By Howie Carr / Boston Herald
None of his fellow solons was impolite enough yesterday to ask U.S. Sen. John Forbes Kerry the only question anybody really wants him to answer.
“Senator, are you really worth $193 million?”
Secretary of state? Who cares. I want to know how he got all that dough, and please, no jokes about how he made it the old-fashioned way, he married it. Whatever happened to prenups?
I’d always heard Mama T gave him a couple Old Masters oil paintings or some other kind of art worth maybe $10 million so he wouldn’t feel like what he is, and has always been, which is a gigolo. I remember him saying a few years ago that “my wife is independently wealthy, but I rely on my Senate salary ...”
This may have been when it came out that he’d given $60 to charity the previous year.
But now this $193 million number is all over the Internet, except when it’s $194 million. I read somewhere yesterday that a lot of it came from “four trusts inherited from Forbes family members.”
Of course, none of his fellow senators wanted to treat him with anything except kid gloves. He got no questions about unpaid sales taxes, fire hydrants or penis straws. It is, after all, the world’s most exclusive club, although if you’ve ever watched them from the gallery, what it really looks like is a convention of mid-market weekend TV anchors, all of whom wear Size 42 long.
Nobody questioned Kerry about his famous initial 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recounting the stories of other Vietnam veterans (which he’d been told, he made sure to say) “of times that they personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable radios to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan ...”
Which he pronounced Gin-ghis Khan.
No senator called him on that slur, either. Here’s another question he should have been asked: “Sen. Kerry, name one foreign policy issue you’ve been right about. Just one.”
Like, say, the nuclear freeze. Or the first Iraq War (against) or the second (he was for it). Do you still think Bashar al-Assad of Syria is a reformer, a fine fellow indeed? And speaking of being a fine judge of character, how’d you happen to pick John Edwards as your running mate in 2004?
But Kerry did hit one out of the park: “I will not take it personally that this is the one thing in Washington that seems to have united Democrats and Republicans — to get me out of the Senate.”
You got that one right, Liveshot. In the name of God, go.
Well, Tim, you DID ASK for IT!
By Howie Carr / Boston Herald
Sun Jan 27, 2013
Just be glad your first name isn’t Tim — Attorney General Marsha Coakley would probably be trying to put you in jail. She must have had a really bad blind date way back when with some guy named Tim.
First it was Tim Cahill, the former state treasurer. Now it’s Tim Murray, the bust-out lieutenant governor.
Poor Tim Murray. When he basically quit politics last week, he must have figured the posses would break off their pursuit. But no — first the feds bag his, uh, fundraiser, Mike McLaughlin, on four felony counts. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz beat Marsha to the prosecutorial punch.
How very convenient that we learn the very next day Marsha’s been conducting her own probe into whether Murray broke campaign finance law by accepting donations from McLaughlin.
But wait, Murray said. How dare you do this to me? I asked for this investigation.
Exactly, Crash. You asked for it. What is the problem with these shady hacks demanding probes? When will they ever learn?
First it was then-Revere Mayor Bill Reinstein. There was a lot of stealing going on during the construction of Revere High School. Reinstein wrote a letter to his pal, Suffolk District Attorney Garrett Byrne, demanding an investigation, wink, wink. Then he wrote a second letter. When Byrne got the third letter, he had no choice.
He indicted Reinstein. The mayor was shocked.
“What was I supposed to do?” Byrne said. “He kept writing me these letters. …”
Then there was Congressman Nicky “Pockets” Mavroules. He wrote his letter to the FBI. He said his son-in-law was a bad guy. He was. He was also Nicky Pockets’ bagman. Guess which one ended up in Club Fed?
And now it’s Tiny Tim Murray. We all know he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but maybe he’s laying the groundwork of a defense — that he’s too stupid to have known that he may have been committing a crime by associating with Mike McLaughlin, the former head of the Chelsea Housing Authority who is now charged with falsely reporting his salary.
In 2011, Mike reported a salary of $160,415 when he really made $324,896. Between 2008 and 2010, he underreported his salary by $391,000. How did the feds learn this? They checked his IRS returns. Mikey, who knew a lot of the boys, wasn’t going to go down like Al Capone, for tax evasion.
So the feds grabbed him on the other end for allegedly lying in the documents he had to send to state and federal authorities who oversaw the Housing Authority, and not very well, obviously.
Anyone who knew McLaughlin is not surprised that he’s all jammed up. They’re just puzzled it didn’t happen 30 years ago. The city manager of Chelsea said he thought McLaughlin was a “reformed rogue,” but it appears that McLaughlin is actually a rogue who lost his fastball. He should have cut his plea bargain before Crash got out of the governor’s fight. It’s a lot better to be trading up a live pol than a dead one.
Middlesex Commissioner Mike McLaughlin was trained better than this. Middlesex County was a crime school.
All these years later, it’s hard to explain just how corrupt Middlesex County was. Middlesex County had a roads department, but no roads. It had a dog officer, but no unincorporated areas for the dog officer to patrol.
The county administrator was John Buonomo, who would later go to jail for stealing cash from the Registry of Deeds copying machines. A guy went out on disability for falling out of the chair at his desk.
Those were the glory days, for the Winter Hill Gang and Middlesex County. They are both but shadows of their former shelves. Mike McLaughlin looks to be going down for the count, and he’s taking Tim Murray with him.
In Somerville, the old timers are amazed. Who would have ever thought Mike McLaughlin would go to the can before Howie Winter? And his name isn’t even “Tim.”