Sometimes life in Massachusetts is like Yogi Berra once said in a different context – “Déjà vu all over again.”
The déjà vu is happening again this week, starting with the first bulletins on Monday afternoon:
“Cambridge shootout on Memorial Drive shuts road.”
On Memorial Drive? Again?
And once more the crime happened right around River Street. That’s where the foreign freeloader Tsarnaev brothers made one of their ill-fated carjacking stops in 2013, as they fled after bombing the Boston Marathon.
When this latest River Street affray was over, the embattled septuagenarian district attorney of Middlesex County, Marian Ryan, doddered out to a press conference.
She said the shooting “does not begin to address the trauma experienced by everybody.”
Trauma. Ryan should know – she herself was shot in the face in 1980 on Memorial Drive, a few blocks east near MIT, when her boyfriend’s car broke down late one night. Some gangbangers came by and shot them both. Her boyfriend died.
The alleged shooter this time is Tyler Brown, and once more, it’s like déjà vu all over again. His record is as long as his arm. His previous career highlight was a 2020 shootout in the South End of Boston during which he tried to kill BPD officers.
That time Bad Bad Tyler Brown barely got a wrist slap from the judge – again, does this sound familiar? For firing 13 bullets at the cops, the judge gave him a mere 5-6 years, plus “mental health evaluation and treatment.”
How’d that mental health treatment work out for him? On Monday, Brown fired four times as many bullets at passers-by as in 2020 and seriously wounded two motorists. I guess his aim has improved.
The 2021 wrist slap of this savage thug was so atrocious that even corrupt coddling Suffolk County DA Rachael Rollins felt compelled at the time to issue a statement after the judge’s brooming.
“Mr. Brown shot nearly three times as many bullets as two BPD officers did in response to his violence,” Rollins said. “Mr. Brown’s actions have inflicted significant trauma on these officers and their loved ones.”
Trauma – there’s that word again.
The judge who gave Brown his big slobbering kiss was Janet Sanders. She’s from Texas, of course, because it’s better to not be from Massachusetts if you want to get ahead here these days. She was appointed by Gov. Bill Weld, who’s from New York.
Sanders’ father was a hack LBJ judge named Barefoot Sanders. She’s retired now, with a monthly pension of $9,164 a month. She has a new job, and now the déjà vu begins to meld into hackerama.
Judge Sanders, Tyler Brown’s BFF, now is on the website of JAMS, which is a mediation-arbitration service that according to its website “resolves and manages business and legal disputes.”
JAMS? I saw that and the déjà vu kicked in again, this time with a side of hackerama.
I recently received a report with the JAMS letterhead on it. It was authored by one Tom Drechsler, another ex-judge, with a slightly higher pension than his fellow extinguished hack jurist — $9,291 a month.
Drechsler is a former law partner of convicted felon House Speaker Tom Finneran. He recently pocketed another $20,000 conducting an “internal investigation” for, wait for it, Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan.
She’s trying to run away from a major scandal, involving one of her office’s State Police detectives who is now suspended and charged with motor vehicle homicide in Woburn in December 2023. Somebody – Ryan says it wasn’t her – managed to cover up the cop’s .114 recorded BAC for more than two years.
She hired Drechsler’s “mediation-arbitration” firm JAMS to handle the probe, even though the criminal charges have been kicked to the Suffolk County DA. Now the wrinkly prosecutor is trying to stonewall the release of Drechsler’s audio interviews of her, as if it’s grand-jury material or some such nonsense.
Ryan brags about her transparency, yet she won’t cough up her own interview with Felon Finneran’s pal. The issue of the release of the public documents is supposed to be hashed out in a hearing in Woburn today.
But there’s more déjà vu. How about this headline:
“Trial of Alvin Campbell begins.”
That would be Alvin Campbell Jr., the brother of the state’s attorney general, Andrea Joy Campbell. He’s charged with nine counts of rape, and is not be confused with his late father, Alvin Campbell, Sr.
Campbell Senior was a stone gangster out of Roxbury back in the day. He was charged with three murders on Blue Hill Avenue in 1967, and would have been convicted if the only surviving witness hadn’t been clipped in the Fenway by hitman Johnny Martorano.
Sometimes people say that the names change but the stories remain the same. In Boston, the names don’t even change. The police blotter around here is a living history book.
Consider a recent conviction in Boston federal Boston court for COVID relief fraud. The perp is David Breen, who stole more than $1.2 million in EIDL relief payments that he obtained while running a bowling alley in Milford named Pinz.
He pleaded guilty in March, becoming the first David Breen to make the headlines since 1937, when local “sportsman” David “Beano” Breen was gunned down in a hotel lobby. Beano Breen was the underworld boss of what was then Kerry Village, now Bay Village.
Then there was the state trooper arrested in January in Plymouth accused of abusing his girlfriend, another cop that he lived with.
That trooper’s name is Joe Ward. Really? There used to be another Joe Ward.
He was a state senator from Fitchburg until 1972 and briefly, much earlier, the secretary of state. Old Joe Ward died in 2003. This new Joe Ward in the headlines wasn’t born until 2000.
But do you see what I mean? There is nothing new under the sun. Not even the names change, let alone the crimes.
It’s enough to give you trauma.
