You may remember my reluctance to get involved in politics but my son’s email to me and others supporting Martha Coakley and Maura Healey made me jump in and endorse both women.
My other son who helps me on this blog wondered why I didn’t do the same thing for his friend and law school classmate who he has supported through the years. In retrospect I should have done this so for the last time I am breaking my rule not to get involved in politics to endorse my son’s classmate to my Plymouth County readers.
You never know how important a smart and effective Register of Probate is until you go to a court where there’s a bad one. Trying to get anything done in a court poorly run from the top can be an excruciating process. You need a smart leader with legal experience who will actively participate in the daily operations for a court to run effectively. An example of such a person is Mike Donovan one of my oldest friends from Savin Hill who has run the Suffolk County civil clerk’s office in an expert manner for many years making it one of the best and friendly clerk’s office in the nation.
My son tells me that like Mike Donovan, Matt McDonough is the person you need to run the Plymouth County probate courts. I’ve known my son’s association with him over the years and I know when he tells me something like that you can bank on it. You won’t find a harder working lawyer and register than Matt McDonough. Matt puts his utmost energy into everything he does and doesn’t stop until he’s done it perfectly. He tells me that like Mike Donovan for Suffolk, Matt is far and away the best choice for the Register of Probate for Plymouth County.
I have little no doubt when I look at his background. He is a Boston College Law School graduate and Holy Cross undergrad. He worked for 10 years as an assistant district attorney in Norfolk County D.A.’s office (my old stomping ground), and has been a selectman in Marshfield. He has the legal and practical knowledge and skills to do an excellent job. He definitely looks like the right person for the Plymouth County Register of Probate. If you’re voting in Plymouth you won’t go wrong throwing him your vote.
Thanks Matt. Keep up the good work and PLEASE and finish the Whitey book. Some people are looking forward to reading it!!!!
Jerome:
I’m hard at work at it. Thanks.
When you are the law enforcement agency
investigating the murder of President Kennedy
who you just helped assassinate,
you can control the direction and outcome
of the investigation.
Every good criminal justice consumer
knows that.
http://www.lbjmastermind.com
LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination by Phillip F. Nelson
Book
LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination
The 2013 softcover edition of LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination is now available, marking the 50 year anniversary of JFK’s assassination. This is an updated version of the original Skyhorse hardcover edition, first published in 2011.
This book is about a man whose long history of criminal behavior has been documented, even in the absence of a court conviction for any of it. His underlying mental issues — a deadly combination of personality (narcissistic and sociopathic) and psychiatric (bi-polar and paranoia) disorders, all untreated until he left the presidency, formed the manic condition with which he climbed the political ladder. His success in brazenly stealing the 1948 Senate election, followed by a series of murders gave him ever-increasing confidence to go further in his criminal activities. His involvement with the Billie Sol Estes scandals in the mid-1950s, through selling his powerful influence to facilitate the Estes frauds against the government, was widely reported on in 1962, yet he cunningly escaped indictment through sheer willpower, threats against Estes and at least five murders of men who could have connected him to the crimes, all of them still “unsolved cold cases” fifty years later. The murder of his sister Josefa was also directed by Johnson in this same period of time, according to Estes. As soon as that scandal had been swept under the rug in 1962, the Bobby Baker scandals followed in 1963, threatening to end his political career through certain censure by the Senate and Justice Department indictments to follow. The only way out for the vice president was to succeed the president, and that meant “He had to go” (which was exactly how Johnson phrased his orders to kill people who got in his way, according to U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples, who was eventually killed by persons unknown, twenty years after Johnson died).
The premise of the book, and the term “Mastermind”,
The only thing worst than
doing the stations of the cross
is having to be inflicted by
this election nonsense.
Plenty of scientific evidence
indicating politicians are
# 1 cause of PTSD and Tourettes
Syndrome.
In other news
The FBI: America’s Secret Police
by JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
The FBI: America’s Secret Police
http://www.gilmermirror.com/view/full_story/26049183/article-The-FBI–America-s-Secret-Police?instance=lead_story_left_column
By John W. Whitehead
November 04, 2014
We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.—President Harry S. Truman
Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Intimidation tactics. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment schemes.
These are the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime from the Roman Empire to modern-day America, yet it’s the secret police—tasked with silencing dissidents, ensuring compliance, and maintaining a climate of fear—who sound the death knell for freedom in every age.
Every regime has its own name for its secret police: Mussolini’s OVRA carried out phone surveillance on government officials. Stalin’s NKVD carried out large-scale purges, terror and depopulation. Hitler’s Gestapo went door to door ferreting out dissidents and other political “enemies” of the state. And in the U.S., it’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation that does the dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.
Indeed, a far cry from the glamorized G-men depicted in Hollywood film noirs and spy thrillers, the government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused.
Case in point: the FBI is being sued after its agents, lacking sufficient evidence to acquire a search warrant, disabled a hotel’s internet and then impersonated Internet repair technicians in order to gain access to a hotel suite and record the activities of the room’s occupants. Justifying the warrantless search as part of a sting on internet gambling, FBI officials insisted that citizens should not expect the same right to privacy in the common room of a hotel suite as they would at home in their bedroom.
Far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers. In fact, in addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts. USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day. Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.
In a stunning development reported by The Washington Post, a probe into misconduct by an FBI agent has resulted in the release of at least a dozen convicted drug dealers from prison. Several suspects awaiting trial have also been freed, and more could be released as the unnamed agent’s caseload comes under scrutiny. As the Post reports: “The scope and type of alleged misconduct by the agent have not been revealed, but defense lawyers involved in the cases described the mass freeing of felons as virtually unprecedented—and an indication that convictions could be in jeopardy. Prosecutors are periodically faced with having to drop cases over police misconduct, but it is unusual to free those who have been found guilty.”
In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.
For example, the Associated Press recently lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”
Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.
The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”
Another fallout from 9/11, National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread violations.
The FBI’s surveillance capabilities, on a par with the National Security Agency, boast a nasty collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls. In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.”
Now the FBI is seeking to expand its already invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world. As journalist Brett Wilkins warns:
If the proposed rule change is approved, the FBI would have the power to unleash “network investigative techniques” against computers anywhere in the world, allowing the agency to secretly install malware and spyware on any computer, effectively allowing it to control that computer and all its stored information. The FBI could download all the computer’s digital contents, switch its camera or microphone on or off and even control other computers in its network.
And then there’s James Comey, current director of the FBI, who knows enough to say all the right things about the need to abide by the Constitution, all the while his agency routinely discards it. Comey has this idea that the government’s powers shouldn’t be limited, especially when it comes to carrying out surveillance on American citizens. Responding to reports that Apple and Google are creating smart phones that will be more difficult to hack into, Comey has been lobbying Congress and the White House to force technology companies to keep providing the government with backdoor access to Americans’ cell phones.
It’s not all Comey’s fault, though. This transformation of the FBI into a secret police force can be traced back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover. As author Anthony S. Summers points out, it was Hoover who “built the first federal fingerprint bank, and his Identification Division would eventually offer instant access to the prints of 159 million people. His Crime Laboratory became the most advanced in the world.”
Eighty years after Hoover instituted the FBI’s first fingerprint “database”—catalogued on index cards, no less—the agency’s biometric database has grown to massive proportions, the largest in the world, encompassing everything from fingerprints, palm, face and iris scans to DNA, and is being increasingly shared between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in an effort to target potential criminals long before they ever commit a crime. This is what’s known as pre-crime.
If it were just about fighting the “bad guys,” that would be one thing. But as countless documents make clear, the FBI has a long track record of abusing its extensive powers in order to blackmail politicians, spy on celebrities and high-ranking government officials, and intimidate dissidents of all stripes. It’s an old tactic, used effectively by former authoritarian regimes.
In fact, as historian Robert Gellately documents, the Nazi police state was repeatedly touted as a model for other nations to follow, so much so that Hoover actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police. As Gellately noted, “[A]fter five years of Hitler’s dictatorship, the Nazi police had won the FBI’s seal of approval.”
Indeed, so impressed was the FBI with the Nazi order that, as the New York Times recently revealed, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen, brought them to America, hired them on as spies and informants, and then carried out a massive cover-up campaign to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. Moreover, anyone who dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.
So not only have American taxpayers have been paying to keep ex-Nazis on the government payroll for decades but we’ve been subjected to the very same tactics used by the Third Reich: surveillance, militarized police, overcriminalization, and a government mindset that views itself as operating outside the bounds of the law.
Yet as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, it’s no coincidence that the similarities between the American police state and past totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany grow more pronounced with each passing day. This is how freedom falls, and tyrants come to power.
Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the
Read more: The Gilmer Mirror – The FBI America s Secret Police
MATT:
I was a little over the top suggesting you had some secret agenda to shame Billy Bulger in my remarks regarding your Connolly/Black Mass satire. The inclusion, which was unintentionally casual I now believe, of their Mother, in your zesty little satire just set me off. For the record, I have communicated privately and on this blog my feelings that you early on earned my approbation by exposing the various calumnies brought against the Senate President for the vile stuff they were. So, I apologize to you! !!! … You have been his ardent champion, and your blog has done very much good in this regard, as well as numerous others. So, We trek on, as you might say. There is no need to respond to this comment ; Just let it be that it is duly noted !!!
Matt. Any word yet on why Whitey was moved to Florida? Do you think the movie BLACK MASS starring Johnny Depp will be way off the mark in terms of accuracy? Also when is your book on Whitey due to be released? Thanks
Jerome:
The only reason I can think of is that they plan to try him in Florida. No one is going to do him any favors and any moves he makes is done under the watchful eye of the Boston U.S. Attorney folk. The only other reason I can see is that it was done to put more pressure on the Florida Appeals Court to keep Connolly in prison.
The movie will be another fairy tale like Black Mass. It will be a little more accurate than The Departed which was a remake of a Hong Kong movie but was supposed to have something to do with Whitey. That won the Oscar which I thought was a joke. I expect the movie will paint Billy Bulger as working hand in hand with Whitey with some scenes having Whitey sitting in the Senate President’s office passing on legislation or intimidating people to vote for Billy.
As for the book, I’ve got to get away from this blog to make real progress. That’s what I hope to start doing shorty. Thanks for asking.
I wonder whats taking them so long to get a trial under way in Florida. It would seem that John Connolly wont be getting out anytime soon. Am I correct in that you posted an article that explains all the lies and misinformation in Black Mass. There is some truth in the book, no? I understand your perspective that the books is NOT accurate but nevertheless I think it is well written (from a style perspective) and entertaining. It is a disappointment that there are inaccuracies.
Matt
Do you know what John Connolly address was in South Boston? Do you know what was Whitey’s address in Quincy?Do you know what was Catherine Grieg address? Steve Flemmi address?
I understand if you can not or will not post on your blog but I ask because I want to see these places in person because they are mentioned in the books.
Jerome:
I don’t have Connolly’s in front of me but will dig it out.
Just after you go over the Neponset Bridge heading out of Boston you go left onto that Quincy Shore Drive (which will eventually bring you Squantum or Wollaston Beach). A high rise condo will be on your left. Just after that there is a group of town house type condos on the left side. Whitey lived in there. On the right side across from them is where Catherine Greig lived. Flemmi once lived with Hussey in Milton but was thrown out. He owned several condos in Boston (which he still owns). I’m not sure what ones he actually occupied.