Case Explained: Hampden DA wiretaps suspects far more than other prosecutors, records show – The Shoestring – Legal Perspective

Editor’s note: This investigation is a collaboration between The Shoestring and The Republican newspaper.

SPRINGFIELD — When it comes to listening in to private phone conversations to investigate crime, one district attorney’s office in the state relies on the tactic far more than others.

Compared to other prosecutors, the Hampden District Attorney’s Office consistently filed the most wiretap applications in the state from 2021 to 2024. That’s according to somewhat obscure reports that DA’s offices are required to file annually to the Statehouse. 

The reports — obtained from the state Legislature and through public records requests to individual DA’s offices — show that during those four years, Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni’s office submitted 83 wiretap applications to judges. Every other DA’s office in the state, together with the Office of the Attorney General, submitted a combined 86 applications during that same period. 

The practice of listening into someone’s phone calls without their knowledge is “probably the most invasive form of government surveillance,” said Kade Crockford, the director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. That’s a sentiment echoed by Maria Villegas Bravo, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research group in Washington, D.C. 

“Wiretapping supercharges any of the issues we would worry about,” Villegas Bravo said.

But compared to other states, the commonwealth’s wiretapping law is strict, she said. 

“Massachussetts is really one of the most progressive states when it comes to wiretapping laws,” she said. “It’s one of the most protective.”

That could change. Several legislators, including one from western Massachusetts, are attempting to loosen the law. Those are efforts the ACLU of Massachusetts opposes. Gulluni said he generally supports changes that would expand the situations in which prosecutors can tap into people’s phone calls.

“There’s a lot of aspects of it that don’t reflect modern technology, of course, and don’t reflect the ways in which investigators could leverage that technology to investigate violent crimes, murders — things of that nature outside of really just narcotics and organized crime,” he said. 

Last month, 2025 wiretapping data from the state’s 12 prosecutors’ offices started to trickle in. Although a complete picture is not yet available on the Legislature’s website, previous years’ trends appear to have held. The Hampden County DA’s office filed 29 applications for wiretaps in 2025. Several other DA’s offices reported no wiretaps last year, and the attorney general’s office reported two. Other reports are not yet available. 

When asked about the trend, Gulluni said he views wiretapping as an effective mechanism for combatting drug trafficking and gun violence in the region. 

“This is a tool we’re using lawfully to do the best work that we can to save lives and keep our community safe,” he said.

It’s a tool that prosecutors could use more frequently if the state’s wiretapping law was expanded. 

One western Massachusetts legislator is trying to update the law — enacted more than 50 years ago — to make it less strict and add to the list of crimes prosecutors can use wiretapping to investigate. That proposal, from state Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield, is one of several filed with the Statehouse that seek to make similar changes.

Under the current statute, law enforcement can listen to people’s phone calls or intercept their text messages, but a judge has to approve it first. In order to get that approval, prosecutors have to show that “normal” investigative techniques have been tried and failed, or are likely to fail if attempted.

Prosecutors in Massachusetts also have to prove that the alleged crime they’re investigating has a connection to organized crime before a judge will sign off on a wiretap. That’s a provision that Velis’ bill would drop for investigations of first-degree murder. Other legislation would expand even further the list of suspected offenses not required to be connected to organized crime. 

Though prosecutors could use the wiretap law to bug a home or car, the Hampden DA’s office has not done that, according to spokesperson Payton North.

Some, like Crockford, think the organized-crime component of the current law is important. 

“If lawmakers were to widen the application of the wiretap statute to a host of offenses that have nothing to do with organized criminal activity, it could open the door to inappropriate uses of the wiretap act for political or personally corrupt purposes, and that would be extremely dangerous to our democracy and our free society,” Crockford said.

Gulluni’s wiretapping has raised eyebrows for some, like defense attorney Vincent Bongiorni, who has practiced in Springfield for five decades and estimates he has dealt with more than 100 wiretapping cases. He said people don’t understand that wiretaps don’t just affect the subject of a police investigation, but also anyone innocent who might be communicating with the wiretapped person.

How Hampden County wiretaps

In Massachusetts in 2024, the most recent year with statewide data available, Gulluni’s office filed 23 wiretap applications — nearly double the second-most filed by the Berkshire County DA.

Those are just the initial applications for a wiretap warrant, however. If granted, those warrants are good for 15 days, but prosecutors can apply to renew them and, in the process, add additional phone numbers to the case. So in 2023, for example, Hampden prosecutors made 29 initial applications for wiretaps but ultimately ended up listening into 63 separate phone lines, according to the office’s report.

The office’s 23 applications in 2024 were part of three cases that each started smaller and then branched to more phone numbers, Gulluni said. 

The DA’s office has specialized technical wiretapping equipment, including computers and software, Gulluni said. “I don’t want to lay out too much of a playbook,” he said when asked how wiretapping works.

However, it’s difficult to track down complete information about the applications the Hampden DA’s office has made for wiretaps and the criminal cases that resulted from them.

Through a public records request, The Shoestring and The Republican asked the DA’s office for any documents tracking criminal cases using wiretaps. The DA’s office denied the request saying the only relevant record was an employee’s personal record, which is protected under the law. When The Shoestring and The Republican appealed that denial, the state agreed with Gulluni’s office. 

District attorneys’ wiretapping disclosures don’t always say how many people prosecutors charged with crimes as a result of the wiretapping. The Hampden County office’s 2023 report, though, says that prosecutors secured 94 indictments as a result of wiretapping that year, the vast majority of which were related to either the possession or sale of narcotics or conspiracy to commit murder. That came after making at least 309,780 “interceptions” that year, the report said. 

Geography is one reason why the office has a relatively high wiretap application number, Gulluni said. The Springfield region sits at the intersection of two major interstates connecting to New York City, Boston, and elsewhere. Gulluni has used wiretapping to tackle the region’s significant drug trade, he said.

“When I came in (to office), I decided that that was a way that we could most efficiently and effectively dismantle drug trafficking organizations that fueled the narcotics and addiction and overdose epidemics,” he said.

Gulluni said his office often investigates for months before seeking wiretap approval from a judge. 

“This notion that this is a ‘Big Brother’ thing and that surveillance is widespread,” he said, “that these wire investigations kind of happen quickly or without a lot involved, is just not true.”

He said he does understand public concern about wiretapping, though. “There is a tension, or balancing, between those privacy rights — the legitimate concerns around privacy rights — versus the government’s ability to keep people safe.”

District attorneys themselves have to sign off on a wiretapping petition — a rare requirement, Gulluni said. 

“I think it speaks to the fact that the Massachusetts Legislature, even many, many years ago in the late 60s, saw this as a serious incursion,” he said. “And there was some tension between the desire to protect privacy rights and the desire to equip law enforcement to make sure that the public is safe.”

He estimated at least 95% of the time, a wiretap leads to criminal charges. If someone is wiretapped and not charged with a crime, a district attorney has to notify them in a letter saying that they were targeted, Gulluni said. 

But that doesn’t always happen, some defense attorneys say.

Ashley Allen is a lawyer who has represented clients indicted based on wiretapping evidence. She said there are exemptions to that rule. As one example, prosecutors can claim notifying a wiretapping target would impair an ongoing investigation.

“There’s lots of people that don’t know that they’ve been wiretapped,” she said.

Last year, Allen filed a petition to the state’s top court that alleged prosecutors had wiretapped four defendants but, because the defendants had changed their phone numbers, the prosecutors never disclosed to a judge that they had previously wiretapped them.

Allen’s petition also alleged that Gulluni’s office has engaged in the “frequent and targeted use of wiretaps against Hispanic individuals,” describing that practice as “discriminatory” and infringing on privacy rights.

Ultimately, the Supreme Judicial Court denied that petition. Some of those cases are still playing out in Hampden Superior Court.

Gulluni denied those accusations.

“We never target communities or certain populations. We’re targeting criminal behavior,” Gulluni said. “It is often a blind process as well, where we just know phone numbers.”

The DA’s office does not keep data on race and ethnicity for cases, he added. 

“Whatever the ethnic breakdown is,” Gulluni said of wiretapping, “we’re targeting the activity, not the community or not the person.”

But Bongiorni, the Springfield lawyer, said that there is a pattern: a “substantial majority” of the many clients he has represented in wiretapping cases over his career as a defense attorney have been Hispanic. 

Bongiorni didn’t want to speculate as to why Gulluni’s office has filed as many wiretap applications as it has in recent years. But he found the difference “glaring.” 

Bongiorni explained that before law enforcement applies for a wiretap, they typically begin with a “softer mode of electronic surveillance” that is possible with today’s technology: GPS tracking on a subject’s car, a camera outside their residence, and geolocation pings from their cell phones, for example. Given that reality, he questions how well the 1968 statute protects people from electronic surveillance today. 

“I can’t think of one instance in 50 years where a judge has denied a wiretap application,” Bongiorni said.

Proposed changes

Under current law, wiretapping can be used only when investigating “organized crime” and for specific suspected offenses. Some think that’s too restrictive.

“This is an extraordinarily limiting set of rules and circumstances,” said state Sen. Michael Moore, D-Worcester, at a September legislative hearing. “And they very often prevent the investigation and prosecution of many serious crimes that fall outside the definition, such as hate crimes, civil rights violations, and illegal firearms trafficking.” 

Moore has filed legislation that would loosen those restrictions. 

Another bill filed by state Sen. Bruce Tarr, R-Gloucester, seeks to expand the list of suspected offenses that don’t need to be connected to organized crime to include murder, manslaughter, rape, some civil rights violations, and drug trafficking.

Velis, the state senator from Westfield, filed legislation that would expand the crimes covered by the wiretap law to include gun-related crimes. It would also remove the requirement that organized crime be involved in investigations of first-degree murder. 

“Our wiretap statute was created decades ago with the narrow intent of combating organized criminal enterprises,” Velis said in written testimony submitted to the Legislature. “At that time, lawmakers could not have anticipated the evolving threats we face today — particularly the devastating rise in acts of gun violence and homicides carried out by individuals or loosely affiliated groups outside of traditional organized crime networks.”

Velis was not available for an interview in early 2026 because he’s deployed with the National Guard, his office said. 

Others are skeptical of the proposed changes. 

Groups including the ACLU of Massachusetts testified against some of the proposed legislation, arguing that the current wiretapping law’s restrictions are important. 

“We today live in a golden era of surveillance,” said Crockford, the ACLU technology expert, who explained that police have widespread access to cell phone data, license plate readers, surveillance cameras, facial recognition software, and many more digital records about the people they’re investigating.

“The crisis that we face right now is not a crisis born from police and prosecutors having not enough access to our private information,” Crockford said. “It is, in fact, that they have far too much access, too easily in too many scenarios, and that our laws ought to better protect our privacy instead of further eroding it.”

It’s far from the first time lawmakers and law enforcement officials have proposed changes to broaden when wiretaps can be used. To date, however, no legislative reforms have been successful. 

When Gov. Maura Healey was the state’s attorney general, she supported a similar bill that would have made it easier to wiretap, like removing the requirement for activity to be connected to organized crime.  

“Not only is this an effort to update and modernize the law,” State House News Service reported Healey saying in 2017. “It’s also a recognition of what our Supreme Judicial Court has signaled for a while now … that the nature and the structure and the shape of criminal activity and organized criminal enterprises has changed over time. And we need the tools in law enforcement to be able to confront that.”

Since taking over as governor, it doesn’t appear that it’s been an issue Healey has worked on. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.