Heroic ex-trooper Cournoyer vs. crooked Proctor: A tale of two troopers

There’s yet another hearing in Framingham tomorrow for disgraced, suspended-without-pay cone head Mass. State trooper Michael Proctor – his third.

Will it finally be three strikes and you’re not? Not likely. Proctor is a crooked cop, and that makes him Good People, as far as the State Police are concerned.

To Protect and Steal – that’s their motto. So what’s not to love about Michael Proctor?

Making just under $150,000 a year, he drove drunk in an MSP cruiser, sent “inappropriate” (read: vile) texts about a woman he was investigating while simultaneously soliciting “gifts” from shady local yokels involved in the same murder investigation, etc.

Bent cops like Proctor are celebrated by the MSP. They had a whole outfit called Troop E – E for embezzlement.

And don’t even get me started on Trooper Terence Kent, indicted yesterday, not to be confused with Trooper Zachariah “Golf Ball” Kent, recently ordered by a judge to stay out of Target…..”
Michael Proctor will not be fired tomorrow. Count on it. He’s a conehead’s conehead.

On the other hand, consider the case of ex-trooper Arthur Cournoyer. Unlike Proctor, who continues to be pampered and coddled by the brass for his atrocious misbehavior, Cournoyer was run out of the State Police.

Cournoyer’s crime? He was injured on duty while ending a hostage situation involving a woman and her 5-year-old child in Brookfield in 1998. He was hurt badly, needed five operations and years of rehabilitation to return to health.

In other words, Cournoyer is a hero. So by God he could never be allowed to go back on the job. When he tried to return to duty, the thugs in jodhpurs ran him off on his first day back at the Academy in New Braintree.

The good news is, a Middlesex County jury last week just awarded Cournoyer $1.9 million in damages, seven years after he filed his wrongful-discrimination lawsuit. He was discriminated against, the jury ruled, based on his physical handicaps.

The jury didn’t rule in favor of his age complaints (he was 58). But based on his filing, his age appeared to be what the fake-tough-guy drill instructors at the academy had their biggest problem with.

One DI in particular – “John Doe,” as he’s called in the lawsuit – seemed to particularly loath Cournoyer. When Cournoyer’s lawyers tried to find out his real name, they had to get a court order to get photos from the MSP.

And when the state cops finally turned over the photographs, they looked like pictures from a middle school yearbook. Thus, Cournoyer couldn’t ID the offending trooper. It’s the same warped professional courtesy that Michael Proctor relies upon to keep his phony-baloney job, even if it’s (temporarily) without pay.

Here are some excerpts of how Trooper “John Doe” treated the hero cop:

“… Looked up at him with disgust and irritation and sarcastically asked him how old he was… turned to his right towards another trooper and said: ‘What the (bleep)?’….”

On the first day of training at the academy, all the recruits had to show the DI’s their medications.

“(Cournoyer)… handed Trooper John Doe his plastic bag of medications… (Doe) looked at Cournoyer with disgust and irritation, then threw Cournoyer’s bag of medications up in the air and let it fall onto the table… and said, ‘What in the hell are they letting old people in here with (bleep) like this for?’”

Perhaps you’re thinking that a 58-year-old should not have been allowed to come back. But that’s the law. And he passed the MSP’s initial physical tests.

And consider Cournoyer’s monetary losses by taking on that thug in Brookfield back in 1998.

Cournoyer’s pension is now $48,742 a year. The lieutenant colonel that he dealt with when he tried to come back was in his recruit class, and now is himself retired with a $110,415 annual pension.

On that first day back, when Cournoyer complained about his treatment, he talked to several superior officers, including that lieutenant colonel. He also spoke to the commandant captain, now retired at $141,162 a year, and a detective lieutenant, now retired with a $148,233 pension.

To repeat, because Cournoyer took a risk to rescue somebody, his pension is $48,742. Of course he wanted to come back.

As he was making his pitch to the brass, he could hear a voice that sounded like John Doe’s outside the room yelling:

“What the (bleep)? He’s 58 years old. What’s he going to do, go home and cry to his mother?”

Cournoyer left the Academy that day but refused to resign from the MSP. So the MSP put him on a “Resignation List” even though he hadn’t done so.

And now, 10 years later, Cournoyer collects almost two million bucks. But he’ll never make up those lost pension years, getting $100,000 less than everybody who didn’t rush into that house in Brookfield.

Does the name Leigha Genduso ring a bell? A year earlier, in 2014, she breezed through the academy. No problems whatsoever.

She was a former hot-pants cocktail waitress at places with names like Scuttlebutts and Funky Murphy’s. She was also the live-in ex-moll of a drug-dealing gangster.

Before being hired by the State Police, Genduso admitted to a federal grand jury that she herself had sold large amounts of weed, abused drugs, laundered money for a gangster boyfriend and “perjurized” herself in front of another federal grand jury.

Leigha Genduso, a career criminal, had no problems at the Academy. After her hoodlum boyfriend got lugged, she hooked up with a lieutenant colonel and somehow, everybody at the Academy looked the other way.

Of course, it could have been worse at the Academy for Arthur Cournoyer. He could have been Enrique Delgado-Garcia, the recruit who died in New Braintree last summer in a “boxing exercise.”

The investigation continues. Wink wink nudge nudge.

Hey, it took Cournoyer a decade to get even a little justice. How long do you think the Delgado-Garcia “investigation” will drag on?

Will that probe be over before or after Michael Proctor’s disciplinary hearings conclude?

Hey state police, you screwed up on Cournoyer, Genduso, Delgado-Garcia and dozens of other disciplinary cases. Can you at least do the right thing tomorrow and fire Conehead Proctor once and for all?

Trooper John Doe could not be reached for comment.