WELL, TIM, YOU DID ASK FOR IT!
Just be glad your first name isn’t Tim — Attorney General Marsha Coakley would probably be trying to put you in jail. She must have had a really bad blind date way back when with some guy named Tim.
First it was Tim Cahill, the former state treasurer. Now it’s Tim Murray, the bust-out lieutenant governor.
Poor Tim Murray. When he basically quit politics last week, he must have figured the posses would break off their pursuit. But no — first the feds bag his, uh, fundraiser, Mike McLaughlin, on four felony counts. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz beat Marsha to the prosecutorial punch.
How very convenient that we learn the very next day Marsha’s been conducting her own probe into whether Murray broke campaign finance law by accepting donations from McLaughlin.
But wait, Murray said. How dare you do this to me? I asked for this investigation.
Exactly, Crash. You asked for it. What is the problem with these shady hacks demanding probes? When will they ever learn?
First it was then-Revere Mayor Bill Reinstein. There was a lot of stealing going on during the construction of Revere High School. Reinstein wrote a letter to his pal, Suffolk District Attorney Garrett Byrne, demanding an investigation, wink, wink. Then he wrote a second letter. When Byrne got the third letter, he had no choice.
He indicted Reinstein. The mayor was shocked.
“What was I supposed to do?” Byrne said. “He kept writing me these letters. …”
Then there was Congressman Nicky “Pockets” Mavroules. He wrote his letter to the FBI. He said his son-in-law was a bad guy. He was. He was also Nicky Pockets’ bagman. Guess which one ended up in Club Fed?
And now it’s Tiny Tim Murray. We all know he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but maybe he’s laying the groundwork of a defense — that he’s too stupid to have known that he may have been committing a crime by associating with Mike McLaughlin, the former head of the Chelsea Housing Authority who is now charged with falsely reporting his salary.
In 2011, Mike reported a salary of $160,415 when he really made $324,896. Between 2008 and 2010, he underreported his salary by $391,000. How did the feds learn this? They checked his IRS returns. Mikey, who knew a lot of the boys, wasn’t going to go down like Al Capone, for tax evasion.
So the feds grabbed him on the other end for allegedly lying in the documents he had to send to state and federal authorities who oversaw the Housing Authority, and not very well, obviously.
Anyone who knew McLaughlin is not surprised that he’s all jammed up.
They’re just puzzled it didn’t happen 30 years ago. The city manager of Chelsea said he thought McLaughlin was a “reformed rogue,” but it appears that McLaughlin is actually a rogue who lost his fastball. He should have cut his plea bargain before Crash got out of the governor’s fight. It’s a lot better to be trading up a live pol than a dead one.
Middlesex Commissioner Mike McLaughlin was trained better than this. Middlesex County was a crime school.
All these years later, it’s hard to explain just how corrupt Middlesex County was. Middlesex County had a roads department, but no roads. It had a dog officer, but no unincorporated areas for the dog officer to patrol.
The county administrator was John Buonomo, who would later go to jail for stealing cash from the Registry of Deeds copying machines. A guy went out on disability for falling out of the chair at his desk.
Those were the glory days, for the Winter Hill Gang and Middlesex County. They are both but shadows of their former shelves. Mike McLaughlin looks to be going down for the count, and he’s taking Tim Murray with him.
In Somerville, the old timers are amazed. Who would have ever thought Mike McLaughlin would go to the can before Howie Winter? And his name isn’t even “Tim.”