“'He was bad, bad news,' ex-detective says of Cinelli” |
| 'He was bad, bad news,' ex-detective says of Cinelli Posted: 31 Dec 2010 01:02 AM PST He recalls the slick, red-dyed hair, the New York Yankees shirt, even the smirk on Dominic Cinelli's face the last time he was arrested. Nate Lincoff, a retired investigator with the Suffolk County sheriff's department, knew the Cinelli who shot a security guard, robbed jewelry stores with a gun, and escaped from prison, and Lincoff never thought Cinelli could be rehabilitated. He also never thought he would be let out of prison. "He was bad, bad news,'' said Lincoff, who directed the criminal investigation division for the sheriff's office in 1986, when Cinelli briefly escaped. Lincoff has joined a chorus of outrage over the Massachusetts Parole Board's decision in 2008 to release Cinelli on parole while he was serving three concurrent sentences of 15 years to life for a history of armed robberies and assaults. On Sunday night, less than two years after his release from prison, where he had spent most of his adult life, Cinelli allegedly killed veteran Woburn police Officer John B. Maguire during an armed robbery of the Kohl's department store in Woburn. Cinelli, 57, was also killed during a shootout. "You can't measure how bad I feel for [the Maguire] family, that this guy was able to get out and do what he did,'' Lincoff said earlier this week. "How could this person get out of the system? Who let him out?'' Lincoff said that he understood the process of granting parole but that he would have spoken out against it in Cinelli's case, if he had known about a hearing. Lincoff was on a local law enforcement team that worked to track down Cinelli in 1986, after he had escaped from custody. Cinelli had been taken to Massachusetts General Hospital complaining of stomach aches after he pleaded guilty to a series of armed robberies and shooting a security guard. At one point, he pointed a fake gun that he had carved out of cardboard at a deputy sheriff and took his revolver. He fled the hospital, still wearing leg irons, and commandeered a car. Ten days after the escape, Lincoff learned that a Medford jewelry store had been robbed at gunpoint. As he had assumed, he said, it was Cinelli. A few hours after the robbery, Cinelli was tracked by law enforcement to The Corner Café in the North End. After his arrest, police found he had jewelry and a .22-caliber gun. "He was just waiting in the bar,'' Lincoff said. "I was expecting it was going to be a shootout, but it wasn't.'' Lincoff helped take Cinelli to prison in Walpole, calling it "one of the memorable days of my career in the sheriff's department.'' "I told Mr. Cinelli that he should make the best of his time while incarcerated, assuming that he was going to be held in prison until he was a very old man,'' he said. "He told me that I'd probably hear about him again.'' © Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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