Former Hingham officer is found dead

February 13, 2009

A former Hingham police officer was found dead Sunday afternoon under suspicious circumstances in a rural wooded area near his Florida home, the Osceola County sheriff's office has announced. A 30-year veteran of the Hingham Police Department, Paul Cadigan, 62, was found by sheriff's deputies in St. Cloud, three days after he was reported missing and seven days after he was last seen alive. Cadigan retired from the Hingham Police Department 13 years ago and moved to Palm Bay in 2004. The cause of death has not been released, and the case is being investigated as a homicide.

The Massachusetts attorney general's office will post online the names, locations, and contact persons of charities that consistently fail to register or file reports, so people can consider whether they want to donate to the organizations, the office said yesterday. "Members of the public should consider a charity's lack of compliance when dealing with, or contributing to, any charity that appears on these lists," Attorney General Martha Coakley said in a statement. Coakley said that only a small minority of the 22,000 charitable groups operating in the state are not meeting their obligations to register and file.

Repairs on the Longfellow Bridge have been approved by the federal government, and the bridge will be completely reopened this morning, the state Department of Conservation and Recreation said yesterday. The department said it had spent more than $12.5 million on the repairs and inspections since August 2007, installing nearly 210 tons of new steel. The next step in bridge repairs will be work on the sidewalk on the Cambridge-to-Boston side of the bridge.

If you see your neighbor carrying his recycling bin out to the curb today, tell him to relax. It was a prank perpetrated by someone who apparently wanted to see the streets of Boston dotted with blue. A hoax letter written on official-looking City of Boston letterhead went out to some residents in recent days, demanding they put out their blue recycling bins for the city to pick up by this morning or face a hefty charge on their real estate tax bill. "Unfortunately for the very few not willing to comply, we have been approved by Mayor Thomas M. Menino to add a standard fee of $327.00 to your real estate tax bill," the letter reads. The name of the signer on the letter was a giveaway; when pronounced phonetically, it is an expression containing an expletive. "This is obviously a prank," said Dot Joyce, a spokeswoman for Menino. "The most concerning part was that someone used City of Boston letterhead."

State Police are investigating a rash of false Amber Alert text messages, the latest of which spread through Chicopee last night. "We believe that the report of an abduction in Chicopee is the latest in what seems to have been a spree of hoax Amber Alerts that have been perpetrated across the country this week," said David Procopio, spokesman for the State Police. The hoax in Western Massachusetts came on the heels of a similar one in Providence on Wednesday. "One of the things we will try to do in the next couple of days is to gather information about how this false information is being spread," Procopio said. The Amber Alert system, which is handled by the State Police, is a program that sends out urgent messages statewide following possible child abductions.

A jury has found that a retired Brockton police lieutenant did not defraud the city when he called in sick 104 times as he worked two public jobs to boost his pension. But Charles Lincoln was ordered Wednesday to pay the city $1 for breach of contract. Brockton sued Lincoln to recoup $39,000 in sick-time pay. He worked as an officer and at the Plymouth County Sheriff's Department until 2004 to boost his annual pension to nearly $140,000. Lincoln has won every legal battle, including being acquitted of federal mail fraud charges. (AP)