The torrid tales of the hackerama
What’s the difference these days between covering the stategovernment beat and the sex beat?
Nothing.
Yesterday, in one Boston courtroom, a sleazy state judge was trying to hang onto his $172,000-ayear state sinecure after an affair with a courthouse underling. In another courtroom a few doors down, the 30-year-old Pee-wee Herman-lookalike spouse of the 68-year-old disgraced ex-state Senate president was pleading not guilty to, among other things, sexual assault, open and gross lewdness and distributing nude images without consent.
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, as they say. And what is the hackerama if not idle hands? If only Judge Thomas Estes and Bryon Hefner had kept their hands idle …
First, Hefner. The line of the day comes from the commonwealth’s statement of the facts, in which we learn that, after Hefner repeatedly goosed his first victim, “Person 1 pushed him away again and told the defendant, ‘Screw off.’ ”
Here are a few more excerpts from the R-rated statement:
“(Hefner) at one point unzipped Person 1’s pants … put his hand between Person 1’s legs … undid Person 3’s belt and pants and tried to stick his hands inside … tried to climb into bed with him …when Person 4 awoke the next morning, he was naked and alone in his own hotel room bed, with no memory of how he got there … .”
Judge Estes, on the other hand, remembers all too well how he got there, namely, to his chambers in Belchertown District Court, where he enjoyed the company of one Tammy Cagle, who worked in a local drug court.
The SJC is deciding whether to refer the love judge’s case to the governor and the Legislature. The State House hacks will need the Jaws of Life to pry the judge out of his chambers, because he is a total hack who will in short order starve to death if his snout is ejected from the public trough.
His lawyer, one David Hoose, quickly turned the hearing into a kind of Greatest Hits of Sleazy State Judges, whose numbers are legion. There was talk of some being “basically crooks,” while others were bagged for “public racism and urination, drunkenness … OUI.”
“Was he driving in the courthouse?” Justice Kimberly Budd asked at one point, after Hoose kept listing off one reprobate drunk-driving hack judge after another.
But almost none of them were removed, Hoose whined.
Hoose kept saying that despite the fact that his despicable client had sex in the courthouse from a subordinate, he had not committed “any actual impropriety.”
Finally, Justice Budd called him out on that one too:
“You’re not actually arguing that there was no ‘actual impropriety,’ are you?”
Hoose countered that everything in the drug court was done “in a collaborative manner.”
“There is no evidence,” Hoose said, “that Justice Estes was favoring the position of Ms. Cagle.” I’ll say there isn’t.
“He is a superlative judge,” Hoose said, “an exemplary judge.”
That’s the problem, of course. As I always say, it’s not that all state judges are bums, it’s just that 98 percent of them who give such a bad name to the on-thelevel 2 percent.
Doesn’t matter, though, if you’re talking State House or courthouse – they’re both dens of corruption and indolence.
It’s enough to make taxpayers with real jobs shout at all the hacks the same thing Person 1 yelled at 68-year-old Sen. Rosenberg’s 30-year-old husband:
“Screw off!”