What’s the difference these days between covering the state-government beat and the sex beat?
The answer is, nothing.
Yesterday morning, in two different Boston courtrooms, a sleazy state judge was trying to hang onto his $172,000-a-year state sinecure after getting 13 Lewinskys from a courthouse underling. A few doors down, the 30-year old Pee Wee Herman-lookalike spouse of the 68-year-old disgraced ex-state Senate president was pleading not guilty to, among other things, sexual assault, open and gross lewdness and distributing nude images without consent.
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, as they say. And what is the hackerama if not idle hands? If only Judge Thomas Estes (rhymes with Testes) and boy toy Byron Hefner had kept their hands idle….
First, Hefner, the superannuated solon’s rent boy, as the Brits say. The line of the day comes from the Commonwealth’s statement of the facts, in which we learn that, after Hefner repeatedly goosed his first victim, “Person 1 pushed him away again and told the defendant, ‘Screw off.’”
Here are a few more excerpts from the R-rated statement regarding Mr., or is it Mrs. Stanley Rosenberg:
“(Hefner) at one point unzipped Person 1’s pants… put his hand between Person 1’s legs… undid Person 3’s belt and pants and tried to stick his hands inside… tried to climb into bed with him…when Person 4 awoke the next morning, he was naked and alone in his own hotel room bed, with no memory of how he got there….”
Judge Estes, on the other hand, remembers all too well how he got there, namely, to his chambers in Belchertown District Court, where he enjoyed being serviced in the afternoon by one Tammy Cagle, who worked in a local drug court.
The SJC is deciding whether to refer the love judge’s case to the governor and the legislature. The State House hacks will need the Jaws of Life to pry the judge out of his sticky chambers, because he is a total hack who will in short order starve to death if his snout is ejected from the public trough.
His lawyer, one David Hoose, quickly turned hearing into a kind of Greatest Hits of Sleazy state judges, whose numbers are legion. Many of the great names of yesteryear were bandied about – King, Scott, Troy, Markey, Bonin, Donahue, etc. There was talk of some being “basically crooks,” while others were bagged for “public racism and urination, drunkenness… OUI.”
“Was he driving in the courthouse?” Justice Kimberly Budd asked at one point, after Hoose kept listing off one reprobate drunk-driving hack judge after another.
But almost none of them were removed, Hoose whined. And he didn’t even get into the more recent worthless bust-out judges, like the one pulled over on 128, or overheard in his chambers throwing around the n-word, or getting bagged at Logan Airport with somebody else’s $5000 watch in her possession….
Hoose kept saying that despite the fact that his despicable client had copped multiple Lewinskys in the courthouse from a subordinate, he had not committed “any actual impropriety.”
Finally, Justice Budd called him out on that one too:
“You’re not actually arguing that there was no ‘actual impropriety,’ are you?”
Hoose countered that everything in the drug court was done “in a collaborative manner.” Yeah, kinda like what the judge was doing with Tammy with the shades drawn. Very collaborative, when the courthouse was empty, except when it was just lunchtime.
“There is no evidence,” Hoose said, “that Justice Estes was favoring the position of Ms. Cagle.”
I’ll say there isn’t. As a matter of fact, just the opposite. In the report of the Commission on Judicial Conduct, we read that Ms. Cagle “did express dissatisfaction with on more than one occasion was that it (the oral sex) was too ‘one-sided,’ meaning that while she was performing… on Judge Estes, he was not reciprocating.”
So his mouthpiece was telling the truth. His client was indeed not favoring “the position” of his galpal.
“He is a superlative judge,” Hoose said, “an exemplary judge.”
That’s the problem, of course. As corrupt as he is, Estes is nothing out of the ordinary in this wretched crew of payroll patriots. As I always say, it’s not that all state judges are bums, it’s just that 98 percent of them who give such a bad name to the on-the-level two percent.
Doesn’t matter, though, if you’re talking State House or courthouse – they’re both dens of corruption and indolence.
It’s enough to make a taxpayers with real jobs shout at all the hacks the same thing Person 1 yelled at 68-year-old Sen. Rosenberg’s 30-year-old boyfriend:
“Screw off!”
