Welcome to the messed-up Massachusetts State Police, Colonel

Geoffrey Noble, the new colonel of the Massachusetts State Police, is going to have his hands full.

It’s never easy for an outsider to take over any inbred organization, especially if that organization is an ongoing criminal enterprise.

And it’s not like Noble will be arriving in Framingham with the kind of personal crew of thugs and enforcers a new crime boss can traditionally rely on, wise guys he’s done all the usual State Police-type things with – embezzling overtime, beating up girlfriends, robbing drugs and guns out of the evidence locker, planting pieces of broken taillight at crime scenes to frame innocent women for murder….

Cops that commit crimes together bond together… until they flip.

Even after they retire – on “disability” of course – they still hang together. I mean, how many of these bloated cone heads have migrated to Sean O’Brien’s personal payroll at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters? At least four, maybe five.

But despite his recent New Jersey ties, let’s not forget that Noble is not without some connections to the sordid, er, storied history of the Massachusetts State Police.

You know, Massachusetts is a small state – everybody is connected in one way or another to most everybody else. And even if you throw Rhode Island into the mix, it’s the same situation.

Col. Noble, it turns out, went to high school at Mount Saint Charles Academy in Woonsocket, RI.

You know who else went there?

Johnny Martorano, hitman for the Winter Hill Gang back in the day.

And Johnny’s connection to the State Police is that he may have been the mobster who began the now-hallowed tradition of bribing state cops, back in the 1960s.

It’s a small world after all!

Once upon a time, the State Police were regarded as uncorruptible. Probably a lot of that had to do with the fact that they largely stayed out of Boston. The city was MDC territory – the Mets. But there were a few who worked in Boston – like Richard Schneiderhan, assigned to the attorney general.

Schneiderhan took to drinking in the Combat Zone, and soon he was pouring out his troubles to a sympathetic soul by the name of Johnny Martorano. Next he was taking cash – setting the pace for other troopers to follow, big time.

“You always put the money in an envelope before you hand it to them,” Martorano once explained to me. “It’s less embarrassing for them that way.”

Those are the kinds of social graces that you pick up in a New England prep school. And they come in handy whatever your future line of work – whether you’re Johnny Martorano or Col. Noble.

Now, Johnny didn’t last long at Mount Saint Charles. He was a PG, a ringer, a football player after a great career at Milton High. But he wasn’t exactly the college-boy type. He left Woonsocket to go back to Milton one weekend and never returned.

But his teammates always remembered him as the bone-crunching fullback – they called him “the Milkman.”

I learned that from another Mount Saint Charles alumnus – the late Ed Bradley of “60 Minutes.” Martorano was getting out of prison, and he’d promised Bradley the first interview after being sprung. (Bradley died before he could get his scoop.)

As Col. Noble begins trying to clean up – or at least cover up – the endless scandals involving the State Police, he will be meeting so many new people. For instance, the attorney general, Andrea Campbell.

She too has a connection of sorts to Johnny Martorano. Her father Alvin and her uncle Arnold were black gangsters. During the War on Poverty, they were trying to take over the so-called job training rackets, er programs, in Roxbury.

The other crew was run by a blind ex-con named Guido St. Laurent. It was the New England Grass Roots Organization – NEGRO. Their headquarters were above a pizza parlor on Blue Hill Avenue.

One night in 1967, the Campbell crew busted into NEGRO headquarters and shot everybody in the office. But one guy survived, and he was going to testify against the Campbells in a death penalty murder case.

His name was Ronald Hicks.

But Alvin’s first wife had an ace in the hole. (Hint: he used to play football for Mount Saint Charles Academy.) She asked Johnny to straighten it out for the Campbells. Soon thereafter, Ronald Hicks was shot in the head in the Fenway as he was in the front seat of a car, snorting a line of cocaine.

If it wasn’t for Johnny Martorano, it’s very unlikely Andrea Campbell would have ever been born, because her father would have been serving three life sentences for murder.

So, you see, the current attorney general and the new colonel of the State Police do have a few connections.

One of the first messes Noble is going to have to clean up is the scandal involving the Mass State Police and the botched frame-up of Karen Read in Canton.

One of Karen Read’s new attorneys is Marty Weinberg, who likewise has his own connection to the State Police. For a while, he represented Dana Pullman, the head of SPAM – the State Police Association of Massachusetts.

Pullman is now a convicted felon, looking at 30 months at Club Fed for the usual State Police antics – kickbacks, looting union funds, romantic getaways to sunny places with young cocktail waitresses, etc.

Yeah, I don’t think Noble will have any problems making small talk with any of the people he’ll be interacting with.

On the bright side, things are starting to look up for the MSP. Only two troopers were arrested for domestic abuse last month – one in Fitchburg and another in Mansfield.

Only two! August turned out to be what the state police call a very good month. And there’s even better news for Col. Noble.

Neither of the two most recent arrested state troopers are graduates of Mount Saint Charles Academy.