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A Scandal of Vatican Proportions
In little more than two weeks, Murdoch's News International (NI) division, the maker and breaker of British prime ministers, has been humbled, and — by extension — its US-based parent, News Corporation, humiliated.

UNDER ATTACK As her husband is pied by a protestor, Wendi Deng (bottom left corner, seen from shoulders up) prepares to defend him. Her fierceness would make her a fit candidate to clean up News Corp's mess.

As a public spectacle, Great Britain's phone-hacking controversy, which triggered the close of Rupert Murdoch's gutter-tabloid, News of the World (NoW), is particularly baroque.

In little more than two weeks, Murdoch's News International (NI) division, the maker and breaker of British prime ministers, has been humbled, and — by extension — its US-based parent, News Corporation, humiliated.

In the public eye, Murdoch is News Corp and News Corp is Murdoch, so this loss of face is punishing and public.

Murdoch is a member of an exclusive cohort. Perhaps only investor Warren Buffett and entertainment titan Sumner Redstone are in the same league. The founders of Google and Microsoft may have changed history, but they are essentially hedgehogs who knew one big thing. Redstone, Buffett, and Murdoch are foxes. They have hunted on wider and more varied terrain. Buffett and Redstone have suffered their own reversals, but never a disgrace of Murdochian proportions.

The essence of the uproar is this: as allegations emerged that NoW regularly and criminally invaded the privacy of people ranging from celebs to a murdered child, NI was forced to scuttle a $12 billion cable-television deal.

This, however, is just the overarching narrative. Each granular development seems worthy of its own banner headline.

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Obama is threatening a medical marijuana crackdown in Rhode Island and across the country. Should Governor Chafee call his bluff?
Ten months after President Obama took office, his Justice Department issued a remarkable directive.

Ten months after President Obama took office, his Justice Department issued a remarkable directive.

The Ogden memo, named after the deputy attorney general who penned it, suggested US Attorneys shouldn't prosecute those acting in "clear and unambiguous compliance" with state-level medical marijuana laws.

The missive marked a sharp departure from the tough-on-ganja approach of the Clinton and Bush administrations. And it won wide praise from pot activists and libertarian types.

But the cheering turned to lusty boos this spring when US Attorneys, in an apparent attempt to rein in the rapid growth of largescale medical marijuana dispensaries, sent threatening letters to governors and legislators in several states.

Rhode Island US Attorney Peter Neronha was among them, warning in a late-April note to Governor Lincoln Chafee that he wouldn't hesitate to go after those involved in three soon-to-open dispensaries or "compassion centers."

The letters, here and elsewhere, have been quite effective to date.

Governor Chafee put a hold on the compassion center program. Democrat Christine Gregoire, governor of Washington, vetoed most of a bill that aimed to license growers and dispensaries. Republican Jan Brewer, the governor of Arizona, used a US Attorney's letter as justification for her push to block a voter-approved dispensary program.

And one can only imagine the chilling effect on would-be pot entrepreneurs in states like Massachusetts, which is expected to consider a medical marijuana law of its own.

Advocates across the country held out hope, amid the rollback, that a long-awaited Department of Justice "clarification" of the Ogden memo would temper the US Attorneys' newly aggressive posture.

But it did not.

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Shucking fit
Denehy and other Boston clam farmers have come to face two seemingly impervious hurdles: a safety expansion at Logan Airport that will deplete two of their richest beaches, and a jet-fuel spill from last October that some allege wiped out half of Boston's soft-shell population.

This past November, on a fair but chilly day, John Denehy and his crew rode their weathered 18-foot motorboat from Winthrop to the northwest corner of Boston Harbor near Logan Airport, where they expected to find the usual goldmine of harvestable clams. This sweet spot, known as the Wood Island flats, has historically proved to be an exceptionally rich nursery ground. Combined with two other runway-side wetlands, last year Wood Island yielded nearly 150,000 pounds of clams, or about half of Boston's output.

On this trip, though, there was hardly any live catch to be found. Instead of a treasure trove, turn after turn revealed heaps of rancid shells. J.J. Gold, one of Denehy's two digging partners, says he was "pained to discover the barren conditions." Eyeing the terrain, Gold estimated that the soft-shell clam population had been fully decimated, which it turns out was indeed the case. That's when Denehy, leaning on one knee, puzzled, looked up and off the coast, where someone had fixed a boom to absorb what appeared to be an oil spill. "I was devastated," he says. "We were in such disbelief that I wanted to cry."

Denehy has mined these flats since his years growing up in the Orient Heights housing projects. His grandfather started clamming around East Boston in the 1940s, and his father followed in those footprints. While some kids built sandcastles, young John mimicked his elders, scraping at the beach with toy rakes while his dad earned a hard living. Since then he's hustled in the best and worst conditions, from sublime sunny days, when the clam-jizz waterworks can be refreshing, to the coldest hell of winter, when diggers have to break through ice to fetch their catch.

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Raking the beaches with clammer John Denehy and his crew
Surrounded by acres of clams? Not so, say diggers.

This year, clam farmers like John Denehy have come to face two seemingly impervious hurdles: a safety expansion at Logan Airport that will deplete two of their richest beaches, and a jet-fuel spill from last October that some allege wiped out half of Boston's soft-shell population.

READ: "Shucking fit: Are Logan Airport pollution and Massport indifference killing Boston's proud clam-digging tradition?," by Chris Faraone

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Another year of crushing free spirits at our colleges and universities
Law school is not known for being fun, so some professors spice instruction with far-fetched hypotheticals. To some students at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Delaware, one longtime criminal-law prof's hypos went too far.  

WIDENER UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW

Law school is not known for being fun, so some professors spice instruction with far-fetched hypotheticals. To some students at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Delaware, one longtime criminal-law prof's hypos went too far.

Professor Lawrence Connell's ordeal began in December 2010, when he was accused of violating Widener's faculty discrimination and harassment code. Students apparently complained about classroom hypotheticals of violent crimes, in which Connell used law-school faculty and staff, including Dean Linda L. Ammons. It was further alleged that Connell used racist and sexist language, including the shockingly racist phrase "black folks."

Fortunately, a faculty panel saw through the flimsy case and, in March, recommended that the school drop dismissal proceedings. That's where it should have ended. Instead, three days later, Ammons bizarrely prompted two students to refile harassment charges, according to the professor's attorney. Connell's fate, wrested from the faculty, was thus transferred to an administrative panel.

One panel member, Vice-Dean Patrick Kelly, had interviewed Connell's students as part of the investigation. One student, according to her sworn affidavit, told Kelly that Connell's teaching style was "extremely useful" and that some of the allegations against him appeared to be "completely fabricated." But nowhere among the complaints and negative student evaluations was this sympathetic student's interview. It was, in the parlance of criminal procedure, suppressed. Were a prosecutor to withhold this kind of information, it would arguably be deemed obstruction of justice.

Connell, for his part, is not taking this quietly, filing in April a defamation suit against Ammons for labeling him a racist, sexist, and "a threat to the physical safety" of campus members. Whether "obstruction" charges are added remains to be seen.

For subjecting a professor to possible dismissal for harmless and common classroom hypotheticals, and for suppressing student interviews favorable to his cause, Widener School of Law is awarded the highly uncoveted Double Muzzle.

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Our annual look at the dishonorable enemies of free speech and personal liberty in New England
To understand just how disappointing Barack Obama has been on civil liberties, you need only consider the case of David House, a founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network.  

To understand just how disappointing Barack Obama has been on civil liberties, you need only consider the case of David House, a founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Last November, House, a Cambridge resident and former MIT researcher, arrived at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago following a vacation in Mexico. According to a lawsuit later filed on his behalf by the ACLU of Massachusetts, federal agents stopped him, seized his laptop computer, a flash drive, a digital camera, and his cell phone, and kept them for 49 days while they inspected the contents.

The agents also interrogated him about Manning, the Army private suspected of providing confidential US documents to WikiLeaks. In a classic example of guilt-by-association, the feds decided that House's activism on Manning's behalf was enough to raise suspicions. House, to his credit, has stayed strong, refusing recently to testify before a grand jury looking into WikiLeaks and calling the investigation "Nixonian."

By targeting House for, in effect, speaking out, the Obama administration demonstrated its utter contempt for the First Amendment. And though the House case has received considerable publicity, it was hardly an isolated example.

It is against this depressing backdrop that we present the 14th Annual Muzzle Awards, our Fourth of July round-up of outrages against free speech and personal liberties in New England. There is never a shortage of overzealous police officers, clueless politicians, and censorious school officials upon whom to bestow the uncoveted statuettes. What's truly distressing, though, is the situation at the national level.

No, the Obama administration can't compare with the Bush-Cheney White House and its embrace of torture, its illegal wiretapping program, and its secret practice of extraordinary rendition, under which terrorism suspects were sent to be questioned in countries where waterboarding is considered a warm-up for the hardcore stuff.

Still, for a president who came into office promising transparency, the Obama record is a bitter disappointment.

Consider that two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, recently accused the administration of secretly abusing the notorious Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to snoop on what library books you've borrowed, what videos you've rented, your medical records, and other personal information.

Or that the Justice Department recently issued a subpoena ordering New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal his sources in his reporting on the Bush wiretapping scandal.

Or that the FBI will reportedly soon unveil new guidelines that will give it even greater powers to invade people's privacy than the agency claimed during the Bush years.

"I'm disgusted with this president," ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said a little more than a year ago.

Not that the Obama administration is alone in its contempt for the First Amendment. To the surprise of few, Joe Lieberman, the unctuous independent senator from Connecticut, suggested at one point that not only should WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be charged with violating espionage laws, but so, too, should the Times, for the offense of publishing documents obtained by WikiLeaks.

"To me the New York Times has committed at least an act of, at best, bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the Justice Department," Lieberman told Fox News.

The Muzzle Awards were inspired by noted civil-liberties lawyer and Phoenix contributor Harvey Silverglate, who wrote the sidebar accompanying this article. They are named after similar awards given by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Freedom of Expression.

This year's edition, as always, was compiled by tracking the previous year's free-speech stories in New England, and is based on reporting by the Phoenix newspapers in Boston, Providence, and Portland, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and various news organizations and Web sites — including the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Providence Journal, the Portland Press Herald, the Associated Press, the New York Times, Politico, the Atlantic, cnn.com, the Narragansett Times, the Barrington Times, the Salem News, the Swampscott Reporter, and wbur.org.

The envelopes, please.

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Dope smackdown
Boston Mayor Tom Menino doesn't like anyone sending bad messages to the impressionable children of his city — you may recall his outrage over the sale of STOP SNITCHING T-shirts a couple of years ago. Last week, he discovered another sordid example: T-shirts on display at Niketown on Newbury Street, with skate-culture lingo that could be interpreted as pro-drug use.  

Boston Mayor Tom Menino doesn't like anyone sending bad messages to the impressionable children of his city — you may recall his outrage over the sale of STOP SNITCHING T-shirts a couple of years ago. Last week, he discovered another sordid example: T-shirts on display at Niketown on Newbury Street, with skate-culture lingo that could be interpreted as pro-drug use.

The mayor demanded removal of the DOPE, GET HIGH, and F**K GRAVITY shirts. Niketown initially balked, but by this week the offending garments had vanished — although store management insisted that the move had nothing to do with mayoral pressure.

It's debatable whether the T-shirt crackdown will lead to young Bostonians eschewing drugs and leading wholesome, positive lives. But surely it will spur Menino to search even more fervently for potentially negative or vaguely offensive material to banish from Boston. Like the Beanpot Tournament? Joint legislative committees? High Street?

But he's only one man — so the Phoenix turned to Twitter and enlisted help. We asked for ban-worthy items to bring to Menino's attention, using the hashtag #MeninoMonitors. Unfortunately, we soon realized that hashtags themselves — you know, hashtags? — are among the offenders. Below are some of the other suggestions — and please add your own to the list!

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Speaking for us
When it was announced late Friday that New York lawmakers approved same-sex marriage, I yelled excitedly across the apartment for my wife.    

When it was announced late Friday that New York lawmakers approved same-sex marriage, I yelled excitedly across the apartment for my wife. We just moved back to New England after years in San Francisco, and were thirlled to hear of yet another East Coast victory for gay-marriage advocates. We are, in fact, newlyweds ourselves — our ceremony last September was a windswept affair on a bluff overlooking the foggy, wild Pacific.

As a man who's married to a woman, you might think my position on same-sex marriage is a good-progressive one — maybe a deeply held belief that denying any group their civil liberties is a slippery slope, an objection a la Martin Niemöller — "First they came for the Communists, but I wasn't a Communist so I did not speak out . . ." Which is true, in a way. Neimöller goes on, famously, to say, "Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."

The thing is, I care about gay marriage because I am a transgender man, and my wife and I are not legally married.

Because my birth certificate currently defines my legal sex as female, my marriage is, technically, a same-sex one — which means we join a long line of loving couples throughout history who've been barred from civil marriage through the brute, ugly force of prejudice.

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I'll never forget the night Karina Holmer was murdered. How could I? I was one of the last to see her alive.
It's been 15 years since the top half of Holmer's body was discovered in a Fenway dumpster. The crime fascinated Boston, paralyzed its nightlife, and spurred an investigation that sputtered along for years. But the police never caught her killer.  

IN THE '90S, Zanzibar was hopping with Euro kids and yuppies -- until 20-year-old Karina Holder was murdered, changing the scene forever.

A young woman with dirty-blonde hair was passed out along the left wall, teetering on a tall chair with her head buried in her hands. I thought nothing of it as I glided by. This wasn't anything new, you see. It wouldn't have been a Friday night without at least one zonked-out babe hanging out in Zanzibar just after closing time looking for her friends or a one night stand.

This was the '90s, after all — a time when Zima was king, the cocaine was crap, and gazillionaire princes from God-knows-where guzzled Cristal amid the sweaty Euro crowd scene. And on the weekends, they all packed into Zanzibar, the Theater District club where I worked, the sweaty beating heart of a bar-lined alley known as "the Alley."

From the balcony above, one of the bartenders called down to me. "Fayner!" he yelled. "Can you walk that chick to a cab or something?"

I pointed to the woman I had just passed. "This chick?"

He replied yes.

"No problem, just let me grab something from the back first," I said, as I made my way to the cooler to rifle beer.

But when I came back, she was gone.

So I guess you could say that I was one of the last people to see Karina Holmer alive.

THE COLD CASE

It's been 15 years since the top half of Holmer's body was discovered in a Fenway dumpster. The crime fascinated Boston, paralyzed its nightlife, and spurred an investigation that sputtered along for years. But the police never caught her killer.

They never even found the rest of her body.

I didn't know Holmer by name, but I knew her face. I had said hello to her time after time when she'd come in to Zanzibar on weekend nights to drink; she got served, even though she was only 20. She was known as "Swedish Nanny." They all were. There were a bunch of them, European au pairs, and they liked to party. They'd dance, they'd drink, and if they were lucky they'd end up getting fingerbanged in the back stairwell during one of DJ Tad Bonvie's cheese-heavy medleys.

We really should have seen this coming.

Monday morning rolled around, and I headed in for my day shift at the Zanzibar offices. The first thing I saw was the news crews blocking up the street. Big microphones bounced off my face as I made my way through the pack.

When I got up to Zanzibar, the tiny office was bursting with cops, both uniformed officers and detectives in plain clothes. Sit down, I was told, they'll get to you soon enough.

Finally, the cops crowded me into one of the manager's offices. Did you see anyone suspicious on Friday night, or any other night? they demanded, as I slouched behind the big desk in the poorly lit room. Where were you at the time of the murder?

I was a grubby-looking guy those days, I won't lie. Plus, a friend at Allston Beat used to give me bottles of Hard Candy nail polish, and I had each fingernail painted a different color. I must have looked suspicious. When they finished asking questions, they started over again.

They questioned my Alley coworkers, too. Cheryl Hanson, who ran Bishop's Pub across the alley, told them she'd talked to Holmer the night she died. "It's kind of freaky to think I was just complimenting her on her clothes," she remembers, "and now I'm giving a description of them so they can help identify her murdered body."

My buddy Thomas was questioned after the cops found out he'd been shot one night outside Zanzibar months before. "I had to get all my credit-card receipts from that weekend and put them in chronological order to give to them," he told me years later. "After that, I never heard another word from them."

The cops called me in for questioning again and again. It got ridiculous. I think I finally told them that I was a cokehead and too weak to even lift up a chainsaw.

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City sticklers
Steps inside the entrance of 152 North Street, exposed electrical boxes dangle out of a demolished drop ceiling. Dust fills the light beams bouncing through the hallways. There's a layer of gray soot fused into the tiles of the bathroom.  

Steps inside the entrance of 152 North Street, exposed electrical boxes dangle out of a demolished drop ceiling. Dust fills the light beams bouncing through the hallways. There's a layer of gray soot fused into the tiles of the bathroom.

This dilapidated dump is home to the city's two-person Finance Commission, which oversees — or tries to oversee — virtually every dollar of the $2.4 billion budget flowing through city channels. If a public-works hack is sleeping on the job, executive director Matthew Cahill and financial analyst Michael Levangie are supposed to expose him. When money goes missing, they're supposed to find it. And that's all in addition to inspecting the several thousand contracts the city awards each year.

The Finance Commission, better known as FinComm, has been City Hall's unwanted stepchild for more than a century. As a state-appointed, city-subsidized body charged with scrutinizing municipal finances, the commission is perceived by many within city government as an unwelcome entity — a last vestige of ancient measures to keep Boston within Beacon Hill's clutches. (FinComm's five part-time board members, who do little outside of monthly meetings, are appointed by the governor.)

Throughout its history, the commission has rooted out municipal corruption and waste and saved the city millions of dollars. In 2007, for example, Cahill went undercover in a graveyard to bust an exploitative superintendent of cemeteries. In 2009, the commission highlighted citywide waste on building maintenance and overtime, and exposed former Redevelopment Authority officials for taking quarter-million-dollar pensions and using their positions to steer business.

This month alone, FinComm stopped Boston Public School (BPS) contracts that would have cost our strapped city tens of thousands in frivolous expenditures. In one case they discovered that Dearborn Middle School proposed to pay a consultant a whopping $243 hourly rate for leadership training. The contract was rejected.

"I'm sure that I'm pissing off a lot of people — many of whom won't admit it," says Cahill. "That's what I'm here to do — I come in every day and ask myself what taxpayers would think about all of this."

But FinComm remains understaffed and underfunded — it will receive less operating money from the city next year than it did a decade ago, and Cahill currently has no administrative support.

As a result, the commission is hamstrung. Just keeping up with the torrent of paperwork is a daunting task that has Cahill and Levangie busy into most evenings and even weekends.

"There might be a day when someone tells me that I have to keep my mouth shut if I want to keep my job," says Cahill. "In that case, I would be gone — it's not worth it. Until then, the plan is to keep doing as much as I can with [the resources] I'm given."

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