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5 days ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Dugan Arnett
New Bedford Police Chief Paul Oliveira officially retired last week from the post he’d held since 2021, less than a year into a three-year contract extension, and just weeks after a Globe Spotlight Team series revealed deep problems in the department. Oliveira, 55, is due to receive more than $68,000 in unused vacation and sick time, according to figures provided by the city.
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1 month ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Dugan Arnett |Andrew Ryan
In a dramatic reversal, Bristol County prosecutors abruptly dismissed a long-running case Friday against an alleged drug trafficker after defense lawyers accused New Bedford police of dishonesty and misconduct with a confidential informant at the center of the case. The accused trafficker, Steven Ortiz, was arrested nearly eight years ago in the parking lot of a Fall River apartment complex, following a lengthy investigation by a multi-agency task force.
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1 month ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Jazmin Aguilera |Andrew Ryan |Dugan Arnett
When it comes to the war on drugs, you could say the police are addicted to confidential informants. That’s the conclusion of a new Boston Globe Spotlight investigation into the pervasive and shadowy world of this police practice that is widely used and barely regulated. The story starts in New Bedford Massachusetts, where use of informants has had dramatic consequences.
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2 months ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Dugan Arnett
“This is an auspicious occasion, because I’ve known this individual for a long time, and I’m fully confident that he is up to this job,” Mitchell told the crowd. The two had worked cases together years earlier, when Mitchell was a young prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Boston and Oliveira was climbing the ranks of New Bedford’s Police Department. Oliveira stood beside the mayor that afternoon, stoic.
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2 months ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Andrew Ryan |Dugan Arnett
Dozens of Massachusetts agencies — including two of the state’s 10 largest police departments, Brockton and Quincy — have no policy governing the use of informants, a fact that one criminal justice expert calls “insane.” More than three dozen departments in the state allow the use of unregistered informants, who are unvetted and go untracked.
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2 months ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Dugan Arnett |Andrew Ryan
Below deck, a handful of fishermen prepared for their journey. Some lay down to sleep. Shortly before 9:30, they heard pounding on the wheelhouse door. The stranger was dressed in black. His eyes were bloodshot. He had a pistol on his hip. He pushed his way into the cabin, barged into the bunk of a sleeping fisherman, and dug furiously through the man’s pockets. Jolted from sleep, the fisherman pushed and struggled to fight the intruder off.
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Jul 4, 2024 | 
bostonglobe.com | Dugan Arnett
The Bristol County District Attorney’s Office has dropped criminal charges against a New Bedford man accused of drug trafficking, a month after a judge excoriated a former New Bedford Police detective for “gross misconduct” involving his use of a purported confidential informant. The charges against Miguel Martinez, 46, were quietly dismissed last week during a hearing inside the Bristol County Superior Courthouse in Fall River.
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Feb 21, 2024 | 
bostonglobe.com | Dugan Arnett
The seventh-grader was naked in the photo “from head to toe.”Berner knew that his son — whose learning disabilities required special education assistance — could be susceptible to bullying, overly trusting and easily coerced. The family had been warned that the differences between the boy and his peers would grow more pronounced as he got older, and that those differences could make him a target. Still, a nude photo?
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Jan 15, 2024 | 
bostonglobe.com | Dana Gerber |Dugan Arnett
But in recent months, all of it started to slip away. It was, after all, a house of cards. The mansion had been bought almost entirely with borrowed money — a $3.8 million mortgage taken from its builder, not a traditional bank, and due in full in just two years. By 2021, unpaid interest and fines had grown, and Rick Kamal sought to restructure their mortgage. A foreclosure followed. Finally, last month, came the court order: The Kamals were to be evicted.
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Nov 8, 2023 | 
bostonglobe.com | Travis Andersen |Dugan Arnett
A New Bedford District Court judge has resigned “with regret” from the bench, according to a letter he recently sent to Governor Maura Healey. “With regret, and effective Friday, November 10, 2023, I am resigning from my position as an Associate Justice of the District Court,” Judge Douglas J. Darnbrough wrote in the two-line letter, a portion of which was redacted in the copy that Healey’s office provided to the Globe. The letter was dated Nov. 2.
