Litigating a deficit in fealty
Plus: Gary Rosen's magical realism, "tentage and a guard shack may also be installed"
Hellllllllõ. First things first, if you haven’t yet go and read my story in The Shoestring, a great outlet out in western Mass, earlier this week: “Northwestern DA to prosecute Worcester ICE protesters”
Haxhiaj, Spring, and some 30 other community organizers responded to a call placed with the LUCE hotline about an ICE raid in progress. Spring was one of the first on scene and she arrived to find six masked agents in tactical vests surrounding a mother, two teens, and a baby in a car parked on the side of the street. As more organizers joined, they demanded to see a warrant from the agents, who witnesses said used the children as bait to bring the mother to the scene. The ICE agents offered no explanation, even as the crowd grew. Instead, they called the local police.
While the Worcester city manager and mayor have maintained that the police arrived on scene that day to protect the public peace, the president of the patrolman’s union, which represents almost all of the 30-odd officers who responded, has a different perspective. New England Police Benevolent Association’s Local 911 President Thomas Duffy told WBUR last May: “From the perspective of the first officers who arrived on scene, the biggest risk right now is to protect the safety of their federal agents based on the actions that they observed when they got there.”
This assessment aligns with what eyewitnesses saw on May 8.
Dozens of Worcester Police Department officers responded to the call. They yanked organizers off of the van after ICE agents stuffed the mother inside. As the SUV drove away to a destination unknown, her daughter ran after it. WPD officers tackled the daughter to the ground and handcuffed her. Their knees on her back, she lay on the pavement crying.
Police pressed charges against the daughter — reckless child endangerment among others — then dropped them a few days later. Her mother would spend the next six months in ICE custody, shuffled between federal prisons in Rhode Island and New Hampshire before a judge approved the open asylum claim she’d had pending review. She is still in the country. During her detainment, two of her daughters went missing for separate stretches. One turned up in Brazil and the other — the one the police tackled and criminally charged — was put in the foster care system.
The rest here.
Writing about this mess for a different audience, one that can’t be expected to know anything at all about life under The Dome, was a clarifying experience. It’s also a better standalone catch-up story than any single post on the matter in this newsletter—we’ve been so deep down in the weeds of this thing. So send it to someone in your life who needs catching up! The trial is for Haxhiaj and Spring is on Tuesday. We need people paying attention, people showing up, people saying what gives. If you hate what ICE is doing here are some people the city’s power elite have maligned for directly standing up to it. The larger the showing of public support the better! Worcester Indivisible has stepped up to run that side of things.
I’ll be in the courtroom for all of it, getting updates out as fast as I can. Going to be a significant, revealing day… for better or worse.
A couple quick follow-up points.
Ashley Spring’s entire comment is worth sharing here. I could only work in a little bit of it without bogging down The Shoestring piece. But here I can bog as much as I please. So here’s everything from Ashley that didn’t make the cut:
We are in unprecedented times where Americans are literally under physical attack by a well-funded and undertrained interior military force that is serving a white supremacist agenda. We are living in a country where dissent has been met with public execution, and that is not hyperbolic. That is the truth. So to ignore the current moment really obfuscates the question of law and order. Who does it apply to? Who is getting justice by Etel being convicted of a crime?
Back in March, months before Eureka St. I made a phone call to then PR officer Sgt. Murtha in hopes of opening up a line of communication so rapid responders like myself could better coordinate our response to suspicious vehicles and my messages went unanswered. In the almost year since then the WPD has done nothing to show the community they serve that they want to work with them to keep them safe from harm. It reeks. Nobody needs to say it out loud for the people to recognize where WPD allegiance is. It’s that brotherhood mentality that consistently separates the “us” from the “them”, and that is unfortunately an impenetrable bond, even when community safety is at stake. It’s on the council to demand the community be let into the public safety process. Let the people play a role in the keeping of their community. It can’t be left completely up to an institution that has undeniably lost its purpose.
It reeks! Here’s a little video evidence to back Ashley’s “brotherhood” point up.
Another thing there was no good way to cover in a straight news story: the exchange I had reaching out to Sullivan’s office for comment. I asked...
The demand from demonstrators was that DA Sullivan drop the charges against Etel Haxhiaj and Ashley Spring, the two Worcester women who stood up to ICE & tried to prevent an illegal deportation in May. Does the office want to comment on this demand?
And Melissa Suppel, a spokesperson for David Sullivan, responded...
We would like to clarify that the criminal charges against both defendants stem not from their demonstration against ICE, but rather, from their alleged assaults upon two Worcester Police Officers.
Like, no, Melissa. If there was no “demonstration” against ICE on May 8 there would be no charges. It’s just patently wrong to say the charges “stem not from” the action against ICE. To accept the distinction is to willfully misunderstand the situation. And that’s why I wanted to highlight it. The comment neatly captures a compartmentalization, sociopathic in the clinical sense, that so many people have defaulted to when they speak about this case. To force a line where there isn’t one between the police and ICE on that day... when they were so obviously one in the same. Advance patrol and backup...
Listen, there’s reality and then there’s this other place you have to port yourself over to in order to defend the police in their most indefensible moments. The nature of this case makes it tough for people to hide that porting process. You can see, in real time, the eyes glaze over. They enter a state of total deference to authority, sublimating reality to make room for it. Debord put it best: “Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in which whatever has previously happened is determined solely by its police.” (A quote so nice I’ve dropped it twice.)
This compartmentalization is a conscious move, thus cynical, or a subconscious move, thus cowardly. Either way the result is the same. The fealty is expressed. So much of the tortured lexicon, the vague dislocation of subject and object, the passive voice, the cultish worship and jingoistic flag waving that come with “the blue” and the backing of it—all the “thank you WPD 🙏” Facebook comments on poverty crime press releases—can be boiled down to the basic premise of fealty. Statements like Melissa’s, trials like the one we’re about to see, have much to do with this expression of fealty and little to do with justice.
What the state is really litigating here is a deficit in fealty to the police.
Way back in 2024, after he barked at the city council like some feral dog, his pack lining the balcony behind him baring teeth at that awful post-DOJ meeting, I presented a theory that Thomas Duffy is the most powerful person in the city...
The polite and naive owner of a large rabid dog. That’s the best way to think about Eric Batista in this situation. The dog is mad. And we’re all on the other side of the fence, eyeing it. Rationally, we know the dog has an owner. And owners put leashes on their dogs. Right? But, come to think of it… have we ever seen this particular owner try to leash this particular dog? Does he even own a leash?
The theory’s borne out each and every time someone adopts this posture of willful misunderstanding. Not one attempt at leashing has been made—not when Duffy spent the time and freedom afforded by his $200,000+ city salary to campaign against Haxhiaj directly, not when he showed up to her court dates with his service weapon and have a private conference with the special prosecutor, not when he basically (allegedly, by others, not me) used city platforms to issue his own press release attacking This Week In Worcester, not when he sued Tom Marino for $10,000,000 because Tom reported the truth. No leash! A posture of total deference to the obvious chaos agent in this long, convoluted story.
We’ve seen so many people adopt this posture in different ways and next week we will see so many more. The closer they are to power—either in elected office or in the amorphous milieu of political operatives, careerist climbers, speculators and media sycophants we call the “inner circle”—the more likely they are to adopt such a posture. The more they’re expected to. The more it threatens the whole thing should one of them decide, on moral grounds, not to do so.
When someone with some real power, who “matters” in the social calculus of the inner circle, deviates from an inner circle norm, the whole thing comes cracking down on them. Most don’t ever dare, especially on such a load-bearing norm as the one in question: treating the police like a caste above the rest of us, as defacto benevolent, as beyond reproach.
That, ultimately, is what this long post-Eureka saga is about, why Etel Haxhiaj has been made to bear the brunt of seemingly all hostilities toward progressives for the better part of a year. The police behaved monstrously in a spectacular way on May 8. The entire world watched. It was like every criticism in the DOJ report came to life in that moment. When they ripped crying women off ICE’s van. When they slammed a sobbing teenager to the ground then perp walked her for a quarter mile. And right next to them, in the same clips on Fox and CNN, were a few dozen community members who saw their neighbor getting kidnapped for no reason by some goons in masks and tactical vests and did what they could to stop it from happening. For those unable, even then, to deviate from blind fealty to the police department, the only course of action was to twist themselves into willfully swallowing the lie that these community members were a mob. And in the middle of that mob was a person with some modicum of power and another looking to gain some. So it was natural, then, that Etel Haxhiaj and Ashley Spring were the top targets. And so when the most feral and powerful cop on the force locked onto them, the whole inner circle blob either looked the other way or they cheered, disposition depending. As is evident by the fact these sham charges are going to a jury trial, no one had the power—or, if they did, the political will—to stop Thomas Duffy’s rampage.
On Tuesday it comes to its conclusion. Six1 people are going to look at a few seconds of footage that almost, when slowed down, looks like Haxhiaj touched officer Shauna McGuirk with intent on the arm. From a magistrate hearing we know the precise moment prosecutor Steven Gagne plans to go with. It happens at 11:22. They’re going to look at that, then they’re going to look at the four other available angles, which show she didn’t. McGuirk’s own perspective makes the charge against Haxhiaj look most absurd.
And they’ll see it from Officer Rozier’s camera, which catches the moment with clarity: McGuirk clearly initiates contact, stepping forward to grab a stationary Haxhiaj by the collar and throw her.
Just two of five different angles (Lugo, Hanlon, Riley) that show, if anything, McGuirk assaulted Haxhiaj. People watching these clips for the first time could be forgiven for thinking this is what all the fuss is about? It is baffling and embarrassing and an indictment of our city that it’s been allowed to go on.
Then a judge is going to ask twelve random people to agree that a mother who stood up to ICE—in this moment when standing up to ICE is the national cause célèbre—deserves to go to jail for up to 2.5 years because, in the process of trying to protect her neighbor and constituent from ICE, she got grabbed and thrown by a cop and that’s assault, when you get grabbed and thrown, the state will argue.
It’s telling that Officer McGuirk is nowhere near this—she didn’t even write a police report, and has so far offered no testimony whatsoever. If it were me, I’d find it too embarrassing. To look at the footage and say yes that’s assault while the tape shows you’re in the process of assaulting someone...
Duffy put us in this position. The feds declined to charge for a reason. The chief didn’t want to for a reason. Early found a conflict of interest to hide behind and recused himself for a reason. In the tunnel vision of Duffy’s rampage, he’s walked the department into the position where the sensitivities and weaknesses and expected special treatment of the law enforcement community are out front, directly in the spotlight. People will start to see this long hissy fit for what it is. They might find it difficult to reconcile the reality on display with their adoration of the police. Some may start to wonder how many other assault and battery charges against police officers are as flimsy as this one. Some might, like me, look into how many times the charge gets used. They might find it’s issued thousands of times annually across the state. Hundreds of times in Worcester county.
They might try to figure out how often people are found guilty. They might struggle to find that data, then learn, after a few calls to different state offices, that no one tracks it, really. There’s no reliable data on dispositions! How many such cases go to trial, or what the outcomes of those trials are, that’s not data apparently worth logging. And then they might read an academic paper or two and find it’s basically an open secret jury trials for low level offenses do not happen. Like, ever. And that prosecutors offer an easier way out, via charge stacking and deals and intimidation and squishy legal carve outs like “continued without a finding,” and it’s gotten so almost everyone takes that easy road. And the easy road taken over and over by most everyone for decades establishes a precedent for the police: they can press charges on a safe assumption the merit of those charges will never be publicly litigated. And so the definition of what constitutes something like “assault” creeps by inches. And we wind up litigating “touching however slight” as Judge Janet McGuiggan put it. Water from a baby’s bottle becomes a weapon.
To take these charges to trial is not just brave and righteous, it’s illuminating—it offers us a rare glimpse into otherwise dark corners of the justice system, where the black mold grows and the air is dank and still and no one’s bothered to plaster over the old ugly foundation.
See you on Tuesday. Go Pats also lol
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—I think I need to partner up with someone who’s willing to basically do the project of transferring this newsletter from Substack to Ghost for me. Every time I think about it I get too overwhelmed. Need to put it in god’s hands. If you would like to take on that project hit me up billshaner at subtack dot com and let’s talk. While I can offer some compensation ideally I’m looking for someone interested in a labor of love haha
—Also don’t say I never did anything for ya: the Dead of Winter horror film festival at the DCU Center later this month is going to be a good time if organizer and man about town John Keough is to be believed, and he’s a trustworthy sorta guy! So he’s trusting me to trust you with a discount code on passes for Worcester Sucks readers. Keough:
If you are going to Dead of Winter get your tickets soon. Here’s a discount code: BLIZZARD gets you 10% off. I cannot guarantee there will be tickets at the door, so ASAP!
Logo this year is pretty sick also...
Talk about Wolves In The Throne Room!
—Today god bless them the Worcester Education Justice Alliance is competing with Tommy Brady 2.0. A great group to get involved with if you care about WPS!
Now for just a few more things: Batista’s ICE executive order, the lack of political will to divest from Signature Aviation, Gary Rosen frolicking... A stuffed post this week but sometimes it be like that.
ICE Out The Lot
To a surprisingly large amount of fanfare (5,000 likes on Instagram, for instance), City Manager Eric Batista announced a few tepid updates to his policy on ICE cooperation: the top level item is they can’t use municipal buildings or parking lots (no word on what happens if they do. Worcester Police have to ummm..... Not do any more tummy tappies with ICE agents?), and they’ll also share any body camera footage captured of ICE agents in action so that we can uhhhhh see them.
No word on the root issue, of course: when ICE comes again and people try to stop them, the WPD will help ICE. That defacto policy was expressed by the WPD’s actions on May 8. No one with any power to change it, not the mayor, the manager, the chief, has suggested any changes to that defacto policy.
Batista’s announcement follows the lead of Governor Maura Healey and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.
All of the proposals share a theme: they are symbolic and operate on a self-diminishing concept of what a municipality or even a state government can do. What’s more interesting is what isn’t in these plans. On the state level, glaringly, we see it in the fact Governor Maura Healey left the Department of Corrections’ formal 287(g) agreement with ICE intact.
There remain two elephants in the room:
1. How much our data systems, especially in the “public safety” space, kick info up the chain to ICE that they then use to make deportation decisions
2. The unwillingness to tell the cops not to help ICE
On point one, I learned this week that every single police department in the state shares information with ICE via a database manager provided by Soundthinking, formerly Shotspotter, called Coplink X or CrimeTracer in different documents. Every department was integrated into this obscure dragnet via a statewide contract signed in 2022. Per an announcement of that statewide deal from the company:
Coplink X is an investigative search engine and analytics tool that has amassed the largest database of police agency data in the United States to accelerate crime solving and was acquired by ShotSpotter in January 2022 when the company purchased Forensic Logic. The system will be accessible to all members of local, county and state-level law enforcement throughout Massachusetts.
In 2018, an investigation by The Appeal revealed that ICE uses Coplink to mine the minutiae of data kept by local police.
The software ingests local police databases, allowing users to map out people’s social networks and browse data that could include their countries of origin, license plate numbers, home addresses, alleged gang membership records, and more.
At that time, only 25 police departments had coplink accounts. Now, every single department uses it! Worcester and every town around Worcester.
The constantly updated police records in COPLINK, arising from day-to-day police encounters, can be indispensable for ICE HSI agents, who often need to find addresses, cars, phone numbers, and associates that are not necessarily housed in federal or private sector databases, according to Massachusetts police and former ICE agents interviewed by The Appeal. They can help ICE officers conduct background research on employees before a workplace enforcement action or when planning logistics for a gang raid.
Some other good reading / watching on the subject.
—The Sludge: The Companies Behind ICE (Westborough and Fitchburg ties)
404 Media: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid
—Free Press (the good one): DHS Is Expanding Domestic Surveillance While Targeting Efforts to Document and Dissent | Free Press
—If I had more time I’d follow up on the fact I found out Auburn PD ran searches for ICE in the Flock database in 2024 — haha lol
“Tentage and a guard shack may also be installed.”
Now to Signature Aviation and the city’s pension fund, a dirty investment in the deportation machine I wrote about a few weeks ago. The way this went down is much more indicative of our city government’s temerity when it comes to ICE than any statement about who gets to use what parking lot. But pension funds are dry and tough to talk about, so let’s start with another kind of investment deal with fascism our city may find itself in.
Consider a hypothetical but increasingly likely future scenario: DHS pays cash for a piece of land or an “under-utilized property”—like say the Krocks’ massive weed garden next to the Walgreens on Park Ave—with plans to build a “detention facility” for ICE abductees.
What will our council do? They will do exactly what the city council of Surprise AZ has done since that very thing happened there, recent;y: nothing, uncomfortably. Read this story in Welcome to Hell World and tell me it doesn’t sound familiar.
By the end of the night, 160 residents had signed up to speak about the possible ICE facility. The two that offered support for the warehouse being constructed into a concentration camp were met with loud boos. When the Surprise mayor attempted to silence the crowd in the name of “decorum,” they booed him too.
Short of the sudden appearance of a real opposition party that would take decades to build at this point the Trump Administration’s deportation machine will hum along at an escalating pace, getting all the money it needs to hit its arbitrary quotas. This will necessarily require a rapid increase in detention capacity, meaning the DHS will be throwing the absurd cash it has on hand on properties it can quickly convert: large warehouses (when the AI bubble bursts, think of all the data centers) and large empty lots. Worcester has no shortage of both empty lots and underutilized warehouses. Think of the former Greendale Mall, of Amazon selling it off to DHS to curry favor for some contract—an open air bribe, just like the Melania movie—accomplished with the blasé ease the company demonstrated by building the warehouse then leaving it empty for a few years without ever saying why. Take your mind’s eye right across the street to the St. Gobain lot. Think of what an agency with the power to ignore zoning regulations could do with that massive tract of land with highway and rail access that the rest of us couldn’t. Think about the Webster Street warehouses. Christ, think about all the buildings downtown that are on the verge of falling apart and are otherwise vacant.
Look to Merrimack, NH, where DHS is in talks with local authorities to buy a 43-acre warehouse property, according to documents unearthed by the ACLU of New Hampshire. A proposal sent to a state agency on Jan 12 lists some of the alterations they’re thinking about: “Tentage and a guard shack may also be installed.”
The town published ICE’s response to their inquiry. The agency is “reviewing its detention structure and acquisition strategy to address a historic operational tempo and increasing arrests.”
Historic operational tempo. This shit is too on the nose, man.
Having covered the “trains run on time” stereotype rather tastelessly the statement takes out the long knives: “Due to the heightened threat environment, and the unprecedented opposition being thrown up by the Left against ICE’s efforts to effectuate mass deportations, ICE is unable to share details about any upcoming expansion in New Hampshire or elsewhere.”
Do you think Worcester City Hall is equipped to deal with a similar situation? Let’s turn to the council meeting Tuesday to see. The matter of the city’s pension fund having $15 million invested in ICE’s deportation machine via the private airline operations company Signature Aviation was on the agenda. In a report to the council responding to then-Councilor Etel Haxhiaj’s order last May, the auditor wrote that the fund accounts for 1 percent of the pension fund, but divesting from it would nevertheless be “a large financial loss” that would be “averse to the interests of the system” and thus illegal under laws outlining fiduciary responsibility—the concept that more than any other will finally cook the human race in its own juices.
At the meeting, the mayor tried to skip right past the order, accepting it in a hardly noticeable bulk motion. Councilor Rob Bilotta flagged it, however, and asked the auditor if we couldn’t divest from the fund.
“It’s considered an illiquid asset,” the auditor said. “There’s not a market out there to sell it.”
Except there is. There’s a massive secondary market for buying up limited partnerships in private equity funds. Stearns made no mention of this secondary market, instead saying as if a matter of settled fact that the city’s stake would be sold at a loss. He also didn’t mention that selling off a limited partnership is an increasingly common way to access liquidity, which can then be reinvested in other funds a number of different ways, some of which might pay off better. He didn’t say any of that, instead proffering the weird lie that there’s “not a market out there” for the city to shop around in. It’s funny, the city’s investment manager, Meketa, has a whole report on its website about interesting new plays to be made in the secondary market. It concludes this way:
Market participants are continuing to develop new and innovative structures to reflect the specific needs of sellers, buyers, and General Partners. Overall, there is a marked decline in the historical stigma attached to secondary transactions.
The secondary market provides a broader opportunity set for Limited Partners to shape their portfolio, even after they make a fund commitment. As part of the development of the secondary market, Limited Partners should expect a rise in requests from General Partners to consider participating in transactions they are leading. These transactions require the Limited Partner to carefully scrutinize its options as no one transaction is exactly like another.
Hmmnm “carefully scrutinize its options” you say? But here we have Stearns saying we have uhhhh no options? And at the July retirement board finance committee I reported on a few weeks ago, the city’s point person at Meketa effectively said the same to Stearns and Co, according to the minutes. Like Stearns to the Council, there was no mention of any secondary market or possible plays.
Listen, I’m not saying anything other than the basic facts of this next part: Worcester is not the only municipality that pays Meketa to advise them to put their money in this fund. There’s at least two.
A City Council that’s strong, surefooted, capable of doing an hour or two of research like I—some fuckin guy—just did, and, most importantly, willing to give a shit, could compel the city auditor to at the very least put together a few proposals for exiting the fund and breaking even. The auditor would then go to his advisors who already wrote a whole report on the exciting new opportunities in the secondary market and say my boss wants to see some of the options out there on the secondary market.
The City Council we have did absolutely nothing. After Bilotta started the conversation, no one said a word. They quietly filed it and moved on. We continue to invest the city workers’ money in ICE.
Do you feel confident they’d put up more of a fight on a property transfer for a DHS concentration camp? Would they suddenly find the mettle to meet the historical moment however they can? Or do you think they’d try like hell to say nothing, then, if that fails, figure out how to blame the people who didn’t keep quiet about it? In other words, take out the long knives?
We’ve never seen the Worcester City Council take a stand when it counted but we’ve seen plenty of backroom shankings.
Now to the comparatively light subject of charter change.
The Magical Realism Of Gary Rosen
Being that Gary Rosen is the Tom Bombadil of city politics—ancient, unknowable, aloof, whimsical and yet deadly serious, existing separately and above the realm of humans and their concept of “history,” yet still always somewhere in the background meddling with it, shaping it in accordance with his designs... or so he leads us to think.... —he might be the only person who could actually get the city to open up a charter review process. He signaled his intention to do so on Tuesday. With a long, stream of consciousness pitch that amounted to “what’s the big deal, why not?” Rosen somehow bypassed the expected round of bad faith arguments from the cranks before the pre-ordained and orchestrated shutdown. (Longtime readers will know the drill.)
“I’m not even using the word change,” Rosen said. “If you read this carefully, I’m looking at charter review. It’s been almost 40 years. Are we gonna do this every 40 years? Maybe we’re not gonna, maybe it’s gonna be every 100 years because I don’t know where this is going to go. But I think it’s time.”
His order passed unanimously, and is on its way to a subcommittee review. Mitra, the chairman of that subcommittee, appeared charmed by Rosen’s sleight of hand vis-a-vis “change” (scary) versus “review” (sensible). (All charter change comes from charter review, it’s how the process works). Mitra asked why Rosen wants to review it and Rosen said “it’s time,” basically. And Mitra was amenable to that: “If it’s been not long enough that we should now look at it, I think it’s perfectly fine, I’ll definitely be looking at it when it comes to my committee.” The mere fact of it advancing to subcommittee makes Rosen’s order the most significant bit of progress on badly needed charter review in recent memory.
For those who don’t know: The charter is a document that outlines the structure of power and responsibility for the city government; think of it like a mini constitution. It was last revised in 1987. It is an insane document for an insane system of government. It’s not hugely conspiratorial to think it was written to ensure the city government cannot function the way it should. That some powerful people may have seen dysfunction of democratic aparati as a feature rather than a bug... understood the potential for wiggle room in that arrangement...
We’ll talk about it more some other time, but the history and the as-of-yet unattempted critical histories of Worcester’s strange “Plan E” system are very interesting.
Odds and Ends
One more humble request that you consider whether you think this outlet existing is a good thing and if you do consider expressing that with the material support needed to keep it so!!!
Let’s see…
WRTA narrowly dodges a new plan from Federal DOT to cut funding to cities that have fare-free buses. From Politico: “The proposal applies to transportation agencies located in areas with populations over 200,000...” uh oh! “...and a fleet of more than 100 buses.” Phew! The WRTA has about 54 buses. Cold comfort, though: in the words of the esteemed local commentator Andrew Marsh (he sent me the article) “So basically the only way we manage to steer clear of this package’s gaze is by keeping our public transport system mediocre? 😅😡”
Courtesy Michael Lange, here’s a hopeful look at the political development of Queens, NY, a borough that went from townie crank city to a progressive haven responsible for some of the most important politicians in what counts for a left wing in America. Read this graf and tell me it couldn’t just as easily describe Worcester...
By the 2000s, the neighborhood had settled into a familiar pattern: reliably blue at the federal level, with a pinkish hue at the local level. Al Gore and John Kerry comfortably carried Astoria versus George W. Bush, but so did Republican Michael Bloomberg in three consecutive mayoral elections (although by less and less every time). Down the ballot, the neighborhood routinely elected conservative Democrats, often from the Vallone family, a multi-generational staple of the Greek community (Peter Vallone Sr. and Peter Vallone Jr. represented Astoria in the City Council continuously from 1974 to 2013).
Just a bit of “it could happen here” (aspirational) to counter out the “it is happening here” (nightmarish).
Katie and I watched “The Smashing Machine” the other day. What a movie. The soundtrack, sound design and song selections were top notch also. Benny Safdie has real taste, man. Nala Sinephro, a UK jazz artist, was the score composer. Turns out her stuff kicks ass! I love love love the combination of soft winds and horns with muted sine wave synth patched she lays down. If anyone wants to buy me a Prophet 08 they’re only 2 to 15 grand.
Ok talk soon! Go freakin pats kid
When this story first ran I had “twelve” here. Trials in Massachusetts district court cases employ six-person juries.
Im hoping the case wasn’t moved to Superior Court for a 12 person jury trial and remains at the district court level with a jury of six. I didn’t hear anything about an indictment. You’re completely correct in pointing out the unfair burden this has put on Etel and I appreciate the amazing service you provide to Worcester and to Etel by continuing to highlight the injustice of her persecution. Go Pats!
The circumstances behind Etel and Ashley's prosecution(s) are a great demonstration of why Worcester needs a charter change as soon as possible. A complete transformation. A strong mayor, elected with a clear mandate from the people. A "review" of the charter by the chamber's hand-picked surrogate, Satya Mitra, is a step in the wrong direction. But business as usual. They may come back requesting a report from the City Manager on the difference between "review" and "change". Embarrassing.
The collective lack of spine and introspection displayed by those who could make a difference and end this is appalling. From the top down. Arms in the air, head down, "nothing I can do about it". Bullshit! Ashley's account of David Sullivan's spokesperson, Melissa Suppel, may be the best example. In fact, Tuesday's "Stand with Etel & Ashley" could be retitled, "Like, no, Melissa". Thanks, Ashley!
I anticipate a strong media presence at the courthouse on Tuesday. They will be talking about your city, Eric Batista. Your city, Joe Petty. Your city, Chief Saucier. Your city, Tim Murray. And, yes, your city, Fred Nathan. Worcester Immolates.