By now it’s clear to the hardreading staff – as it should be to everyone – that the trial of mobster James “Whitey” Bulger is about one thing and one thing only:

Howie Carr.

The Boston Herald columnist previously milked his presence on Bulger’s witness list for some bulk-mail pieces. Now it’s John Martorano’s turn to get a Carr ride.

From today’s piece:

Martorano’s ‘career’ nothing to be proud of

Johnny Martorano seems a little more subdued these days. He’s 72 now, but it’s more than that.

I think it’s the fact that unlike during the earlier Zip Connolly trials, he’s been back in Boston for a while now. He sees his family, they can read the papers, and even though “hit man” is a fearsome job 
description, obviously it’s not anything to brag about.

And by the way, Johnny was absolutely correct on the witness stand yesterday. I did name the biography about him “Hitman” — actually, it was one of my neighbors in Florida. And yes, it is named “Hitman” because I thought that title would sell more.

And etc.

Crosstown at the Boston Globe, Kevin Cullen also addressed what label should be attached to Martorano:

[A]ccording to Johnny Martorano, he was no hitman. He murdered people. Many people. But he didn’t do it for money. He did it for friendship. He did it for honor. He did it for blah, blah, blah.

Seriously, I don’t know what’s more ridiculous: Whitey’s claim that he was never an informant, or Johnny Martorano’s insistence that he was never a hitman.

Hey, Kevin, don’t you know:  That’s “Hitman” with a capital Howie. Just ask ‘im.

Always Relevant, eh? So how come Herald home subscribers got no coverage of last night’s NBA Finals game in their one-star editions today? (Sorry – no pictures. The Missus has a real job.)

Lucky for the fusty local tabloid, any suckers who fall for its home delivery pitch won’t know what they’re missing until it’s too late.

Heisty, eh?

Always Relevant? Seriously?

Here’s Page One of the sports section Herald home subscribers received this morning.

Page 2 (photos courtesy of the Missus):

And that was the four-star edition.

Once again, crosstown rival Boston Globe delivered an eight-page Stanley Cup section.

Hey, Heraldniks: You haven’t just lost your fastball. This is like tee ball for the hardreading staff.

Seriously.

The, er, money quote:

[T]he winner, Lisa Blumenthal, who lives in a single-family home with three parking spots on Commonwealth Avenue valued at more than $5.8 million . . .  said the auction was a unique opportunity to get more parking places for guests and workers, although she admitted she didn’t expect the bidding to go so high.

Guests and workers? Seriously? That’s got Herald front page written all over it.

Except here’s what the musty local tabloid ran instead:

C’mon, Heraldniks – you can cuff Ed Markey around anytime. But how often do you get his ‘n’ her parking spaces . . . in the Back Bay . . . at $280,000 a pop . . . for guests and workers?

You’re losing your fastball, guys.

But what did we find on our doorstep this morning masquerading as a daily newspaper?

The Boston Herald one-star edition.

Which featured this back page:

And this inside back page (photos courtesy of the Missus):

The heisty local tabloid’s coverage spanned an entire two periods, which turned out to be roughly 40% of the game.

Is that any way to treat the 17 home subscribers the Herald boasts? Sure, the three-star edition had this back page:

BUT WE DIDN’T GET THE THREE-STAR EDITION, DID WE?

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe that plopped onto our front porch had a separate section with eight – count ‘em, eight – pages of honest-to-God coverage.

Page One:

Page 8:

Yeah, we know – the Herald subcontracts the Globe’s printing presses so the stately local broadsheet has the advantage. But maybe the Heraldniks should put on some big-boy pants and find an arrangement that doesn’t force them to print a first edition at 11 pm the night before.

If not for their own sake then at least for the few, the proud, the 17.

(Just checked – Whitey and Crew aren’t on Pinterest yet)

Inside we get this rogues’ gallery of State Police surveillance shots.

Crosstown at the Boston Globe, it’s Trial Coverage 101 for a non-televised case: courtroom sketches, transcript excerpts, and etc.

One place the two dailies do intersect, though, is in these dueling columns.

Both columnists paint Bulger’s lawyer, Jay Carney, as a man trying to lead the jury down the garden path by contending that Bulger was just a crook, not a murderer or an informant.

From Howie Carr’s column:

“Jim Bulger is of Irish descent and the worst thing an Irish person can do is become an informant.”

There’s not enough space in the paper to refute that one. So how about this one?

“Jim Bulger made millions upon millions upon millions of dollars.”

Then why are we the taxpayers picking up the tab for this “indigent” 83-year-old defendant?

From Kevin Cullen’s column:

It is obvious the defense strategy is to acknowledge that Whitey was a top echelon criminal but to refute any suggestion that he was a top echelon informant for the FBI who used his status to allow him to murder and maim with impunity.

Of course, that plays to Whitey’s grossly inflated view of himself. He was a millionaire! Admire his asset acquisition skills! He got an FBI agent to feed him information about criminal rivals and honest law enforcement efforts to nail him. Admire how he read Machiavelli and took those lessons to heart!

It’s classic Whitey: I’m the smartest guy in the room, and the rest of you are a bunch of rubes who just fell off a turnip truck.

Rats!

Coincidentally (or not) both local dailies have salary surveys of the Boston mayoral candidates today, with – wait for it – mostly different numbers.

Start with the Boston Herald:

BIG BUCKS BACKING BIDS

Herald review shows top earners in mayor’s race

Dorchester health care executive Bill Walczak is the wealthiest among the top tier of mayoral candidates, reporting a staggering $450,000 salary, while state Rep. Martin J. Walsh and City Councilor Michael P. Ross each reported earning more than $200,000, and two others hauled in a quarter-million dollars with their spouses, a Herald review of candidates’ tax returns found.

Walczak, co-founder of the Codman Square Health Center, and his Boston schoolteacher wife, Linda, reported earning a combined $526,000 in 2011, according to a tax return supplied by the Walczak campaign.

Like that “staggering”? That’s the Herald all over.

The feisty local tabloid also listed the incomes of former state representative Charlotte Golar Richie, Boston School Committeeman  John Barros, Boston City Councilors Felix Arroyo, Rob Consalvo, and John Connolly, and Suffolk District Attorney Dan Conley.

Crosstown at the Boston Globe, the story looked like this:

Income of Boston mayoral hopefuls varies

Many looking to succeed Menino now earn more than city’s median income

There are no Mitt Romneys in the bunch, no nine-digit personal fortunes, no eye-popping investments. But roughly half of the candidates hoping to succeed Thomas M. Menino as mayor of Boston earn more than double the city’s annual median household income of almost $52,000.

Four of the aspirants would face pay cuts if they move into the fifth-floor office that belongs to the mayor, a job that pays $175,000 a year.

As campaigns clash this summer over affordable housing and the plight of the middle class, tax returns can provide a glimpse of each candidate’s socioeconomic status. The Globe requested 2012 state and federal tax returns for all 15 people running for mayor and found that income varied from roughly $59,000 to $700,000. One candidate gave almost $19,000 to charity; another donated a few hundred dollars, the returns showed.

The stately local broadsheet also included this helpful chart.

Notice not just the different numbers, but the Globe’s inclusion of Robert Cappucci, “a former School Committee member and retired Boston police officer who collects a pension,” and its listing of tax rates and charitable donations – both quite telling.

Notice also who failed to provide tax returns, most conspicuously Councilor Charles Yancey.

Follow-up, anyone?

to the double-barreled columnists here

to this Sports Section piece

to the back page of the feisty local tabloid.

But nowhere is there any mention of this from a Yahoo! Sports piece last month:

[W]hile there’s plenty of media chatter that Tebow could land with the Patriots (whose offensive coordinator, Josh McDaniels, was the man behind the Broncos’ decision to draft Tebow in the first round), my organizational sources tell me that’s very unlikely to happen, with one going so far as to say that Coach Bill Belichick ”hates” Tebow as a player.

Belichick waited four weeks to deny that, which seems like mighty convenient timing and sort of undermines the outrage in his statement to ESPN Boston: “[F]or anyone to have represented that is the way I feel about Tim Tebow is completely untrue, baseless and irresponsible. It is unfortunate that something so inaccurate was reported.”

And not repeated in today’s Herald. A Boston Globe report by Shalise Manza Young, however, did make reference to it:

It seemed odd last Thursday that Belichick suddenly decided to dispute a Yahoo! Sports story from nearly a month earlier that cited a Patriots source who said Belichick “hates” Tebow as a player. Belichick told ESPNBoston.com that was “untrue, baseless, and irresponsible” to report that he felt that way about Tebow.

Now it makes a bit more sense.

Again, just not to the Herald.

From today’s Boston Globe:

Doc Rivers mum on returning to Celtics

MIAMI — Doc Rivers reached out to the Globe for the first time since the Celtics’ season concluded, but would not offer any hints as to whether he will return to the team as coach in a text-message exchange Sunday evening.

Rivers said he needed to “detox” after the season and apologized for being inaccessible to reporters . . .

Which apparently still applies to the Boston Herald. The feisty local tabloid has nothing in today’s print edition, and hasn’t even fudged a web piece the way it usually does.

Hey, Heraldniks: Like Howie always says, when the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s Doc.

So the feisty local tabloid has followed in the Boston Globe’s footsteps and asked the court to let their Howie go.

Herald wants columnist in courtroom

The Boston Herald filed a request in federal court Saturday to exclude the newspaper’s columnist Howie Carr from a sequestration order that would prevent him from sitting in the courtroom during the trial of James “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious gangster who has been the subject of countless Carr columns and several books.

The motion came a day after US District Court Judge Denise Casper granted a similar request from The Boston Globe to exclude veteran journalists, reporter Shelley Murphy and columnist Kevin Cullen, who wrote a book together about Bulger, from the same sequestration order. “The Boston Herald and Mr. Carr respectfully submit that the reasons supporting exemption of those journalists similarly require exclusion of Mr. Carr from the sequestration order,” the newspaper’s lawyer, Elizabeth A. Ritvo, said in the filing Saturday.

Funny thing is, that report appeared in the Globe. Nothing in the Herald about it.

The hardreading staff is checking with our Walt Whitman desk for clarification.