Anthony Mazza, who served nearly 48 years in prison for the 1972 murder of a bank teller in Uphams Corner, is suing Boston, its police department, and some police officers who, he says, framed him for a bogus first-degree murder conviction in part because they hated gay men.

Mazza was released in 2020 when the Supreme Judicial Court - on his sixth appeal – ordered a new trial.  About a year later, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office dropped the charge against him. Last year, a Suffolk Superior Court judge formally expunged his conviction from court records.

Mazza was arrested following the death of Peter Armata, a Malden resident and the manager of the First National Bank branch in Uphams Corner, whose body police found tied up in a closet on the second floor of a house on Bowdoin Street at Downer Court on July 5, 1972.

In his suit, filed in US District Court in Boston, Mazza charges that investigators ignored evidence pointing to the killer being the man in whose apartment police found Armata - but that that man, initially charged with murder, managed to convince police that they should go after Mazza. 

Mazza charges that police withheld key evidence - including an interview in which that man’s brother contradicted his sibling and cleared Mazza. The suit alleges that police ignored other evidence pointing to the other man as the killer, including the fact that he was a violent man with a criminal record who had “bragged of robbing and killing the victim” to his lifelong friend, Mazza’s roommate at the time - even to the point of detailing how he strangled Armata.

The complaint also charges that police began making the case that Mazza was “queer,” had slept with a man and had gone to a bar known to be “a queer place” the night before the murder. Prosecutors brought all that up during his weeklong trial to prejudice the jury, the suit charges.

The complaint describes the effect of spending decades in prison for a crime you didn’t commit: “Mr. Mazza was in his early twenties, in the prime of his life, when he was wrongly convicted. Mr. Mazza’s whole life was turned upside down without any justification…In addition to the severe trauma of wrongful imprisonment and Mr. Mazza’s loss of liberty, defendants’ misconduct continues to cause Mr. Mazza extreme physical and psychological pain and suffering, humiliation, constant fear, anxiety, deep depression, despair, rage, and other physical and psychological effects.”

The suit seeks compensatory damages for malicious prosecution and violations of Mazza’s rights to due process and equal protection under the 4th and 14th Amendments and conspiracy to deprive Mazza of his constitutional rights by homicide detectives, the failure of their supervisors who knew what was happening to stop it, and the failure of the city of Boston to do anything about widespread and long-standing BPD policies to hide evidence from defendants.