What are the odds that A.J. “Gropey” Baker is going to beat this rap?
Not great, would be my call. The best the Gropester can hope for this time is the traditional CWOF – Continued Without A Finding.
Gropey is 29 years old. He’s not exactly a kid anymore. There are a lot of advantages to growing up with a silver spoon in your mouth.
But damn, shouldn’t some of his fellow blue bloods on the polo team or at the yacht club have filled him in on what the rest of us learned at a very early age?
Never, ever take the Breathalyzer.
Eat the six-month license suspension and just use Uber. Geoff Diehl could use the work, as much money as he owes on his pathetic failed campaign for governor.
Instead, Gropey went back to the barracks in Danvers and blew a 0.152. The legal limit, of course, is .08. I thought kids learned this while studying for the MCAS test. They certainly should.
What the kid blew was what the wise guys term the Double Bubble. And that means Double Bubble Trouble.
To get the conviction, the cops need chemical evidence. You can fail the Sidewalk Olympics (Gropey did) but your mouthpiece can still claim… medication, or something.
But the bigger problem for Gropey is who his father is. Forget that ridiculous poll last week, the governor known as “Charlie Parker” remains one of the most despised figures in Massachusetts.
I know this because on Mother’s Day, as news about the Saturday-night arrest started leaking out, my phone exploded. I got the tip from people I hadn’t heard from in years. They were all calling from phones with no numbers on them, and the callers ended every sentence with, “Sir.”
As in, “Have you heard the news, sir?”
Many of these guys I got to know when Charlie Parker was the boss of the State Police. He was the governor who tried to make sure that all the bad guys on MSP didn’t lose their pensions, even if they embezzled federal funds or sold guns.
Simultaneously, Tall Deval gleefully ordered the firing every trooper who refused the insane Panic vaccine that in many cases a) didn’t protect you, or b) destroyed your health.
Do you remember how Charlie’s jackbooted thugs raided the houses of K-9 troopers and grabbed their dogs – which in addition to being police dogs are also the family pets for the troopers’ families?
The kids would be screaming and yelling as their pets were dragged away and thrown into a kennel in Acton, but hey, what did Parker et al. care? How dare they refuse to comply with his lunatic fits of pique.
Then there was the anti-vax trooper who was an actual Sunday school teacher, not to mention a combat vet. He went to the academy in New Braintree for a day of continuing education. The brass pulled him out of class, humiliated him in front of his fellow cops by stripping him of his uniform, badge and gun. They even grabbed his cruiser.
They left him stranded in the middle of nowhere, which is where New Braintree is.
And the supercilious bastard who fired this super straight-arrow Sunday school teacher – well, you might want to check the district court records about him out in western Mass. But not on a full stomach.
These kinds of outrages are hard to forget. You know, if a politician raises a fee on you, or makes your street one-way, you can maybe eventually forgive him.
But if they destroy your life, the way Charlie Parker did to so many of these guys, you tend to hold a grudge. Am I right, sir?
Gropey Baker should have understood that. Another thing you learn on the street, if not at the kinds of cotillions Gropey no doubt frequents, is that you have to be able to read the room.
It’s never a good thing to drive drunk, obviously. But damn, Gropey, you certainly don’t want to get out onto a highway patrolled by people your daddy was putting the screws to over absolutely nothing, seemingly forever.
Not of course all of them. Only the good ones. If you were a bent cop, Charlie was your best friend. And of course the reason why was that the State Police F Troop had the unexpurgated report on Gropey’s first little problem, on the Jet Blue flight to Logan from D.C. back in 2017.
Remember how that one played out? The district attorney of Suffolk County, Dan Conley, booted the groping case over to the US attorney’s office, where it vanished forever.
Then Conley quit as prosecutor and became a lobbyist. The Panic began and everything was shut down by Charlie Parker. The golf courses hired Conley as their lobbyists and suddenly Charlie Parker allowed them to reopen. Fore!
Miniature golf courses remained shuttered, ditto driving ranges and of course every church, gym, barber shop etc. in the Commonwealth was likewise bleep out of luck.
But golf courses were open, per order Charlie Parker.
The trooper who lugged Gropey Saturday night was Kyle A. Holmes #4528. I call him “Sherlock” Holmes, and here he describes his initial encounter with the wayward tosspot:
“I approached BAKER who was sitting on the guardrail outside his vehicle. I asked BAKER where he was coming from and he stated Salem where he was golfing.”
Irony, anyone?
I understand that you shouldn’t hold the sins of the father against the child. But you also shouldn’t fire people for not wanting to kill themselves with an untested vaccine against a virus that had a 99.6 percent survival rate.
They say that bad news goes around the world in the morning while good news is still putting its pants on. So true, as Gropey Baker found out again on Mother’s Day.
Am I correct, sir?