Talk about mailing it in: Apparently Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr can cover the James “Whitey” Bulger trial without actually attending it.
First, today’s third-class piece:
Johnny’s bad, but not the real rat
The worst word you can ever use against Johnny Martorano is “rat,” so you can bet that Whitey Bulger’s lawyers will be throwing it up against him again this morning within 30 seconds or so of resuming their cross-examination.
They’ll be trying to make him lose his cool. Good luck with that.
Stipulated, I wrote a book with Martorano, and we split the profits. I get along pretty well with him. So does just everybody else I know who knows him, believe it or not.
Carr’s readers? Not so friendly. Representative (if ungrammatical) sample:
And it gets even worse when it turns out Carr was a no-show yesterday:
Unless the hardreading staff is misreading this, Howie’s reporting telepathically.
Meanwhile, crosstown at the Boston Globe Kevin Cullen has his daily bookend to Carr’s whatever.
Pretty sure Cullen was even in the courtroom.
It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town 
[…] Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town. […]
That Carr is a hack and probably feels like hiding somewhere does not confused or surprise me.
The thing that confuses me is:
“But that’s not what happened with Johnny Martorano. He went crazy when he discovered that Stevie Flemmi and Whitey were informants. He thought up several ways to kill Stevie in the jail, but ultimately he decided to get them back in a better way — by offering them up to the feds.”
So, Martorano was so upset at them being rats, he decided to become one himself? (I realize here that I am trying to apply reason to a psychopath, which is always doomed to fail, but still…)
The law of the lawless, as I understand it, is that you only rat on a rat – a kind of rough justice, presumably.
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