Pants down, hands up
Cops: Hub lawyer busted with Mass and Cass prostitute
A big-time Boston attorney who once enforced the law is accused of breaking it this week when he allegedly was caught literally with his pants down on Methadone Mile with a prostitute — and then asking for “lenience and consideration” after the $40 sex act.
Bruce Singal, 73, allegedly told cops that he was a lawyer — but couldn’t get out of the arrest, according to the police narrative.
He ultimately asked to speak to a police supervisor, according to the police report — but when he further asked for “lenience and consideration,” he ended up just being chastened by police officers, who “reiterated the severity of the issue that has plagued not only this immediate area but the effect it has on victims nationwide.”
According to the police documents, cops trying to cut down on the common practice of prostitution at Mass and Cass were surveilling on Wednesday evening shortly before 7 p.m. an area where the sex workers — many of whom are thought to be trafficked — meet johns. The cops saw a woman “known to the commonwealth” meet a man on Allerton Street in the troubled neighborhood where drug use and dealing abound.
The woman hopped into a 2019 Infiniti sedan and the cops followed it to the South Bay shopping center parking garage, where the car stopped, according to the report, even though “the garage was busy with both pedestrian and vehicle traffic.”
“As (a cop, name redacted) approached the vehicle he could clearly observe through the unobstructed vehicle windows the female in the front seat who was leaning over to the drivers lap area with her head moving in a upward and downward motion,” the police wrote.
Police walked over to the car, where they found the man, who they soon identified as Singal, with his pants “down around his mid thighs,” otherwise exposed, according to documents.
The woman told police he paid her $40 for the “commercial sex,” the report states. She was not arrested, but taken in to be connected with services.
“Mr. Singal stated that he understood and repeatedly asked for lenience and consideration,” police wrote of the lawyer from Newton as cops confronted him. “Mr. Singal stated that he is an Attorney and that he understood the significance or our efforts to combat such activity.”
That’s when Singal asked for a supervisor — and asked that commanding officer for leniency, too. He didn’t get any, per the report.
Authorities confirmed that this Singal was in fact the Hinckley Allen litigation partner. He was arraigned Thursday at district court in Roxbury, where he’s next due to appear May 19. His arrest was first reported by the blog Live Boston 617.
The law firm Hinckley Allen — which by strange coincidence was in the news this week for authoring the bombshell report alleging nightmarishly bad conditions at the Mission Hill Pilot K-8 School — didn’t respond to a request for comment. A message left on the cellphone listed for Singal on the company site similarly went unreturned.
Singal over the past few years has been a high-profile defense attorney. His photo outside of the federal courthouse made the papers the most in the mid-2010s, when he represented former New England Compounding Center chief Barry Cadden in the tainted-steroid fiasco.
Across his career he’s worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in the 1980s, assistant state attorney general in the 1970s and, per his law firm bio, at one point a Boston College Law professor. He’s not currently listed in the faculty directory for the law school.