U.S. Attorney John Durham resigns; led prosecution of mobsters, drug kingpins and corrupt politician

Source: Hartford Courant

Full Headline: U.S. Attorney John Durham resigns; led prosecution of mobsters, drug kingpins and corrupt politicians. ‘A hero in the law enforcement community.’

By EDMUND H. MAHONY HARTFORD COURANT | FEB 26, 2021 AT 6:10 PM

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 the most 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.

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