There are only three possible ways to describe the top brass of the Massachusetts State Police and the Executive Office of Public Safety (EOPS).
Very incompetent, very corrupt, or both.
I’m going with both.
The latest news is that two more State Police superior officers were booted down the stairs late Friday afternoon, one step ahead of multiple posses.
So long, it’s been good to know you Major Susan Anderson and Lt. Col. Dan Risteen. Let’s discuss Risteen first. He’s thisclose to suspended trooper Leigha Genduso, an admitted drug abuser, drug dealer, money launderer and perjurer who last year made $151,000 in the MSP’s K-9 unit. I’ll bet her hound was great at sniffing out hidden drugs.
(By the way, Trooper Genduso told the federal court under oath in 2007 that during her years dealing drugs, her favorite concealment technique was to gift-wrap the weed, in case she was stopped on her way to Worcester by “law enforcements,” as she called cops. She also admitted that she had taken the Fifth Amendment before a federal grand jury to avoid “perjurizing” herself. Whatever La Genduso’s other attractions to her various drug-kingpin and top-cop boyfriends over the years, they don’t include her scintillating intellect.)
Genduso passed not one but two State Police background checks, and even after word of her devastating admissions in her boyfriend’s 2007 federal drug case surfaced Monday on turtleboysports.com, she was still collecting a state paycheck until Friday. See what I mean about corruption?
On Friday morning, as I was gathering material for this column, I emailed a number of questions to the EOPS, which has control of the State Police. My last question:
“Finally, has Lt. Col. Daniel Risteen filed retirement papers yet?”
That was at 10:22 Friday morning. At 2:56 p.m., the EOPS flack replied by tersely answering a couple of my questions.
“Your other questions,” he said, “relate to either pending lawsuits or investigations, so I respectfully decline to comment on those.”
An hour or so later, Risteen put in his papers. Am I prescient or what?
The other scandal involves Alli Bibaud, the daughter of a hack state judge who when arrested for OUI last fall admitted to honest troopers that she was both a junkie and a prostitute. She is also a one-time employee of the Worcester County district attorney, like her father the judge, the then-head of the state police, Richard McKeon (since “retired”), the state secretary of public safety, Daniel Bennett, and at least one of his top deputies, Jennifer Queally, although Bennett is dummying up about how wired his office is to the Worcester County DA. I guess the Worcester hackerama is part of the investigations.
After the Worcester-ized brass got word that the judge of their hack judge pal had been lugged, they threatened to discipline or even fire the honest troopers who made the pinch.
So now those staties are suing all the hacks in federal court. The MSP superior officer who directly told the troopers to unlawfully alter the reports to protect the hack judge’s junkie-prostitute daughter was the aforementioned Anderson, who like Risteen took the pipe Friday evening.
Anderson is a central figure in the Judgegate scandal. According to the troopers’ lawyer, Lenny Kesten, both troopers and their union rep will testify that Anderson told them that the orders to illegally change the arrest report came directly from Secretary Bennett.
Here’s what the honest troopers wrote about their now-former boss in one recent court filing:
“Major Anderson… gave the plaintiff a direct order to commit and participate in multiple felonies, as part of an overarching and far-reaching conspiracy that Major Anderson told the plaintiff extended to… the Secretary of Public Safety of the Commonwealth.”
I was thinking about that accusation against last month when I and 400,000 other firearms license- holders in the Commonwealth got threatening letters from this same Bennett “RE: Notice of Legislation Prohibiting Bump Stocks and Trigger Cranks.”
Basically, this career hack was demanding that law-abiding gun owners hand over these newly prohibited firearm enhancers to the State Police “for destruction. Retention of such a prohibited item beyond the 90-day grace period will expose the owner to criminal prosecution.”
You know, I’ve been jammed up a few times over the years. But unlike the payroll patriot who signed that letter threatening me, I have never, ever been accused in a court filing of “participating in multiple felonies, as part of an overarching and far-reaching conspiracy.”
One of my questions for Bennett Friday was whether it is even remotely appropriate for someone in his current legal predicament to be threatening law-abiding citizens.
He refused to answer.