My Dad, John Bunn, born Oct 1, 1906, had one son. That would be me. After many years of watching my family bounced from apartment to apartment, at no fault of ours, like the time the owner didn’t pay his bills so the bank tossed out us tenants, Dad decided it was time to buy us a family home. He worked hard, saved all his cash and didn’t believe in buying things on payments. This locked us down to what we could spend on a home. We knew a guy that lived in Holland Mass., living with the owner of 90 Maybrook Rd.
The home was owned by three brothers, one living on the property. He was not paying the taxes and the other two brothers wanted to sell the property. My Dad struck a deal with the brothers and paid cash for the house form his bank accounts. Traceable, legal cash. The house was never listed with any agency or real estate broker, it was straight up sold, and my family started moving in July of 1997. Looking back now, I can see where the Town of Holland might have thought that the house was bought with drug money because I am known as Captain Joint, and have been for years.
We lived in town and worked at Extra Mart for years after moving in. The house we bought sat on 6.43 acres across from the lake with a river in front of the house and the only bridge rights allowed on that side of the road.
There was undeveloped land on both sides of the property. The home was way too small, but we had applied for building permits to make it fit our needs almost as soon as we moved in. For some reason we ran into problem after problem with the town regarding the addition, and it was never finished.
On March 27, 2003 the property was raided by the Holland Police, then headed up by Chief Kevin P. Gleason. He was working with a Special Agent Scott E. Haley and the Eastern Hampton County Narcotics Task Force out of Palmer Mass. Scott E. Haley signed off on an affidavit that stated I sold marijuana from my home on three occasions to a C.I. #62. This was the basis of the warrant.
During the raid the police asked several times who owned the house, and were looking for deeds and house paperwork, items not illegal to own. They only searched half the home and stopped when my daughter Christena placed a call to me in the hospital telling me she was being raided. The police, after it was confirmed that I was in the hospital, stopped the search and left half the home untouched. As it turned out, I was in the hospital on all the days they claimed I was home selling pot, and this according to hospital documents.
The newspaper said (The Telegram & Gazette, Friday, April 4, 2003) in a press release from Chief Kevin P. Gleason, that I was arrested for possession of marijuana, and with intent to distribute, and violation of drug paraphernalia laws. I was never charged with any crime in connection with this raid. The newspaper also said that in an interview Gleason stated that, “about one quarter of a pound of marijuana was taken from the house…” The newspaper statement of one quarter of a pound does not match up with the report the police filed for evidence taken.
On Feb, 22, 2003 I had a letter to the editor published in the Telegram & Gazette about the Ed Rosenthal case titled, “Legalize Marijuana for Medical Uses.” It is not illegal to write a letter to the newspaper, yet Chief Kevin P. Gleason asked the newspaper for a copy of the letter for the affidavit he needed for the illegal raid on my house. He also used in the affidavit news clippings of demonstrations I had participated in, also not illegal. He counted the news clippings in the actual page count of the affidavit.
No charges were filed from the raid on anyone in the house until 11/09/2004, just over 20 months after the raid. My Wife Judy and my Daughter Christena were charged with simple possession, I was still not charged with any crime. We believe the charges were filed by someone in the Town of Holland Police Dept. that had no knowledge of the facts of the raid, and the charges were filed by mistake. If no charges are filed for three years after a police action of this nature, the victims of the raid have no recourse to sue due to the statue of limitations. Given all the facts in this case, why would the police even try to file charges. The Marijuana sales they swore to were lies; (perjury by police officers is a crime). If you pick the affidavit apart, the only reason in it to raid me were the three made up pot buys, nothing else they documented in the affidavit was illegal in any way and protected by the United States Constitution.
At first, due to all the language in the affidavit referring to my marijuana politics, it looked like the police had targeted me for my beliefs but now looking back, it is very clear this was an attempt to simply take my family’s land away in a drug raid.
Lets look at the facts here. If the police sent an informant into my home to buy pot, that informant would then turn the pot over to the cops as evidence, and it would be held and produced during the discovery portion of the legal proceedings. The C.I. #62 would be brought in to testify. This did not happen in this case because no pot was sold to a C.I. at any time from my home. No C.I. ever entered my home, and the police never did reveal who the C.I. #62 was in this case. I at one time named Michael Zelonis as the suspected C.I. #62 to try and force the hand of the police. Zelonis had been arrested on my property on Oct 30, 2002 while my Wife and I were at an Alice Cooper Concert at Foxwoods. We were allowing him to get wood off our property and didn’t know him too well. He was taken for 14 guns and drug charges. We felt he had reason to lie to the police, but was in jail when the made up buys took place. I have said all along there was no C.I., or someone was lying for the police.
The big question has been who is C.I. #62, and how does he play into this whole story…?
We tried to sue Holland and the cops for damages as we sold our property in Holland and moved to a church in Maine. The Town threw their best lawyers at us and beat us in court because you need a lot of money to fight a town, and it doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong if you can’t pay the legal bills.
We did get depositions on Haley and Gleason, both showing little to no correct police procedure in this case. Gleason stated under oath that he still had my marijuana in his desk drawer when the depositions were taken in 2007 and “didn’t know what to do with it.” I guess he never heard of a bic and a bong…?
Also revealed in the depositions as well as in letters between the lawyers and the D.A’s office of William M. Bennett was the fact that there was not a scrap of paperwork on a case with a six week investigation attached to it that ended in a SWAT RAID? The police however did have a 4 page police report on an alleged dog attack on a cat on the family property the day after the raid.
Just about the time I was ready to let this all go as a lost effort to ever see any justice done, along came a phone call from Dan Malley of Allegiant Investigations on July 26, 2010. He had questions for me about the Task Force, Agent Haley, and a few other things on the case. I told him as truthfully and as factually as I could my story and who I thought the C.I. #62 was, again naming Zelonis as the suspected C.I. #62.
Dan Malley has never worked for me, he was getting information on another case he was working on, one that is all over the news now (Molly Bish murder and Battistoni being named as a person of interest). He got back to me and told me Zelonis was not C.I. #62.
Dan Malley told me that he had uncovered in his investigation that C.I. #62 was Gerald Battistoni, and he was sending me a police mug shot to see if I could I.D. him as anyone I had ever seen. He asked me to sit on the information as it was part of a bigger case. He told me Gerald was charged with 6 counts of serial child rape. It had come up in a deposition that Gerald was C.I. #62, and Dan Malley in his investigation had seen my many blogs about the Palmer Police and C.I. #62 and he supplied me with the C.I.’s real name and face.
If you have been following the news, Gerald Battistoni, the man the police have used for an informant since the mid 1990’s, is now in jail for serial child rape, 10-12 years, and is being connected to two murders of young girls. The newspapers say that one of the bodies, Molly Bish, was dumped in the Whisky Hill area of Mass., where Battistoni was going to buy drugs. Special Agent Scott E. Haley claims ownership of C.I. #62 in the depositions taken for my case against the Town and the cops.
Best way to sum this up is the police were using a serial child rapist and killer to set up drug raids to seize property from people; it didn’t matter if they were breaking the law or not. The Chief of Police on this case, Kevin P. Gleason, has been compromised as a reliable witness. Do a Google search on him. He went to jail for too many crimes to list, but I will say the missing drugs and money from the Town of Holland evidence room and the 17 guns he bought on town tax dollars then sold illegally to his cop friends was the capper on him. The town threw up their hands and he did a plea deal and got two years. He only served three months and it seems a mystery as to where X-Chief Kevin P. Gleason is today. My bet is not working in law enforcement.
So far everything Dan Malley has told me has been true. Dan Malley also told me that the police were hiding the crimes of Gerald Battistoni because he was making them so much money in seized property. The State of Mass. may has to open up as many as 500 cases or more that the Eastern Hampton County Narcotics Task Force has been involved with. Time will tell if he is correct about that. Anyone that has been arrested by the Task Force since the mid 1990’s should have their lawyers take a look at their cases, and if C.I. #62 is on the paperwork. If so, victims should be thinking about re opening their cases and look into suing the cops.
This story is just now sorting itself out and there are other unsolved rape and sex crimes that may be the work of Gerald Battistoni, a/k/a Palmer Police Informant C.I. #62. He worked for the police since the “mid 1990’s“ and this according to information I got.
The first girl, Holly Piirainen, that Gerald Battistoni is suspected of killing, went missing in 1993. The Eastern Hampton County Narcotics Task Force has used Gerald as C.I.#62 since the mid 1990’s, and is suspected of hiding Gerald’s crimes to keep him on as a C.I….
Was the Task Force hiding the crime of the murder of a young girl? Did Molly Bish die at Gerald’s hands as a result of him being sent into her area by the police to work a drug case?
A lot of questions here to be answered by the police. As far as the Towns of Holland and Palmer Mass., and my claims against them, I am not done yet and all this new information should be enough to re open my case against them. I was falsely accused by the police of crimes, my family was harassed and chased out of town. My children couldn’t play with their friends in town because we were accused of being drug dealers publicly in the papers by the police, then re capped as the biggest drug bust in Holland in the New Years Eve Edition of the local newspaper. This “Drug Raid” they made up was totally illegal and I am still trying to have Special Agent Scott E. Haley charged with his crimes against my family. If I can find his buddy Chief (no more) Kevin P. Gleason, his perjury charges are still waiting for him. To all the people of the Town of Holland that baked him up on that bogus raid, shame on you. You got what you deserved with him as your Chief of Police. Live with your lies.
November 29, 2011, Dave Bunn, Captain Joint