Something is rotten in the Charlie Baker administration – rotten to the core.
Almost daily there’s a new scandal bubbling up to the surface in the cesspool of corruption that is Tall Deval’s Executive Office of Public Safety, which oversees the thoroughly disgraced Massachusetts State Police.
Yesterday’s scandal was the indictment of three greed-crazed state troopers from the now-defunct Troop E – by the feds, of course, because the state attorney general was probably too busy drafting her next frivolous lawsuit against Donald Trump.
The day before, it was F Troop stonewalling on the release of the report about the incident involving Tall Deval’s son, A.J. “Gropey” Baker, on Jet Blue Flight 1354 last week – a wise move on F Troop’s part, considering it’s up to Tall Deval to decide whether to end that mob’s phony-baloney $350,000-a-year jobs at Logan Airport.
Then there was the State Police payroll clerk pleading guilty in Framingham to stealing $23,000 – and getting no jail time, not one day. Hmmmm, do you suppose this woman knows where the bodies are buried, and who buried them?
Can you imagine what a State Police payroll supervisor could have told the G-men if she’d started chirping to keep herself out of MCI-Framingham?
Meanwhile, day after day, Tall Deval does his best Sgt. Schultz impression. He knows nothing!
His lieutenant governor is doing selfies with a cocktail waitress who cops to perjury, income tax evasion, drug dealing and money laundering and still gets hired by the State Police? I know nothing!
His secretary of public safety is on the phone continuously with the bent district attorney of Worcester County as the fix is being put in for the drunk-driving junkie daughter of a hack judge? I know nothing!
The Senate president is forced to resign in a sordid sex scandal, the House speaker is an unindicted coconspirator and the attorney general is accused of committing a “fraud upon the court” by a judge investigating the framing of defendants in drug cases. And what does Tall Deval say?
I know nothing!
The latest MSP scandal is all about kleptomania. Veteran troopers on the now-disbanded Troop E on the Turnpike are indicted for stealing – “the kind of rot that tends to spread,” as US Attorney Andrew Leilling put it yesterday.
Rot is exactly what it is. In 2016, these three allegedly bent troopers made, respectively, $230,123, $227,826 and $163,533. And yet they are charged with claiming overtime they didn’t work, at the rate of $75 an hour.
I spoke last night to retired MSP Maj. Dennis Galvin, a 29-year veteran who went on the job in 1974. Living in the barracks had only ended two years earlier, and a trooper’s starting pay, he recalled, was about $12,000.
Twelve grand a year! In 1978, when Mike Dukakis was running for reelection as governor, the wives picketed his events, demanding a living wage for their husbands. And yet, even though the troopers were making next to nothing, there was practically no corruption, certainly not at the level of, say, the Boston FBI office.
In 1992, in one of those “reforms” that backfired, the staties were merged with the corrupt MDC police as well as the Registry cops. Now the colonel would be directly appointed by the governor. Can someone say hackerama?
The three rules of life at the State House became the three rules of life for the MSP.
1) Nothing on the level. 2) Everything is a deal. 3) No deal too small.
It’s sad what has happened. I remember the late Lt. Col. Jack O’Donovan. Myles Connor shot him once while trying to escape. O’D, as he was called, was almost forced to retire by certain parties at the State House after he had the audacity to plant a bug into Whitey Bulger’s garage in the West End. O’D was an honest cop, therefore he had to be eliminated, one way or another.
That was the Massachusetts State Police then. They’ve gone from Jack O’Donovan to Leigha Genduso. And Charlie Baker, who claims to be a hands-on micromanager, has only one thing to say about the terrible decline and fall of the largest, proudest police force in New England.
I know nothing!