A REALLY GREAT HERALD PIECE THAT GIVES A PEAK INTO THE UNDERWORLD.

Meet the suspects: Charles O. Pappas
The son of a convicted cocaine dealer, Charles O. Pappas tried to stay afloat in the netherworld by snitching on criminal associates whenever prosecutors promised to bring down the hammer, according to law enforcement officials.

The Herald - quoting sources - first reported in 1992 that Pappas and Dorchester drug lord Carmello Merlino offered to trade information on the 1990 Isabella Stuwart Gardner art theft in exchange for leniency on the drug charges.
The offer also included promises about the whereabouts of $30,000 worth of stolen paintings from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Museum in Cambridge in 1985.

Although sources told the Herald that negotiations between investigators and lawyers for Pappas and Merlino occurred, the $300 million art theft has not been solved and there is no hard evidence Pappas had access to the works.
Pappas, 27, was ambushed by two masked men in Braintree on Thanksgiving Eve 1995 as he prepared to snitch about another crime - a 1990 Canton home invasion that allegedly involved his friend, and fellow Gardner heist suspect, David Allen Turner, law enforcement authorities said.

Pappas’s father, George, met a similar death. He was cut down by a bullet to the right eye at the Four Seas Restaurant in Chinatown in 1981. Reputed mobsters John J. “Jackie” Salemme and Edward “Brian” Halloran were charged with the slaying of George Pappas.
Salemme, brother of Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, reputed underboss of the New England Mafia, was convicted of second degree murder, but the verdict was overturned by the Supreme Judicial Court in 1984. Halloran was killed before the trial.

Shortly after Charles Pappas died, his boyhood friend Turner, now 40, was let off the hook for the Canton home invasion case because of the death of another witness and the refusal of a third witness, Andrea Freedman, to testify.
It was one of several convictions Turner was able to duck over the years, while his friend, Pappas, resorted to singing like a canary to break loose from the noose of criminal charges.

Their criminal journey reaches back to 1985. That year the pair were in Provincetown after the bars had closed. A young gay social worker from New Bedford, Steve Noon, offered Pappas and Turner a ride back to Braintree.

One of Noon’s friends told police he watched the three of them climb into a van. His body was discovered in the van on Route 3, his head bludgeoned by fierce blows. Police said although Turner was a chief suspect in the death, he was never charged.

Years later, Pappas introduced Turner to Merlino, who ran a major cocaine trafficking operation out of TRC Auto Electric Co. in Dorchester. Turner and Pappas picked up drugs in carburetor boxes and brought them to hotel rooms for distribution.
Before Pappas decided to cooperate with law enforcement about the Canton home invasion, he was thought to have information about the death of another Turner associate. Leonard DiMuzio was found dead in a car trunk in East Boston in 1990. Turner was questioned in that death, but never charged.

Turner is now jailed at the United States Penitentiary-Canaan in Pennsylvania for his involvement in a foiled robbery at an armored car depot in Easton in 1999. His release date is set for 2032. Turner has denied any involvment in the Gardner theft and believes he was framed by federal agents trying to bring the art thieves to justice.