When the appalling tale of Joe Salvati’s 30-year imprisonment for a murder he did not commit first became public more than a year ago, there was something strangely unsurprising about it. Shocking as it was to learn that the FBI may have effectively framed Salvati for the 1965 killing of a Chelsea man named Teddy Deegan, Bostonians were already well aware of the agency’s occult relationship with local mobsters in the 1960s and 1970s. Around the very time that Salvati finally won his freedom, in fact, a book by Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI and a Devil’s Deal, was selling briskly in the Bay State and beyond. By then the ugly tale of the FBI’s relationship had become adopted as another chapter of Boston lore.

“There’s a joke going around now that sums it all up,” Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr wrote. “Q: What do you call an FBI agent in a three-piece suit? A: The defendant.”

In Washington, however, there were no such jaded jokes. Members of Congress were at best only vaguely familiar with the sordid history of the FBI and the Boston mob. So when several members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation brought the case to the attention of Indiana Congressman Dan Burton, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, Burton launched a series of hearings to bring the scandal wider attention. It worked. Salvati himself appeared before the committee to tell his awful tale to astonished members of Congress, and was followed by sheepish federal officials who had a hand in the case. Soon the national media was onto the story as well. The New York Times and The Washington Post covered the hearings, 60 Minutes aired a feature on Salvati, and pundits including Times columnist William Safire fanned the flames of outrage.

While the frenzy surrounding the case has surely provided Salvati with some measure of vindication, it has also had a far broader impact. Salvati’s story has reverberated through Washington, galvanizing critics of the FBI who are calling for reforms. And it has added to the growing friction between Congress and the Bush White House over how much information the executive branch can withold from Congress. As Burton put it at a recent hearing: “As terrible as this story is, it’s only one small part of a much larger picture.”

That Dan Burton should be the man to cause so much trouble for the Bush White House, especially over a case brought to his attention by a group of Bay State Democrats, was a curious thing. Throughout the 1990s, after all, Burton played Ahab to Bill Clinton’s white whale. His obsession with Clinton scandals led him once to call the president a “scumbag” and propagated the theory that former White House counsel Vincent Foster had been murdered. At the peak of Burton’s Clinton-bashing, US Rep. Barney Frank declared Burton “incompetent, abusive, out of control, [and] the worst kind of McCarthyite.”

But the Salvati story seemed to strike a chord with the Indianan–especially when the Bush White House refused to allow the Justice Department to turn over internal memos that might shed light on the FBI’s practices. From his perch at the hearing room dais, Burton railed against the FBI and Justice Department with hints of the contempt he once reserved for the Clinton administration. Some liberals suspected there were other agendas at work, like a long-term effort by Burton to win access to documents related to the old Clinton scandals, with which he remains enthralled. But others were willing to give Burton credit. Frank, in fact, stunned his colleagues by declaring Burton a “man of intellectual integrity” for his dogged pursuit of the case. (“I ran to the window to see if the moon was blue,” a Republican committee staffer joked to me soon after.)

There was no blue moon. Frank was simply impressed by Burton’s rare willingness to confront a president of his own party. That confrontation took on greater proportions when the White House invoked executive privilege to keep the documents under wraps. This move appalled even conservative pundits: Safire called it a “power grab” of “unprecedented sweep.” And it came at a time when the White House was already under intense pressure from Congress and the media to provide more information about its contacts with Enron and the war on terrorism. So when Burton threatened to round up support for a citation holding the White House in contempt of Congress, the administration quickly responded–literally within hours–by releasing the documents, thus staving off still more headlines about White House secrecy.

All this was delicious political theater. But it was something of a sideshow to a more fundamental dilemma: What to do about the FBI?

The Salvati debacle may have taken place more than 30 years ago, but there’s still plenty of trouble at the agency. In the past few years, the agency has suffered one humiliation after another: the widely blasted investigation of accused nuclear spy Wen Ho Lee; the last-minute discovery of bureau documents that forced a delay in last year’s execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh; and the failure to detect long-time Russian mole Robert Hanssen within the agency’s ranks, to name a few.

“There are serious and profound problems here,” explains US Rep. William Delahunt, a former Norfolk County prosecutor. “It has become clear that there is an erosion of confidence and integrity at the FBI.”

Burton’s hearings became a flashpoint for these accumulated gripes. Long-time critics of the FBI joined in, like Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, who visited Burton’s hearing room in February vowing to “reform the FBI’s culture of arrogance and its practice of putting image over product.”

What might that reform entail? Grassley has recently introduced, along with Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a bill that would grant more protection to FBI whistleblowers and open up the agency to more outside scrutiny. Currently, the bureau is largely shielded from Justice Department oversight; charges of misconduct are typically handled by the bureau’s internal Office of Professional Responsibility, which has a less-than-stellar reputation on Capitol Hill. Grassley has suggested a permanent congressional oversight committee, while Delahunt says he may propose a special congressional or presidential commission.

Others want to hold the bureau’s agents more accountable for their shadowy modus operandi. Yale Law School professor Stephen Duke told Burton’s committee that Congress should closely monitor the inducements, such as reduced sentences, offered to criminals in return for testimony that incriminates others. At a minimum, Duke says, all negotiations with key witnesses should be taped and shared with the defense lawyers of anyone implicated by the dealmaker.

Duke and others have also urged an extension of the five-year statute of limitations on most federal crimes; that statute ensures that no one at the FBI involved in the Salvati case, which took place decades ago, can be prosecuted. Salvati’s lawyer, Vincent Garo, has made a passionate plea for harsh penalties on federal agents who withhold the sort of exculpatory evidence that might have spared Salvati from jail–proposing, among other things, that their sentences match the penalty they sought for the defendant unjustly accused.

But the post-September 11 political climate will make even the mildest of these reforms hard to achieve. The terrorist attacks gave the FBI’s critics one more reason to be appalled with the agency–intelligence lapses allowed the hijackers to get away with their deadly mission–but the war on terrorism, at home as well as abroad, has provided law enforcement agencies with a new mandate, not to mention a sheen of heroism. Hoping the bureau will catch the next Mohammed Atta before he strikes, Congress has given the FBI freer rein than anytime in recent memory.

“The scary thing is that we just voted the FBI a lot of new powers,” says Barney Frank. That will make it a challenge for Burton, Frank, and company to persuade their colleagues to place the FBI under more scrutiny.

But that’s where the Salvati hearings come in.

“There are not a large number of members who are familiar with the criminal justice system,” explains Delahunt. “They don’t come from that kind of a background, and I don’t think they were aware of some of the abuses that have emerged over the course of time. These hearings have really given the problems a focus.”

In this way, the local story of a long-forgotten murder in Chelsea has captured the attention, and the conscience, of many a congressman. As Republican US Rep. Steven LaTourette of Ohio put it at one of the hearings: “It’s not just the Salvati case that worries me. It’s what may be beyond it. There might be other Salvatis out there who are in prison or, worse, may have been put to death.”