“May You Live In Interesting Times.”

 

     That famous Chinese imprecation, one of several beloved of my late girlfriend, Barbara, is a tongue-in-cheek curse that's somewhat on a par with the Appalachian, "bless your heart".

     For the last year and a half, I've been living in Phoenix, Arizona. The reasons for that (hopefully, temporary) move are manifold and I won't get into most of them. Immediately upon arriving, I started and published a novella entitled, The Final Bullet. Almost immediately after launching that, I began another, much longer novel, Ink and Iron, which deals with the 1919 Boston police strike.

     But part of my current living arrangement with my longtime friend, Tony Wilson, is predicated on my agreement to help him with his memoir. It's an iron in the fire none of you knew about because I simply haven't mentioned it. After all, what's the point in publicizing a book that doesn't exist, yet?

     Eight years ago, in the summer of 2017, I'd written a series of posts in this blog entitled, "Good Cop, Bad Cops" that had given an account of what had happened to my friend Tony starting with an incident in Franklin, Massachusetts in the winter of 2000. It helped put his case into the spotty record of the internet with its memory holes and dodgy Google algorithms. But, throughout it all, while Tony's various court cases went nowhere due to corrupt attorneys, he'd been planning on writing a book about his quarter century-long ordeal.

     While my posts gave his story some middling and limited visibility, he wanted a real investigative journalist, which we both knew I am not, to give his story a wider audience. So I went on Twitter years ago and contacted independent investigative journalist Chris Faraone, who'd achieved some renown 13 years ago debating Andrew Breitbart (with whom I'd also crossed swords) shortly before his death. I'd asked him to contact Tony about a possible article. Being a fellow Bay Stater, I knew about Faraone's work in independent Massachusetts media and thought he'd be a good match.

     Some time later, the result was a bloated 14,000 word article in which Faraone buried the lede so deeply and wrenched the true narrative so far off its axis that it could be said he wound up doing more harm than good. Tony's said more than once that he "expected Mother Jones and got, instead, Tiger Beat."

     That was about this time when Tony decided to take matters into his own hands and write his own account.

      Back in the day, when Tony would come to Massachusetts and visit Barbara and me, he'd asked me to get involved. I told him I wasn't an investigative journalist and do commentary. I also told him that his case was still "radioactive", which alone ought to prepare you to understand the powers that were at play at the time. That was one reason I feared getting involved; The original incident in Franklin and the subsequent ones were still a fresh memory of the minds of those who'd taken part in the coverup and needless persecution and I didn't want to get on their radar. After all, this story directly and indirectly involves an attorney who would go on to become a judge and the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House, not to mention the command structure of the state police itself.

     Now, about 13 years after first meeting Tony (He was one of my earliest readers. Like Barbara, he discovered me through the Rude Pundit's blogroll), it now seems, a quarter century after the original incident, Tony's story is in a sort of strange half-life period. The original radioactivity of his story is now not so toxic, largely due to the sudden resignations of certain high-ranking Mass State Police officials, deaths and suspensions and disbarments of certain corrupt attorneys.

     In short, Tony's story has come full circle and is now relevant again.

     The book on which Tony and I are working, Good Cop in a Bad State, will deal with the corruption of the Massachusetts State Police, of whom he was a part until he was forced out. What makes his story so relevant is the recent Karen Read case as well as other recent scandals involving the state police and the Massachusetts legal profession. I don't want to reveal too much at this juncture but let's just say that when this book comes out, one will have all their fears and suspicions about lawyers confirmed.

     Therefore, in the interests of priming interest in this project and possibly racking up some advance book sales, I decided to conduct a brief interview with Tony, which follows.

 

Q. Tony, the question that always comes up when you revisit your story is how do you convince the reader that a story that goes back nearly 25 years is still relevant today?

A. That is a credible question. The fact is that I've been trying to tell my story for nearly 20 years, and it has been mostly ignored but variants of the story were published as early as five years ago, though they got minimal traction because the reporter spun the narrative away from the most salacious facts and presented it as a feature story. That was when you and I concluded that the only way to get the story out was to do it ourselves. And, as you know, your personal issues prevented us from getting started immediately after those articles were published. The reader will quickly discover that this story has been on-going for the entirety of the last 25 years. I've never taken my eye off the ball and, if nothing else, the fact that I've been in this fight, undaunted, for 25 years is itself a story.

Q. You've mentioned that your story ties in with the recently-concluded Karen Read case. In what way?  

A. I was watching the Read case from afar, but I was able to discern the modus operandi of the discredited State Police investigators who basically tried to manufacture facts to pin a conviction on Karen Read after conducting a deliberately inadequate investigation. It was evident that they only wanted to give the impression of having a solid case to compel her to plea bargain. That was basically the strategy in my case when Internal Affairs was investigating me, but I demanded a hearing that totally discredited the prosecution's case. As you know, there's too much back story to chronicle here, but the Read case helps my story because it helps the public to put my case in proper perspective, and it makes my claims more understandable and credible.

Q. When you revisit the article published by Chris Faraone a few years back, how do you reconcile the fact that he kept the most controversial aspects off the record?  

A. Well, I needed a sounding board that you provided to determine that the story was, in fact, under-reported. You knew the back story as well as anybody and you quickly discerned that he avoided or spun the most contentious facts, particularly those facts pertaining to the legal misconduct by some very prominent attorneys, attorneys we will be naming. I remember your disbelief as you read Chris's article, concluding that he had effectively buried the lede. But I also remember you telling me that a journalist had the right to spin a story as they saw fit, as long as it was truthful. Chris was truthful even though he left the best parts of the story on the floor of the cutting room. That said I owe him a debt of gratitude for publishing enough to make me credible and sympathetic, and those articles effectively set the table for this book.

Q. So why do you think he buried the lede in that article? 

A. It was a slog to read through that monstrosity and even then I could only read it once, though the article was subsequently picked up and published in abridged form and went viral nationwide. I don't want to speculate on why he spiked the most contentious aspects of the story, but I suspect it may have something to do with his police contacts. It’s possible that officers he was friendly with were directly involved in my case and he didn't want to implicate them. I think it’s also noteworthy that the article, as clunky as it was, got more engagement than any other article had posted in quite some time and was getting clicks long after the expected expiration date. So, it did resonate with the greater-Boston audience. 

Q. I've called the Massachusetts State Police "the gift that keeps on giving." It seems they're involved in a cycle of misconduct or corruption every few months and these incidents will reflect on your story. 

A. Absolutely. And, as we discussed, every incident is merely a piece of a larger puzzle that, once it comes together, will present the big picture that everyone tries to dismiss. One thing I’ve noticed is that the news media seems to take every story, once publicized, and present it as some unique development and not as a part of a bigger picture, exemplifying a toxic and dysfunctional entity. I think this book may in some way tie all that together.

     As Rachel Maddow says, "watch this space", because we are indeed living in some interesting times.