Who is that masked man? COVID get-out-of-jail card for con

It was inevitable that some crackpot state judge would order the release of career criminal Ray Wallace.

Long before prancing around outside in face masks became the ultimate form of virtue signaling, this 42-year-old thug from Salem wouldn’t leave the house without one as he went about his daily business.

His daily business was armed robbery.

Stick up a PetSmart in Salem, or the old Borders Books & Music in Peabody – hey, Ray, don’t forget the “flesh-colored rubber mask.”

And this mask obsession of his may go back even further than that. On his 25-page rap sheet, there’s also a vague reference to some appearance in Framingham District Court back in 2003 involving, you guessed it, a mask.

Back then it seemed like an affectation of sorts, a retro look like an old Wild West train robber, just the way he torched his getaway cars after the hold ups. Back in 2011, the judge speculated that “perhaps these robberies had nothing to do with money but instead a… thrill with criminal activity.”

And what could be more thrilling back in the day than pulling a mask over your head? But now, suddenly, masks are all the rage. Everybody who’s anybody is wearing one. Hell, in some places (like Salem), you gotta be wearing a mask to go inside a business.

No wonder Ray Wallace thought it was about time he finally checked out of the Big House.

Wallace is really one of the poster boys for this current fashionable insanity of letting thugs out of prison because of COVID-19. He’s been involved in at least two shootouts with the law. He’s got all kinds of firearms violations. He’s been known to wear body armor on his jobs. He used to keep a battering ram stashed in his garage.

And now a lunatic Deval Patrick judge says he has to be released. She cut his $1 million bail to zero. Poor baby tested positive, don’t you know, so once he finishes his 14-day quarantine, he’ll be free as a bird … a jailbird.

Wallace’s case may be even outrageous than the 32-year-old alleged fentanyl dealer who was released to home confinement – into the retirement community his aged mom lives in in Salem.

Think about that one – in order to dodge the virus, an asymptomatic heroin dealer is released to infect a vulnerable population. Does that make any sense? Of course not. But what does right now?

These thousands of released criminals are behind a new crime wave across the country. Headline in New York Post: “Dozens of NYC inmates back in jail after coronavirus release.”

In California, a released jailbird immediately carjacked a motorist and then hit somebody else over the head with a hammer. The Washington Post reported the incident by way of saying that the bleeding-heart policy “is backfiring on authorities.”

Backfiring on authorities? What about backfiring on the citizens who are being robbed and carjacked and hit over the head with hammers?

Back to career criminal Ray Wallace. Who was that masked man, you ask?

Well, after he got lugged for the robberies in 2010-11, he was awaiting trial when his eye was injured in a jailhouse brawl in Middlesex. He was taken to Mass Eye & Ear Infirmary for treatment, where he grabbed one of his guards’ guns and shot him in the leg.

The other guard then shot Wallace in the abdomen. Since then, he’s apparently been in one hospital or another. The various bills for his medical care and guards have topped $2 million.

All these years later Wallace hasn’t stood trial on either the armed-robbery charges in Essex County or the shooting in Suffolk. Too sick, don’t you know.

And now, he’s… too sick to be in jail.

Right now he’s quarantined after testing positive. In the meantime, cops and prosecutors from three different counties are trying to keep him locked up, despite the ruling by one of Gov. Deval Patrick’s real beauties, Judge Beverly Cassone, a second-generation career public defender.

When Cassone was nominated by Small Deval back in 2009, the local paper ran a list of her best-known allegedly indigent clients, one of whom was convicted of raping and murdering his 6-year-old cousin in 2007.

Another of Judge Cassone’s pets was a guy charged with murdering his father and two sisters in West Quincy in 2007. Not to mention a Quincy real-estate broker who was charged with rape of a child under 16.

Of course Judge Cassone was going to let this nice young man Ray Wallace out! After all, he’s only been involved in two shootouts with the cops.

And most importantly, he knows a lot about social distancing and safety protocols in this time of the plague.

Wallace has two lawyers, which is about average for these punks. One for gunning down the c.o., one for the armed robberies. The public defender on the Boston shooting case is trying to convince a single justice of the SJC to release this nice young fellow immediately, after which he can set up a GoFundMe page to buy himself some new masks.

It’s the least the Commonwealth can do for a fashion trendsetter like Ray Wallace.