Jamal Khashoggi went in the house;

Jamal Khashoggi never came out;

All the Saudi money and all the rogue spin

Couldn’t put Jamal together again.

Yesterday I wrote about the mystery surrounding Jeremy who went into Gerry’s office and never came out and was never seen again. Some might have noticed the similarity between that and the situation involving the missing Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi who went into the Saudi tent and never came out. Well, that’s not totally right. I should write he never walked out again.

There is a mystery now facing the world. No, not the one about Jeremy. I think we were able to figure out what happened to him. And not the one about the Jamal Khoshoggi. I think we can pretty much figure out why it is that he didn’t come back out of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey after leaving his fiance waiting for him. The mystery is why some people  think this is a mystery.

Part of my legal career was spent as a prosecutor.  The district attorney who I worked for gave me the ability to operate as I saw fit. His belief was that he hired attorneys with enough brains and skills that they could  handled matters assigned or what they got themselves involved in without any interference from him. His approached worked well because most were self-motivated and capable.

Capable. That’s a word often used by the gangsters when talking about someone who could well take care of himself among the fellow gangsters which usually meant he had the wherewithal to murder someone else either by himself, in the company of others, or by having people killed for him. As a prosecutor because of the freedom given me I liked to investigate these type criminals using various forms of electronic surveillance.

Some situations were not amenable to that so we had to use our human resources. That would mean we used undercover police officers or former gangsters who had seen the light, usually the light came from looking at a long prison sentence, who decided to assist us in some of our work.

Why is it all of these guys who go about killing people when caught try to blame something or someone else for their despicable actions. Take Whitey Bulger, he’s now peddling the maddening story that somehow his being a guinea pig for a CIA experiment with LSD turned him into a two-bit murderous felon. We can only thing of the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde except Whitey doesn’t have to ingest any laboratory formula from a test tube to lose his otherwise benign composure, it comes in the form of flashbacks that come during the nighttime nightmares..

The matter that is thrown at us is that Whitey would have been an upstanding citizen had he not been set upon by men in suit jackets with needles. We are supposed to accept that  Whitey had some time of post traumatic stress disorder which causes him to turn into a monster.

it might have had a chance to pass as credible if one were to ignore his past. Whitey was bad to the bone since he was a young teenager. He just wanted to live on the wild side a step or two over onto the wrong side of the law. There’s  a newspaper article about him being caught lifting goods off of the back of a truck. Tailgating it was called back then before the term became polished up and expropriated by the college and professional football crowds to describe their pre-game parking lot banquets.

Whitey was a guy who was looking for excuses, sad to say. He wasn’t really a stand up guy because the first chance he had to come up with a scheme to try to get himself off the hook he threw the guy who had been his friend and who protected him from other people to the wolves.  I’m not going to get into whether Whitey was an informant or not at this point, but you do know that since about 1975 FBI Agent John Connolly protected Whitey.

He also protected Steve Flemmi, who we know was an informant because he testified under oath in 1997 that he was one since the mid-1960s. Connolly did not develop him as an informant. That was done by FBI Agents Paul Rico and Dennis Condon who handed him over to Connolly after Rico left Boston for the Miami FBI office in 1975 and Condon retired in 1977.

I think it was Condon although it could have been Rico who introduced Connolly to Flemmi. Flemmi, as you know, had just returned from Canada to Boston in 1974 after being on the lam from serious state criminal charges including blowing up a lawyer’s automobile. Condon was able to get those charges squashed which opened the door for him to come back and help the FBI out again.

There are gangsters and there are hoodlums. There are hit men and there are bystanders. There are guys like Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and guys like James “Whitey Bulger. One is a real killer and gangster; one is all hat and no cattle, well maybe he has a few goats running around.

I wrote about T.J.English who hopped on the bandwagon making Whitey into a super gangster by engaging in a lot of hyperbole – bodies washing up on Carson beach, people stuffed in 10 gallon drums, etc. The truth was Whitey was far from that which English should have known. I say that because at the end of his book he wrote an epilogue where he talked about Sheeran who was a real gangster.  I’m at a loss to figure out why it didn’t occur to English that Whitey was in the junior varsity when it came to Sheeran. Maybe it did but he had thrown his lot in with the big bad Whitey crowd so he couldn’t extricate himself.

Shirley:           What kind of deal?

Freddy:          A deal to give him a reason to tell us what he did. You see if we did not give him a deal on his sentencing he would never have confessed about the murders. So to get his confession and to learn he was the one who murdered them we made a deal.

Shirley:          What good is knowing someone murdered someone if they are not going to get punished for doing it? This Martorano murdered three people and because he tells you about it he gets a deal. What was the deal?

Freddy:          He will be sentenced to twelve years in prison.

Shirley:           Twelve years? He murders our brother and sister and friend – that’s three murders and he gets only twelve years? Did he murder anyone else?

Freddy:          Yes, he admitted to 17 other murders which he committed.

Shirley:           Oh, so he’s going to get more than 12 years, how much more?

Freddy:          No, he’s getting only 12 years, that’s it.

Shirley:           For 20 murders he’s doing twelve years? That’s, that’s less than a year for each one murdered. That makes no sense. We don’t understand.

A Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker on September 9, 1999, sensed something was not right. He was commenting on the deal that John Martorano had made with the government where he would end up doing 12 years for admitting to 20 murders. He noted how the three black victims seemed to be invisible. He wrote: Federal prosecutors had a chance to restore their humanity, to say that even after all the years that have passed their lives and death mattered. And yesterday they blew it.” 

He note Martorano was not charge with their murders but racketeering, race fixing and extortion. He wrote: “You can commit one of the worst massacres in this city’s bloody history and pay not price at all. The lives of Smith. Dickson, and Barrett meant virtually nothing.”

He quoted retired Boston Police detective Eddie Walsh who said: “John Martorano killed an awful lot of black people. He practically used black people for target practice in Roxbury.” 

Where Adrian Walker had it wrong was putting in all on the federal prosecutors. The whole community made them into non-persons. Where was the follow-up by the media asking questions about it? Or, the other law enforcement community? Or, anyone in the white community?

A few thoughts.  We’ve  now heard from a third woman who alleges that Brett Kavanaugh was a big drinker in high school and involved in a group of boys who gang raped women.

That is not going to give the GOP Senate majority pause from what I now understand. The GOP majority is rushing ahead to a vote to send his nomination to the full senate without regard to the reputation of the Supreme Court.

I’ve noted before that Kavanaugh’s failure to ask for a full investigation to exonerate himself so that he goes on the Supreme Court without this cloud hanging over he head is bothersome. In my experience that would be the first thing an innocent person would seek. Some have come up with reasons for him not to do it but none of them are substantial as far as I can see.

Kavanaugh claimed eleven times in his unprecedented interview that he wanted a fair process. The question is does he?