BREWSTER, Mass.

LIKE ANY organization around the world with a tenuous grip on the heartstrings of its sponsors, our FBI tries to keep a pretty low profile, except when it can’t.

Case in point is the recent murder trial in Miami, where the Boston office of the FBI has outsourced its John Connolly problem. Now 68, Connolly is already in jail on a sentence for second-degree murder and is now fighting a second conviction on similar charges for other murders committed by his compatriots in the Boston underworld, Whitey Bulger, Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi & Co.

Because the murder in question (of John Callahan) happened in Florida, the Connolly problem went with it — away, but not far enough away to avoid further exposure of this lethal and long-running mix of mobsters and Feds who danced in the shadows for far too long, and finally left too many corpses for no one to notice.

From the AP, we heard this on behalf of the accused, whose memories of summers and weekends in Chatham — the boats, the dinners out, the beach — must now seem as distant and illusory as the Northern Lights:

“We can in good faith say he shouldn’t get more than John Martorano got,” Connolly’s lawyer, Manuel L. Casabielle, said about a deal that let Martorano, the Manny Ramirez of Boston mob hitmen, walk free after only 12 years, despite 20 admitted killings over his professional career.

It wouldn’t be fair, they were saying, to penalize Connolly, the guy with the badge and the gun and the coif and the pinkie ring, for the deaths he caused, more than Martorano, for the deaths he caused. After all, the argument went, Connolly only told the gangsters who needed shooting and why. He didn’t shoot them.

“The position of the state attorney is that a corrupt law-enforcement official deserves to serve the maximum punishment as allowed because they take advantage of the public trust and they violate it,” said Miami-Dade Assistant State Atty. Michael Von Zamft, who, praise the lord, is state attorney in a state other than Massachusetts.

With all due respect, what has Boston done to rid itself of the cloud of corruption that has been camped over it since about . . . Ted Williams? Besides this penny-ante stuff with, say, the local pols in Boston and their various pay-to-play scams, the answer is pretty much nothing.

Getting Miami involved should be seen as a start, for if people claim an end to the deadly alliance of organized crime and organized law in Massachusetts, they are as delusional as John Connolly hoping to see the sun rise over North Beach ever again. This doesn’t start or end with John Connolly. It starts at the top and flows down to the cop on the corner.

What is surprising about all this Connolly business is not that it happened — that a special agent with Harvard and Bulger credentials and a brother-in-law-next-door-neighbor-in-the-“family” could have gone native, as they say. What is surprising is that so much attention is focused on him, Martorano, Bulger and those guys, and virtually none on the agent’s former colleagues and his enablers at the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts and other such seats of power.

It’s a pretty stellar cast of characters that has receded into the woodwork here, starting with the senators and their legislative chorus and running through several former U.S. attorneys in Boston. Some had their reputations sullied, but among those who managed to survive unscathed in Connolly’s wake are the current occupant, Michael Sullivan, and predecessors Robert Mueller (now the FBI director), former Gov. William Weld and current federal judge Edward Harrington.

With Weld having moved to New York, Mueller having been promoted to Washington and Sullivan stuck in limbo between the Boston office and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, it fell to Harrington, now a federal judge, to return to his already controversial genuflection to the convicted agent, sticking with Connolly just as his own sponsor, Sen. Edward Kennedy, had stuck with Harrington 20 years earlier in tumultuous confirmation hearings before the Senate.

Suffice it to say, without going Google or anything, Harrington’s performance in Miami was predictably lame. We couldn’t have busted up the Italian mob without John Connolly, he told another judge, to little apparent effect.

In terms of politics and families and favors and ever-lasting bonds, Ed Harrington is Ted’s guy, which makes him Sen. John Kerry’s guy, too, and all the rest who play the game at that level. But what difference does that make now, since Harrington is a federal judge, Ted is hurting, and John Connolly has gone from being a featured guest on Top Cops, the short-lived Sonny Grosso series, to a guy with a story to tell and a captive audience to hear it?

His sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 15.

As for Sullivan, the current Boston U.S. attorney and acting director of ATF&E, he is getting blitzed these days from so many sides, you wonder how long he will have at the public trough in the post-Bush era.

There was this, on his fairly recent appointment to the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston of a hack named Kenneth Shine, in a piece by Joe Keohane in Boston Magazine: “So, why Shine? One reason might be that, according to the Dukes County Registry of Deeds, Shine co-owns a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard with Sullivan. It’s further worth noting that the other part-owner of that property is Sullivan’s longtime friend District Court Judge James McGovern, also of Plymouth County. If that name rings a bell, it’s because early in Sullivan’s tenure, he created an assistant U.S. attorney/senior policy-adviser job for McGovern, who worked at the office from 2002 to 2006 before returning to the bench.”

Good stuff. Here’s more: “In 2004, two federal judges offered rare public rebukes of Sullivan’s tactics. U.S. District Court Judge Mark Wolf castigated Sullivan for tying up the courts with penny-ante street-crime cases, and U.S. District Court Judge William Young hammered Sullivan’s office for evincing ‘a moral code more suited to the alleys of Baghdad than the streets of Boston’ and adopting a mindset that ‘reveals such callous indifference to innocent human life as would gag any fair-minded observer.’ ”

And people around here complain about their local prosecutors, politically hard-wired pols like Barnstable County District Atty. Michael O’Keefe, who is also Ted’s guy, and who is pressing gun charges and threatening jail for his No. 1 critic, the author Peter Manso, even as he fumbles with his own missing-and-belatedly-reported-stolen-snub-nose-special problem.

Oh, well, it is what it is. A new day dawns. There is no need to dredge up all sorts of old wounds. Time will take care of all of this. That has to be the answer, right?

Jeff Blanchard, formerly of CBS News, is an occasional contributor who lives in Brewster and contributes to capecodgrapevine.com.