On the WaPo bullshit story—Charles Pierce, reminiscing about a certain incident in Boston (ah yes, I remember it well):

Most of all, it reminded me of a guy named Willie Bennett.

On a rainy night in 1989, a well-dressed, well-spoken thug named Charles Stuart capped his pregnant wife as they were returning from a childbirth class in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston.

As part of the plan, Stuart shot himself in the stomach. He told the Boston police that an unidentified black man had done the crime. This was a nice white couple from the suburbs shot in a largely African American neighborhood.

The Boston cops went completely wild, strip-searching men at random, busting down doors, and rousting everyone who looked at them crossways. Then, they heard about a kid who had been joking about his uncle’s having shot the couple. His uncle was named Willie Bennett. The cops picked him up and then fed him into the media maw, drowning out the complaints from Mission Hill about the excessive police response to the incident.

As The Master put it in another context, the newspapers, especially Mike Barnicle of The Boston Globe, went along for the ride. Not long after, my wife and I attended the annual dinner of the Boston community development organization, and we were sitting next to several of the city’s old-line African American activists.

“He shot her himself,” one of them said. “Everybody in the neighborhood knows that.”

He was right. The cops were wrong.

esquire.com