Finally, after four years and nearly thirty broadcast reports, Boston television reporter Dan Rea was not the only journalist dogging the story. On a chilly morning this March, twelve cameras stood side by side in the parking lot of a Massachusetts prison, awaiting Joe Salvati. At sixty-three, Salvati was about to walk out after serving thirty years of a life sentence for his conviction in an organized-crime murder.

Back in 1967 Salvati, from Boston's North End, had said that he couldn't remember where he had been the night Edward "Teddy" Deegan was murdered two years earlier. But he said he was innocent, and Rea, forty-eight, a lawyer and an award-winning reporter, believed him. "I put my career on the line," Rea says.

Rea's pit-bull grip and extensive reporting on the story since May 1993 led to Governor William Weld's recommendation last December that Salvati's sentence be commuted. Before that, Rea had little competition from his colleagues in the media. In 1994, a long Boston Globe feature questioned Rea's relentless pursuit of his "mission impossible." The article came after the district attorney sent a scathing letter to WBZ-TV, Rea's employer, accusing him of irresponsible advocacy journalism.

Rea's first report on Salvati aired on May 17, 1993. In a dingy alley in Chelsea, a town just north of Boston, Rea recounted the bare facts: in 1965 there was a mafia hit "right here in this Chelsea alley." In 1967, Rea reported, a notorious killer and loan shark named Joe "The Animal" Barboza entered the Federal Witness Protection Program and confessed to having engineered the Deegan murder with several criminal accomplices. His testimony convicted Salvati, who owed money to Barboza, and five other men.

Rea came to the story when he met Victor Garo, a gruff-talking lawyer who had represented Salvati pro bono for seventeen years. In 1989, Garo had obtained -- he won't say how -- a long-suppressed 1965 police report written right after the Deegan murder. It revealed that an informant had named Barboza and others, including a mobster named Vincent Flemmi, as the probable conspirators.

Before the murder a Chelsea policeman had noticed Barboza and others -- including a bald man in the back seat -- in a car parked near the alley. Barboza, Rea reported, had apparently lied to investigators, telling them that Salvati, his loan shark customer, had been the "bald" man. But Rea showed viewers a picture of thick-haired Salvati and a photograph of the now-deceased Flemmi, Barboza's friend, who, as Rea put it, "was as bald as a cue ball."

Rea's broadcasts brought new witnesses forward. One of them, a Yale Law School professor named Stephen Duke, produced an affidavit by a former client who had shared a prison cell with Barboza. The client said he had heard Barboza "claim with pride that he had given Salvati the 'long dry death.'"

Governor Weld decided to recommend -- based on a review of the case -- that his statutory advisory council vote to commute Salvati's sentence. Weld, a patrician intellectual who neither watches a television nor owns one, saw none of Rea's broadcasts, says Virginia Buckingham, his chief of staff. But Rea "obviously kept the issue on the front burner both for the public and the government," she adds. "Dan's a pro, he doesn't have an ax to grind."

On February 5, the Governor's Council voted unanimously for commutation (which does not erase the conviction, but allows release on parole). Salvati was released on the morning of March 20.

Dominating Dan Rea's evening reports was a tape of Salvati happily walking through the old neighborhood and getting a haircut, a free man.

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