DiPaola

I was shocked to hear about Middlesex County Sheriff James DiPaola taking his life this past weekend. My mother called me on Saturday night to see if I had heard and I literally gasped. Such sad news and one never knows what goes through the mind of someone who takes his own life.

DiPaola was on Howie Carr's show last week in which he tried to explain himself. Now that he has killed himself, Howie has a post mortem. See it all here but below is a taste:

Pols don’t kill themselves, but sometimes cops do and in the end, whatever he did in those final years, for better or for worse, DiPaola was a cop.

He still remembered his starting salary on the Malden PD — $119-a-week. On my show, to describe his pension grab he kept using phrases like “perfectly legal” and “totally legal.” He got sloppy, too, obviously. If the allegations against him on Fox 25 are correct, he was laundering campaign funds in front of multiple witnesses, his own employees. Not a smart move for anyone, but especially for someone who runs a jail.

There’s an old saying about being a sheriff in Massachusetts. “You have to deal with the dregs of society . . . and then there are the inmates.” And so DiPaola blamed his ethical woes on “disgruntled employees and inmates.”