Hard lives for wives of men wrongly imprisoned

updated 7:59 p.m. ET Aug. 16, 2007

BOSTON - For three decades, Marie Salvati and Olympia Limone essentially lived as widows, struggling to make ends meet as they raised four children on their own. Their husbands grew old behind bars after being convicted of a murder the FBI knew they did not commit.

Now the women hope a judge’s ruling awarding them and two other families nearly $102 million marks the end of their struggle in a long story of love, devotion and survival.

For many years, the two women would see each other about once a month, across the visiting room of a state prison. Their conversations were rarely more than a wave hello or a “how’s the family?” but they didn’t need words to understand each other’s lives.

In the days after the verdict, the two women and their husbands spoke to The Associated Press about living apart for so long, and the bonds that kept them together.

Never any doubt
For Marie Salvati, there was never a moment of doubt, even after her husband, Joe, was charged with murder, convicted and sentenced.

“He told me, ’Marie, I want you to know I had nothing to do with this,’ and you know, from that moment on, I knew I was in this with him for his life sentence,” she said.

“I used to tell him, ’You take care of yourself in there and I’ll take care of the family on the outside’,” she said.

And for 30 years, that’s what she did.

Every week, she traveled up to two hours each way to visit her husband in prison. She and the kids endured humiliating pat-downs and searches. The visits, she said, were to buoy her husband’s spirits and to preserve the bond between a father and his children.

It was hardly the life they had planned.

The first time Joe Salvati saw his future wife, she was 16 and wearing a two-piece white bathing suit decorated with a big red lobster. He tried to edge closer on his beach blanket, but Marie’s mother shooed him away.

Salvati, who was two years older, didn’t give up. Three years later, they were married.

The first years of their marriage were typical of many working-class couples in Boston’s largely Italian North End neighborhood. Salvati worked two or three jobs — truck driver, dock worker, doorman — while his wife stayed home and took care of their kids.

Then came Oct. 25, 1967, when Salvati was fingered as the driver of the getaway car in the 1965 slaying of small-time hoodlum Edward “Teddy” Deegan.

'Daddy, what's an electric chair?'
At first, the couple thought the police would discover the mistake and release Salvati, who insisted mob hitman Joseph “The Animal” Barboza had framed him over a $400 debt. Salvati had been arrested just once before — for petty larceny.

Elise Amendola / AP Marie Salvati said her kids were picked on at school because of their father's murder conviction.

After a two-month trial, Salvati, then 34, was convicted, along with Limone, Louis Greco and Henry Tameleo. Salvati was sentenced to life in prison, while the others were sentenced to die in the electric chair.

Marie Salvati, then 32, tried to reassure their children, then 5, 9, 11 and 13.

“I said, ’You know, Daddy will be OK,”’ she recalled. “But nothing got better. If anything, it got worse.”

From prison, her husband spent years working on appeals, motions for a new trial and commutation requests. When his kids came to visit, he got a glimpse of what life was like for them.

“My kid came up and asked me one time, ’Gee, Daddy, what’s an electric chair?’ I said, ’Where’d you hear that?’ and he said, ’Well, the kids in school said they’re going to give you the electric chair,”’ he said. “They were always getting picked on.”

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