So the Boston City Council today won’t even consider whether to expel Ricky Ricardo Arroyo after his despicable conniving last summer with disgraced ex-US attorney Rachael Rollins.
Pitiful.
Remember, the Council has expelled at least one of its members before – the late Chuck “Superfly” Turner, back in 2010, after he was convicted of taking a $1000 payoff from an undercover G-man.
Granted, Turner won a state lawsuit later, when the Supreme Judicial court said the Council should have waited 10 days, until he actually began his sentence in Club Fed, before stripping him of his job and his office.
But the point is, politicians at every level sometims need to be put on the record, as to which side they’re on.
Framing people, or not framing people.
The fact is, what Turner did by taking a bribe was small potatoes compared to City Councilor Arroyo’s shocking behavior last summer.
He was basically lobbying a federal prosecutor to frame the sitting district attorney of Suffolk County, as Arroyo was running against him on the platform of essentially decriminalizing all crime in Boston.
What the Russian collusion hoax was on a national level – an attempt to railroad a politician out of office with false, concocted accusations – that was the Rollins-Arroyo conspiracy in microcosm.
Of course the motion to expel Arroyo wouldn’t have passed, even though one of the Council lunatics, Kenzie Bok, recently resigned, leaving the Reds with one fewer vote.
But the City Council is still controlled by the inmates. Of the 12 current members, only four can be counted upon to do the right thing, even occasionally. Six, including Arroyo, are incorrigible.
Among them, you have one who brags about having once been an illegal alien, one whose alleged residence in public housing has been questioned, one who publicly shouts obscenities about the nepotism laws and one who reportedly posts video on social media that, well, we can’t even go into it because this is a family newspaper.
However, at least two of the district councilors – Gigi Coletta of East Boston and Liz Bradon of Brighton – have at least a few constituents who aren’t all in on the Council majority’s dreams of fundamentally transforming America into a Third World hellhole.
It would have been nice to have had Coletta and Bradon on the record as to which side they’re on when it comes to the Rollins-Arroyo insurrection.
But the word is that the profiles in courage on the Council want to postpone any action against Arroyo until after the “investigation” by the Board of Bar Overseers.
The Board of Bar Overseers? Please. Arroyo will be in his 10th two-year term before those hacks even get around to beginning their half-hearted probe.
Again, it’s like the Russian collusion hoax at a local level. The FBI claimed they couldn’t investigate any of the crimes they’d committed because of “sources and methods.” The City is using the Board of Bar Overseers as their “sources and methods” – a lame excuse for not doing anything.
Why not give Arroyo the chance to defend himself in public? Shouldn’t the statesman of color be welcoming the opportunity to, uh, clear his name? His alibis thus far have been beyond feeble.
Of Rollins’s dirty deeds done dirt cheap, Arroyo has said, among other things, “I did not ask her to do this, nor did I know she was doing these things.”
If that’s true, then why did Arroyo text her, “Are y’all announcing an investigation with Hayden? Would be the best thing I can have happen at this moment.”
At that moment, for the record, was when the Globe was about to light him up with a scorching expose about his alleged sexual assaults against young women when he was a teenager at the O’Bryant School in Roxbury.
After the story broke, Arroyo’s campaign was reeling. So was it appropriate to text the top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts and ask her about his opponent, “Whats (sic) going on with the investigation into him? Is it moving?”
Even Rollins herself, on page 14 of the DOJ inspector general’s report, is quoted as saying, “I’m not saying these communications are appropriate.”
If Ricky didn’t ask Rollins to do anything for him, then why exactly was he spending one hour, 51 minutes chatting up the prosecutor on July 29, not to mention 26 minutes on July 20, and for 35 minutes on Aug. 17?
And if everything was on the level in the run-up to the primary last summer, then why, as they were trying to plant some dirty-tricks stories against the district attorney, did Arroyo suddenly switch to an encrypted communications system that assured him and Rollins that “no one outside of this chat, not even (this service) can read or listen to them.”
You would think that Arroyo would want to answer these questions forthrightly, in a public forum, this afternoon, rather than wait for the Board of Bar Overseers to begin its non-public probe sometime around 2031.
To repeat, doesn’t Ricky Ricardo Arroyo want to… clear his name?
I mean, it’s not like anyone on the Council is going to raise any embarrassing issues. There is, after all, legislative courtesy. None of his colleagues will ask him about, say, what high school he finally graduated from after fleeing the O’Bryant in the wake of all those tawdry allegations?
And none would think of asking him why, wherever he picked up his diploma or G.E.D., why didn’t he learn how to spell, or to use apostrophes properly?
Another question Arroyo would never be asked at City Hall: When your dear friend Rachael told you that Hayden “will regret the day he did this to you,” why did you respond:
“I hope so. I really need it for my heart.”
Councilor, did you really need to have the district attorney run out of office for something he didn’t do, just to make you feel better about losing a fight you had no business winning or even being in, given your sordid record?
The City Council owes it to the people of Massachusetts to ask these questions. It’s the least they can do – for the people, and for that matter, for the late Chuck “Superfly” Turner.
