Third in a series
Somewhere and occasionally in this alternative, non-news universe, I managed to lay claim to my share of legitimate stories or subversively slip content by the producers.
I’d covered presidential politics, the war in El Salvador and later the war in Kosovo, political corruption cases and the environment. I was working for a news operation that had often been called the best local news station in the country, in a TV market, Boston, that was considered one of the most serious news markets in the country. But the serious news assignments were becoming far more infrequent. It was no longer the case of reporters being pushed to come up with real news stories of their own. Instead we were cast as actors in the producers’ scripts of stories—entertaining, gripping, weepy, funny, SCARY—that would keep the audience captive. So I started going off the reservation.
They’d send me to a happy news story of the Mass General doing a cat scan and X-ray of the mummy of an ancient Egyptian, who apparently had worked in a salt mine. So I started speculating whether the guy belonged to an HMO and had troubled getting the procedures covered. And 3000 years later he was still a working stiff. If Natalie our anchor, known as the News Madonna of Boston laughed…I was generally saved from being called into the principal’s office.
They sent me up to New Hampshire when the Old Man of The Mountain—that face in the rock—fell down a few years ago. They rushed me up there the morning it happened like it was a crime scene from a Friday night murder and as we arrived in Franconia Notch people were crying and laying flowers at the foot of the Mountain. This in New Hampshire, a state with a well-served reputation for its granite heart and mean-spirited social welfare budget, and a governor out of the high tech industry who had fled Massachusetts because of its tax burden. The governor showed up in a helicopter and with can-do spirit announced that he was going to rebuild the Old Man. Put the face back up there, where it had already been artificially held up for years by cables in a sort of industrial jock strap. The governor said it was as much the symbol of the state as the state’s motto: live free or die.
I asked him: “how can the Old Man be free if you won’t let him die?” At that point State Troopers started eyeing me like I was a threat. I told my editor to freeze frame an old shot of the Old Man and frame it in black, and closed my news report with: “the Old Man of the Mountain, dead at the age of 200 million.” Back in the studio, they laughed. It was a weekend—the adults were away. I was okay.
Whenever I did something like that during the week and Natalie smiled or enthused something on air like “that David Boeri”, I figured I’d dodged another bullet. But I would have been a goner if it hadn’t been for the Mob.
It was in Boston that J. Edgar Hoover, who had always denied the existence of the Mob, launched the war on Organized Crime after he’d been embarrassed by the Kennedys into recognizing its existence. The war was against La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, but the war turned out to be dirty. Four decades of history that corrupted local and State government, law enforcement, the media, and the culture of the city. It’s been called the greatest scandal in the history of the FBI, which has a history of scandals. In this one, a corps of FBI agents became criminal partners with the Irish Godfather—”Whitey” Bulger—they’d developed as a secret informant. If you’ve seen the movie “The Departed,” you have an idea of story. I started working on it in 1985. In between covering jugglers and sword swallowers and circus news and birthday girls turning a hundred, I’d made it my beat. And it became my claim to serious reporting, something they couldn’t take away from me…I thought.
One reason I got to do it was because no one else had assembled the personal stash of mug shots, crime stats, wise guy files, cop talk, and scorecards that would allow the reporter to tell the difference between, say “Jimmy the Weasel” and “Jimmy Blue Eyes.”
Ask me about the murder of Teddy Deagan in 1965 and I can reel off the names and backgrounds of those caught up in the case: “Joe the Seagull,” “Ronnie the Pig,” “Vinnie the Bear,” “Romeo the Goat,” “Joe the Horse”…I’ll tell you about the whole menagerie!
Note: This post is a revision of a recent talk at Wesleyan University
