Michele McPhee Has Had It UP TO HERE with Whitey Bulger

Now, Michele McPhee has written for this magazine before and I do think she’s a perfectly nice person. But her column today — given the front page treatment by the Herald — is among the most ridiculous things in the recent history of ridiculous things. McPhee, a former Herald crime writer and current WRKO talk show host, noticed that her book, A Mob Story, turned up in the photo evidence taken from Whitey Bulger’s Santa Monica apartment (the federal government just released the pics). And guess what, McPhee is outraged! So outraged that she spent 574 words railing about it. (Yes, we counted. Our only solace is that the 575th word got away safely.) She begins:

They say there is no such thing as bad press. But I have to tell you, seeing a picture of my book “A Mob Story” among the photographed evidence released by the federal government on the front page of the Herald on Saturday just made me sick.

Ok, that should be enough to give you the flavor of it. Of course, you can only blame McPhee so much for angling for free press for her book, however transparent her tactics may be. The real clowns here are the editors at the Herald who decided that this merited their full front page. Seriously, was there no real news over the weekend? Surely, there must be some Indian cookbook somewhere that Elizabeth Warren might have made a recipe out of. Alas. God bless the Herald.