Feb 12 2007
Man who helped bug the Mafia dead at 70
“Money was nothing to him,” Gopoian said. “He just went gambling and did whatever he wanted,” often traveling to neighboring states to play the lottery and spend his FBI stipend.
Though the two talked every week, they never discussed his relationship with the FBI.
“He was put in a situation that he didn’t like, but he had to do it, or he wouldn’t have been around,” Gopoian said. “He had no choice because that was not him. Believe me, he was a stand-up guy. ”
She added: “People think that because of the business he was in, he wasn’t a good human being, but he was. ”
Gopoian said Mr. Mercurio suffered from a blockage of arteries serving the lungs. She said he never fully recovered from an operation he had about two years ago.
Gopoian said the federal government forced Mr. Mercurio to live in Arkansas, though he would have preferred to live in Florida.
“You’d think they would have given him ‘Jim Roberts,’ or something that would not have designated him as an Italian,” she said.
When Tracy Miner, a Boston criminal defense lawyer, deposed Mr. Mercurio at a food court in Las Vegas several years ago, she said it was hard to see the criminal in the short, gray-haired man.
“He was like an old Italian grandfather,” she said yesterday in a phone interview. “He was a nice, old man, almost enough that you could forget about all the things he had done.”
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Mercurio leaves a sister, Lorraine Carvalho of Woburn, and a brother, Michael of Arizona.
Shelley Murphy of the Globe staff contributed to this story.
By David Abel and April Simpson, Globe Staff | February 12, 2007 http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=T&ct=us/0-0&fd=R&url=http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/02/12/man_who_helped_bug_the_mafia_dead_
at_70&cid=1113556218&ei=vzrQReeyJJCCHLWwvN0D
