Whatever happened to Operation Squeeze?
That was the Boston Police Department called its periodic crackdowns on street prostitution. The BPD ran various Operation Squeezes for close to 25 years, from 1992 until about 2015. At least that was the most recent reference I could find online to one of the weekend roundups.
Operation Squeeze took place in what seems like a vanished world, a thousand years ago. Back then, the arrested johns were ashamed of themselves – which was the whole point of the operation, after all. To discourage prostitution, for all sorts of reasons.
The thought of contesting an Operation Squeeze pinch would have been unthinkable.
By that I mean, none of the hundreds of johns who were rounded up by the Boston cops over the years ever appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC). Most of them didn’t even hire lawyers.
They just sheepishly appeared alone at the BMC on Monday morning and tried to mumble their way through the hearing, and not run into any reporters or TV crews looking to humiliate them.
I used to get an occasional column out of Operation Squeeze. Sometimes, I would follow the johns out of the courtroom and hit them with questions as they waited for the interminably slow elevators at the courthouse in Pemberton Square.
Occasionally I would have a TV cameraman with me.
“You told the judge you got ‘lost?’” I would ask them, with a smirk. “So you asked the first woman you saw in a micro mini-skirt standing on the corner in the Combat Zone near the Naked Eye for directions?”
Sometimes, I would make them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Would you like to come on my radio show this evening to discuss this terrible misunderstanding? That’s one option. Your other option is that if you won’t be interviewed, I may have to read your name on the air, and your hometown.
But if you agree to come on, I’ll just call you “Mr. X….”
I could usually close that deal. I remember one time, one of the johns was a 90-year-old guy. That column got a tease off the front page – “90-year-old john” probably moved more than a few papers off the newsstands.
Now we have this case before the SJC, where 18 johns – they prefer to be called, collectively, John Doe – are trying to keep their names from being revealed publicly in court.
This isn’t an exact reprise of the old Operation Squeeze. For one thing, this recent bust was in Middlesex County – Cambridge and Watertown. And it wasn’t street prostitution – these guys were patronizing high-end brothels. No $20 bills here, these guys were using credit cards.
Like everything else in Massachusetts crime, this bust was basically a federal operation. There was no interest in actual law enforcement by actual local laws. There never is, and the problem extends far beyond Norfolk County.
Last November, when acting U.S. attorney Josh Levy announced the charges against the three “operators,” he noted that the johns included “a wide array of buyers.”
Meaning, Levy said, “politicians, high tech and pharmaceutical executives, doctors, military officers, government contractors that possess security clearances, professors, lawyers, scientists and accountants.”
In other words, they all have big bucks. They’re Beautiful People. Democrats, most likely. The enterprise included another whorehouse, in northern Virginia, and you can be sure there’s an even higher percentage of Democrats among the johns down there.
The Virginia operation was in a county with a George Soros-affiliated prosecutor. Obviously, Soros’ stooges have no interest in busting rich Democrats because… professional courtesy. The Republican state attorney general, I’m told, was willing to go forward.
But it’s a local, not a state crime.
Here, the Cambridge police wanted to press local charges against the johns, which would mean release of the names. So the johns all hired private lawyers to keep the hearings closed. They are terrified, apparently, of being exposed, although by the very nature of the charges, at some point they weren’t all that worried about… exposing themselves.
As one of John Doe’s lawyers told the SJC, if they’re named, even in the probable-cause hearings, “It’s common sense that they will undoubtedly lose their jobs, lose their professions, and that their lives will be ripped apart.”
So what? All those guys who were busted in Operation Squeeze – whether in the old Combat Zone, or Chinatown, or Fields Corner or on Blue Hill Avenue – they probably had to endure some bad times at home from the little woman.
For dinner, hot tongue and cold shoulder.
But now, in 2024, the johns consider themselves… victims. That’s how much things have changed – actually, fallen apart – in about 30 years.
Nowadays the perps have no shame – zero.
The other difference is, in 1992, most of the johns would have realized, well, I did do wrong, and it’s gonna be embarrassing, but I can’t expect to be treated any differently than all the ham-and-eggers getting bagged in Operation Squeeze.
Now, however, the Beautiful People just assume they will be treated differently, with kid gloves. Rich Democrats not only accept, they celebrate the two-tier system of justice in America, meaning one set of rules for people who work for a living, and no rules whatsoever for, for lack of a better term, Democrats.
Think about it. If you’re a Deplorable involved in Jan. 6 or at a prayer vigil outside an abortion clinic, pack your toothbrush before sentencing, ‘cause you’re going away for a good long stretch.
If, on the other hand, you looted and committed arson and shot at police cars in the BLM and antifa riots of 2020, absolutely nothing happened to you.
This is why the 18 John Does are willing to go to the mat to protect themselves. Why should they be made examples of, when nobody else at the yachting regattas or the polo clubs ever gets lugged?
Another lawyer for one of the horny rich dudes told the SJC that while he theoretically understands the need for “transparency” – meaning equal treatment – if everything was opened up, “The system would stop functioning.”
In other words, if a rich degenerate is allowed to be humiliated in Cambridge, who’s next? Pretty soon, a cop won’t be able to murder somebody in Canton and get away with it.
It’s a slippery slope, you might say, which leads me to another thought.
Sometimes slippery slopes aren’t so bad.