Meet Boston’s bloodstained blackface bank bandit — Joseph Gerard Rachal.
He’s not Black, but he’s back, or soon will be. He’s back and he’s proud – a federal judge in Boston just cut the murdering career criminal loose from federal prison on account of, you guessed it, the virus.
Wearing blackface is verboten these days, so you would assume that it would be even more unacceptable for a white career criminal to wear a black mask while robbing a bank, so that the Boston cops’ first post-heist be-on-the-lookout bulletin was for “a short black male, dark skin.”
But no, Rachal gets to finish the last 31 months of his sentence in the comfort of his own home.
According to the Bureau of Prisons, Inmate #99200-038 was released on Wednesday, despite his bloodstained half-century of crime, topped off by his minstrel turn in Brighton Center.
It’s just amazing, how some obscure people get destroyed for wearing blackface, but others, such as Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, Jimmy Kimmel, Howard Stern and Joy Behar, suffer zero consequences for offending the woke mob.
I guess Joseph G. Rachal must be a moonbat Democrat.
Rachal is 68, and his criminal record dates back to 1965. At age 16, while stealing a car in Brookline, he gunned down a new college graduate. Rachal’s rap sheet also includes, among other things, two escapes from custody, an armed robbery committed while on weekend furlough, an OUI, possession of Class B controlled substances, etc., etc.
And most recently, Rachal robbed the TD Bank branch on Market Street back in 2015 while pretending to be Black.
Is Rachal now canceled? No, the only thing that’s been canceled for Rachal is his prison sentence for that 2015 bank robbery.
U.S. District Court Judge Nathaniel Gorton this week ordered the release of the archfiend from federal prison to finish the last 31 months of his sentence at home. Because, you see, he has high blood pressure, and he tested positive for, you guessed it, COVID-19.
Doesn’t have it, exactly, just “tested positive.” Consider this scam Rachal’s third escape from jail.
He was at the Club Fed in Butner, N.C. — a lockup that has been home to Bernie Madoff and, earlier, another Boston career criminal by the name of (former House Speaker) Sal DiMasi.
The prison told Judge Gorton that there was no need to release this stone killer, that his hypertension was “well-controlled” and that the virus isn’t a big problem down there.
But Gorton quickly approved the thug’s “Emergency Motion for Compassionate Release.”
It’s a puzzling decision, because less than three years ago, at Rachal’s sentencing on the Brighton heist, Gorton brushed off the hood’s plea for mercy. Rachal claimed he was a junkie — stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Here’s Judge Gorton to Rachal:
“Neither your age nor your addiction to opiates provides a significant excuse for not imposing a very significant prison sentence.”
But now it does, apparently. Has everybody in the world lost their minds?
The 22-year-old man murdered by Rachal at age 16 was named Walter Howe. Howe had just graduated from Northeastern, had a job lined up and was engaged to be married. He spotted Rachal and a couple of other East Boston punks stealing a car on Park Drive, and gave chase.
Rachal shot him down in cold blood.
Before Rachal was sentenced to 101 months for the bank robbery in 2017, the federal prosecutor, Kenneth Shine, spoke to Howe’s brother, who is now 77. Shine quoted the victim’s sibling:
“Every day I think about my brother and the life he would have lived had Mr. Rachal not decided to put a bullet in his chest. And this was over a car. I think it was a Pontiac Gran Torino or some insignificant car.”
Fast forward to Rachal’s most recent crime, the blackface bank job. As Shine explained to the judge:
“He wore a mask in an attempt to throw the police off, that he was a Black male, and we heard testimony of that. He wanted the police to stop the first Black male or a Black male that fit the description walking down the street. That’s offensive to me, that he would try to hide his identity, to point the blame on somebody else.”
Rachal walked into the bank with a fully loaded (15 rounds) Glock 9 mm handgun. He told two tellers, “Give me the money, I’m not playing!” He was “brandishing” the gun — a real no-no in the federal criminal code — and banging it on the counter.
He escaped with $2,397 in cash. When police found him, he’d discarded his minstrel-show disguise. But he still had a police scanner tuned to the BPD frequency. In his bag, with the cash, Rachal had another 15-round magazine for the gun (which had its serial numbers “obliterated” — another popular word with G-men).
But now Rachal is once again back home in Everett, or soon will be. Talk about Independence Day. Does anyone know if you can listen to Al Jolson on Spotify?
