English writes, “Bulger’s role in the Boston gang wars became the stuff of legend.” Yet we know Bulger was in prison during the gang war. He refers to the state police as the “Massachusetts State Patrol.” He has FBI agents Rico and Condon approaching Whitey “on numerous occasions” when it was only Condon who interacted with him two or three times setting up a fake informant file; he has Agent Connolly chasing Frank Salemme through the snow in New York City (December 14, 1972) which never happened, and states the hit on Roger Wheeler in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was done by “a hit team [that] had been dispatched from Boston”  when it was done by Martorano and Joe McDonald who were hiding out in Florida.

Some stuff he doesn’t just confuse, he plainly makes up like Black Mass did. He writes: “In a late-night bull session at the downtown FBI office, Morris told Connolly, “John, we got a problem. Brian Halloran has implicated Jim Bulger and Flemmi on the Tulsa murder. We’ve got to head this off at the pass.” “Don’t worry,” said Connolly, “I’ll take care of it.” There is no evidence of that.

Soon after Stevie arrived they started to eliminate the Mullins who might be a threat to Whitey. Winter and Martorano would pretty much run the show up until 1979 when a federal case concerning race fixing sent them to prison or on the lam.

Flemmi was a long time FBI informant. Whitey may have been. Whether the latter was one or not, both he and Flemmi were protected by FBI agent John Connolly. They moved their operation to Lancaster Street in the North End. They were discovered there by the Massachusetts State Police. Tipped off, they moved their location ending up in a South Boston Liquor store.

English wrote about Whitey in 2005 in an interesting book Paddy Whacked, The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster. To write the story English returned to the Boston area in 2004 about ten years after Whitey took off. By that time the Whitey myth would be well into its ascendancy. English swallowed it hook, line and sinker. He depended for his sources mainly upon the notoriously biased Black Mass and a self-important Southie gangster Patrick Nee.

Brett Kavanaugh seemed to have sailed over the low hurdles that faced him on the track as he raced to his appointment as an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court as he entered the final turn. Then, instead of seeing another low hurdle like the ones he had easily passed, he faced a high hurdle that had suddenly been put out just before the finish line. As we watched we wondered whether he had ever jumped over such a high hurdle before for as all know there are different techniques in handling the different heights.

This high hurdle goes by the name of Christine Blasey Ford,  a clinical psychology professor at Palo Alto University in California. She told about when she was a 15-year-old high school student a drunken Kavanaugh who was 17-years-old attacked her: ““I thought he might inadvertently kill me. He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”  She talked about the situation which the Washington Post noted: “While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.” She tells how the two boys were laughing  and that she was able to get free when the other boy jumped on top of the bed and they rolled off.

• T.J. English came to Boston
• Planning to tell a story
• With pen and paper in his hand
• He was seeking a little glory

• T.J. English arrived in Boston
• Hooked up with local hoodlums
• He got an earful of fancy tales
• He couldn’t tell they were foolin’

1. T.J. English while in Boston
2. Hung out with the media guys
3. The story that he thus produced
4. Was a repeat of all their lies.

• TJ. English wasn’t from Boston
• He had a chance for glory
• He fell in with the wrong crowd
• And missed the real big story

T.J. English is a very good writer of crime stories. He’s from New York City. Perhaps he knows that crime scene well. Perhaps he is aware of the right people to talk to so that he gets his facts right. He has one problem endemic to people from that city. He thinks the rest of the world operates like the Big Apple.

If all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty back together again is there anyway the Catholic Church can be put together again?

Al Johnson a top Boston criminal defense lawyer now located in sunny Florida sent me this video. It is the homily of Fr. John Lankeit, rector of Ss. Simon and Jude Cathedral in Phoenix, delivered on August 26. He tells how Jesus when he set out his hard teachings He lost many of his followers. He was preaching in a synagogue in Capernaum located on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

He said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”  Those who knew him from the neighborhood  said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?” Hearing their complaints he said: “Stop grumbling among yourselves.”

He went on to say:  ^“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”  The Jews present asked: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus tried to explain but it was too much for many of his followers who said, ‘This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?’ 

I suppose he like all the judges before him he had to say that. But anyone paying attention knows that neither precedent or stare decisis has any weight when it comes to the decisions of the Supreme Court. I’ve often said this before but just in case you have forgotten, the law is what the judges say it is regardless of what was decided before. Any judge worth his salt can find something in the past to support whatever he or she wants to write about today. Like the queen Alice ran into said” “sentence first verdict afterwards.”

Thus we engage in fictions that prior decisions bind the Court. Common sense tell us with all the 5 to 4 decisions that is make-believe. Each side can reach back and find something to support their beliefs. What we have in Kavanaugh is a guy who avoided answering most questions and sought to get on the Supreme Court to write decisions based upon what he believed. And, as best we can tell it is obvious what he believes is what Donald Trump believes or he would not have received the nomination.

Right now it looks like Brett Kavanaugh is going down in flames like one of those Japanese Zeros after the Grumman Hellcat came into the fight. The Zero up to that time was the superior fighter plane in the Pacific war even though it had thin skin and when hit received the reputation of being a “flying gas can.” I suggest it is safe to engage in a little metaphor by noting Kavanaugh right now is a flying gas can. One more well placed shot we can figure his nomination is to explode.

His big problem is that he seems to be a Trump on steroids. His approval rating among Americans is equal to that of Harriet Miers. Who was she? She was nominated by Bush II in 2005 in a move that sent shock waves through the legal establishment. She had been quoted as calling Bush “the most brilliant man” she had ever met. Her circle of friends must have been very small.

I wrote about the problem in the Catholic Church and the sexual abuse of children and young people by priests in the Church. There is a debate whether this problem is mainly one of homosexuality among the priests. As I noted before over 80% of the victims of priests were young boys. To some that suggests a homosexual priest is more likely to commit a sexual offense against young children than a straight priest; to others it suggests that a priest whether homosexual or not, when under certain pressures, will assault a readily available victim and that usually is a boy.

The sexual assaults which are mainly upon young men have brought shame upon the Church. What if anything can be done about it? Some suggest the problem is that of the homosexual priest. If that is so is the solution then to ban all homosexual men from the priesthood and remove those who are?

Is it that simple? The initial problem with taking any action against homosexual priests is not what at first blush it seems to be. It would not be identifying such men who do not want to disclose their sexuality. It is more fundamental. It is to discover how would such an act fit within the teachings of the Church.