How did a gun-toting cocaine-dealing career thug get a $115,000-a-year job as a top aide to Gov. Maura Healey?
Who approved this appalling hire? Who signed off on gangbanger LaMar Cook being granted access to ship eight pounds of blow directly to Maura’s office suite in Springfield, as well as another 19 pounds of coke to a hotel on the UMass-Amherst campus?
Early on, Healey blurted out that her hack minion passed a background check by the State Police. But since that admission, all inquiries — even by fawning, regime-controlled media like the Globe — have been met with total stonewalling.
Still, we’re learning more about the role the MSP may have played in this ongoing scandal, if indeed Maura was telling the truth, which you can never assume with anything she says.
Both the governor’s office and the State Police continued their omerta about LaMar Cook’s background checks Friday. Such checks are routinely performed by the MSP’s State Bureau of Investigations (SBI), which handles background investigations into state management hires.
The State Police did not respond Friday to repeated inquiries about the apparent boss of the unit, Det. Lt. R. Bradford Porter. According to the state Comptroller, he makes $199,430 a year, plus the take-home car and the gas card, which is probably worth another 20 grand or so a year.
The SBI operates out of One Ashburton Place, the basement. Out of sight, out of mind. A call yesterday to Porter’s office in the basement was not returned.
If this were a normal police department, in a normal state, there is no way Porter would still have a job, let alone be in an office that is supposed to be covering up, er, investigating, the crooked appointments of a failed governor.
In 2007, while not in uniform in Milton, then-Trooper Porter went crazy on a 44-year-old woman named Beth E. Shea. This now superior officer claimed the woman, a securities trader in Boston, had been speeding in his neighborhood.
After chasing her, he shattered the front window of her car with a flashlight, then pulled her out as she begged for her life in terror. Porter claimed that while breaking into Shea’s car, he never ran her license plate because he “forgot.”
In a later decision in federal court, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV wrote: “He dragged her out, shouting obscenities at her and calling her a (bleeping) bitch… Multiple witnesses to the event called 911, thinking that Shea was a victim of domestic violence.”
When Milton police arrived on the scene, Beth Shea was on the ground, screaming, “Help me! He’s going to kill me!”
Porter warned off the local cops, shrieking at her, “You’re bleepin’ mine!”
Shea testified: “He grabbed my wrist, he violently pulled me out so hard that I fell on the ground.”
And then, she said, he touched her breasts and groped her “below the waist.”
On the witness stand in federal court years later, defendant Porter claimed that he could not recall using obscenities against his victim. However, under oath he specifically did recall NOT groping Shea — it’s odd how these cops’ memories work. Just ask Kelly Dever.
Did anyone ever think to do a background check on the guy doing the background checks?
So Porter is now the guy the State Police have supposedly doing a deep dive on the clowns, grifters and assorted gender-bending jokers that Maura Healey hands six-figure hack sinecures to — judicial nominees, college presidents, the heads of the veterans’ homes, etc.
What could possibly go wrong?
This atrocious case involving a rogue state cop has so many parallels to Karen Read. First, the location — Norfolk County. Like Karen, Beth E. Shea was a successful professional woman. At her civil trial against Porter, her lawyers said the traumatic frame-up destroyed her career.
Because of the PTSD brought on by her brutal treatment, Shea could no longer handle her $400,000-a-year job in finance. She had become a $13-an-hour veterinarian’s assistant.
Karen Read likewise lost her job at Fidelity. When taken into custody after being falsely arrested, 15 years apart, both women were rudely handcuffed at the barracks, Karen Read to a radiator.
Both Shea and now Read sued the State Police for destroying their lives. The State Police slow-walked everything then, and are now using the same m.o. with Karen Read.
Shea was beaten in 2007, but her case wasn’t settled until 2015. She was awarded $300,000 and would undoubtedly get millions if the trial were held today. The judge also awarded her $366,000 in legal fees — that’s how egregious the State Police’s endless delays of the case were.
As you can see for yourself, a jury found Porter guilty of “malicious prosecution” of Shea, as well as violating her constitutional rights to enjoy “Freedom from Excessive Force.”
As per usual with the State Police misconduct, none of this had the slightest negative impact on Porter’s career. In fact, it was probably a resume enhancer.
He was promoted, first to Trooper First Class, then Sergeant, then Lieutenant. And now he’s a Detective Lieutenant.
You know what else was unaffected by this federal court verdict against Porter?
His certification by the Mass Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) Commission. He’s all set until July 1, 2026. They all are, everybody except Michael Proctor.
The POST Commission is designed, it says on its website, “to improve policing and enhance public confidence in law enforcement.”
Is your confidence in law enforcement enhanced by knowing that Det. Lt. Brad Porter is still a certified peace officer in Massachusetts? He didn’t provide much peace to Beth E. Shea, did he?
And now he sits in the basement conducting background checks on DEI-credentialed accused cocaine kingpins… and rubber-stamps them. Or somebody does — someone Maura Healey desperately doesn’t want you to learn the identity of.
One final lesson here, for women in Norfolk County. You’re all fair game for cops to abuse, that’s clear. But if you have money, or social standing, you may be able to prevail in one of the local kangaroo courts, or at least avoid being beaten to death on the street with a flashlight by one of the local boys in blue.
But if you’re a pregnant woman in Norfolk County with neither money nor connections, you could end up murdered in Canton by a cop. And then have these same State Police try to cover it up by ruling your murder a suicide.
Sandra Birchmore could not be reached for comment.
Buy Howie’s new book, “Mass Corruption: Vol. 1, The Cops,” at amazon.com or howiecarrshow.com/store.
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