The Globe Nails a Parking Violator

My high school principal drove a black Mitsubishi Eclipse with an easily-identifiable vanity plate. So you can imagine the fun a bunch of high schoolers had behind her back when a local paper ran a story about people who repeatedly got caught speeding — a piece that featured a woman in a black Mitsubishi Eclipse with a vanity plate who was issued two speeding tickets in one day.

The same schadenfreude-inspired church giggles must be spreading around the offices of Greenbaum, Nagel, Fisher & Hamelburg this morning after the Globe outs one of the firm’s lawyers for using a handicapped placard that belonged to his dead mother.

State Police are cracking down on people who illegally use the handicapped permits to score prime parking spots. The paper of record gives us the story of Gerald Hamelburg, a loaded lawyer who (allegedly) used his mother’s placard to avoid paying hefty garage rates in the Financial District.

Hamelburg, who has two Mercedes vehicles, a Lexus, a BMW, and a Jeep registered at his address, was a target of the original probe, but kept eluding investigators. . . Investigators observed him illegally using the placard about six times, but he was able to move the car before State Police arrived to ticket him, the office said.

But last week, the po-po finally caught up with him.

“He denied that he was ‘displaying’ the placard,” wrote the investigator, who videotaped this week’s exchange, “and stated that it was merely ‘hanging there.'”

If you’re the kind of a jerk who can afford to park his Lexus in a garage but instead takes handicapped spots from people who need them, we can only imagine the delight your underlings are taking in your very public shaming.