Haven, among them counsel to the U.S. attorney, deputy U.S. attorney, acting and interim U.S. attorney and chief of the criminal division. Then-U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed him to lead a special justice department task force when he was in Boston investigating Bulger and law enforcement corruption. While investigating CIA treatment of detainees and destruction of CIA video recordings, he was appointed acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Durham’s colleagues say he also has a gift for inspiring loyalty, while producing unusual investigative efforts among the army of investigators with whom he has worked.

When a scrap of paper with which Durham’s home address was found in part of the Hartford jail holding a group of mobsters in the 1990s, word moved quickly through the law enforcement grapevine. Armed officers converged on the home and when he arrived, Durham was greeted in his own driveway by a shotgun-carrying agent.

Don Brutnell, an FBI agent who helped persuade a father-son team of would-be mafia killers to join the witness protection program in the Patriarca case, retired not long afterward and has long since moved south.

“You really have to wonder what things will be like when he leaves,” Brutnell said during a telephone conversation.