Good career move, Turtleboy.
In case you missed it, Aiden Kearney, the local blogger better known as Turtleboy, was arrested by the State Police Wednesday.
It’s no fun getting lugged, but this is one of those times when every knock is a boost. This pinch will ultimately be a major resume enhancer for Turtleboy, because now he’s got videotape to shop around Hollywood.
Kearney, a 41-year-old former school teacher from Holden, was recorded doing the perp walk into a local district court, flanked by flabby, jack-booted troopers.
He was handcuffed behind his back — the mark of any Serious Journalist in a future streaming docudrama that is, as they say, Ripped from the Headlines.
And it wasn’t shot by some fanboy on a shaky, out-of-focus cell phone — it was on local TV news.
That is like money in the bank when you are trying to negotiate a deal with somebody like Netflix — it shows you’re getting the job done, whatever the job is.
The charges against Kearney are “witness intimidation.” But as one of TB’s fellow guerilla reporters, Robert Bastille of hyannisnews.com, put it, it looks more like “journalist intimidation.”
State-run media sneeringly dismiss Turtleboy and his website, tbdailynews.com, as “controversial,” as if that’s somehow bad. The fact is, for the past few years, all he’s been doing is filling a vacuum created by the utter collapse of local media.
Not so long ago, most of his scoops — and he’s had plenty — would have been uncovered by daily newspapers, or maybe even local TV news.
He lives in Holden, where a newspaper called the Worcester Telegram used to circulate. In 1999, the Telegram was sold to the New York Times for $300 million. As insane as that now sounds, remember that the Times had earlier bought the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion.
A few years later, both papers were dumped for $70 million, which was the value of their real estate. The two rags themselves were, and are, utterly worthless, by any standard.
TB started covering Worcester like a… reporter. For a while he jokingly referred to the shell of the old sheet as the Turtlegram. That joke no longer works, though, because the paper is so irrelevant now that even its faint memory has faded from public consciousness.
Then he expanded into a subject that the bankrupt Boston media no longer cared about — news.
He took down the entire State Police command staff. He reported on the COVID outrages, like the firings of honest troopers who refused the worthless vaccination, and on the political establishment’s flaunting of their own preposterous diktats.
He almost singlehandedly took out Monica Cannon-Grant, the greedy plus-sized BLM grifter who so wowed the Globe and the rest of the trust-funded suburban hens in the newsrooms.
Of course much of his daily output concerned what he calls “ratchets” — tattooed 300-pound welfare moms peddling their EBT cards on eBay, or menopausal teachers posting photos of themselves in the Caribbean drunkenly carousing during the school shutdowns during the Panic.
Obviously, TB had to go. He was afflicting the comfortable — verboten in modern journalism.
So they went after him on the Karen Read story. She’s charged with running over her boyfriend, a Boston cop, after a drunken evening in Canton with some of the local connected townies.
Turtleboy has been pursuing the story with a vengeance because, let’s face it, how long can the ratchet racket last? We all get the point of TB’s ratchet chronicles: the War on Poverty is over. Poverty won.
So TB’s turned to pointing out the holes in the murder case against Karen Read. The Keystone Kops blundering ahead are working for Norfolk County District Attorney Mike “Pass the Gravy” Morrissey, a hack straight out of Central Casting.
Of course, Morrissey has a “D” after his name. In his case, it stands for “Donuts.”
When Hollywood starts work on the inevitable made-for-TV movie, the producers may have problems finding someone to portray Morrissey. I don’t know if there’s anyone in show biz obese enough to do Pass the Gravy justice, or should I say injustice?
The hackerama is beyond angry at TB about Karen Read — not to mention every other expose he’s done. They told the judge his Read stories were “intimidating.” But in fact a lot of that is just what reporters do, or used to anyway. Hell, look at how Fox News humiliated Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Nazi apologist, last week.
If Hillary Vaughan had done that chase interview in Norfolk County, Tlaib’s fellow Democrat Morrissey might now be charging her with “intimidation.”
The Deep State sent six MSP cruisers to TB’s house in Holden. He’d just put his kids on the school bus when they arrived. Some of them were from the “Fugitive Apprehension Unit.” While he was being booked, the troopers ransacked his house and grabbed his computers and cell phones.
And that’s his problem. TB is a reporter, in the old sense of the word. He has actual “sources.” A lot of his reporting has always been about State Police corruption, and now the MSP thugocracy may finally find out who all his sources are.
Honest cops are worried. The police state is coming after police.
“Who’s ever gonna call me now?” he said Friday night. “This is just about humiliating me. That’s all it is.”
In court on Wednesday, the hack “special” prosecutor told the hack judge that Kearney had made $5 million on the Karen Read story.
“I think they googled ‘Aidan Kearney’ and came up with a retired Irish rugby player. The posting for that guy said he was worth $1-5 million. So they claimed in court that he was me. That’s the level of evidence against me.”
Next is the grand jury. If he’s indicted, the charges could be worth 10-year sentences. Ten times eight….
“Eighty years,” TB said. “They want to put me in prison for 80 years for the crime of having a show on YouTube where I make colorful comments.”
He’s set up a legal defense fund on givesendgo.com, the unwoke crowd-funding site. In the first two days, he took in $45,000. He still needs to find a lawyer who doesn’t mind going up against the local kleptocracy.
In the end, of course, Turtleboy prevails. He gets the docudramas and the made-for-TV movies. Assuming, of course, that Hollywood can find somebody fat enough for the role of the pizza-crazed district attorney, Pass the Gravy Morrissey.
Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.
