The harsh realities
It is probably no consolation to the families of Paul Cahill and Warren Payne, but we all will be better off when all this settles.
The disclosure that the two Boston firefighters who perished fighting a grease fire at a Chinese restaurant may have been impaired when they died means that, inevitably, there will be more attention paid to alcohol and substance abuse by firefighters.
That's a good thing, for firefighters and the public they protect. That is not a judgment on firefighters. It simply reflects realities, realities that should have been faced seven years ago when a commission convened by Mayor Thomas M. Menino and led by former police commissioner Kathleen O'Toole recommended confronting a firehouse culture where alcohol abuse was sometimes tolerated.
No one is covering themselves in glory in this one. The firefighters union, which honored its fallen brothers so graciously after their deaths, looks backward in not having agreed to the sort of testing that is common in other big-city departments. The city looks irresponsible in not pushing for such oversight during collective bargaining and for ignoring some of the recommendations to improve the department made in 2000. The news media look insensitive in reporting facts that cause enormous pain to the Cahill and Payne families. And then there's a gnawing uncertainty, so many unanswered questions. How could Cahill put on his gear, much less wield a heavy hose, with a .27 blood-alcohol content level? And how could no one notice?
No one came out of this looking worse than Superior Court Judge Merita Hopkins, who last week did to the Constitution what Mitt Romney's dog Seamus did to the family station wagon roof. As details about the toxicology tests performed as part of Cahill's and Payne's autopsies were leaking out, Hopkins issued an order barring WHDH-TV (Channel 7) from disclosing any of those details.
Hopkins should have stood up and heartily congratulated Channel 7 for diverging, if only briefly, from its usual diet of car crashes, Floridian mayhem, and Britney updates to engage in some real journalism.
Instead, she created a Kafkaesque situation in which the only news outlet prevented from reporting this information was the one that was poised to break the story in the first place.
It was especially rich that the judge cited privacy for engaging in the sort of gagging of a free press that is common in autocracies. She suggested it was to protect the privacy of the dead firefighters and their families. But the public, not to mention the judge, had a dog in this fight. Before ascending to the bench, Hopkins was the city's top lawyer, and, as such, signed off on contracts that lacked the sort of oversight that will be the inevitable legacy of this tragedy.
Was Hopkins trying to protect herself or her former boss, Menino, when she issued her ruling? Through a spokeswoman, Hopkins said she could not comment.
In a prior career, Hopkins was an FBI agent and in that capacity displayed less enthusiasm for privacy. In 1990, she testified that she overheard James "Whitey" Bulger's name come up as she eavesdropped on a 1986 conversation in the old Victoria Diner.
The people having that conversation were John Baharoian, a bookie; Peter McDonough, a Boston police detective later convicted of taking bribes from Baharoian; and Bob Faherty, a Boston police commander who was one of the best cops the city ever produced.
The real scandal was this: The FBI smeared Bob Faherty, an honorable cop, finding him guilty by association with the mere mention of Whitey Bulger, a serial killer who at the time was a protected informant for the FBI's organized crime squad, of which Hopkins was a member, and of which her husband, Jim Ring, was the supervisor.
When the firefighters case came before her, Hopkins would have done everybody, including herself, a giant favor if she had said those three magic words: I recuse myself.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. 