Barnicle's Game

"Most of the people here work harder than I do," he said, an admission to which anyone who's read more than a handful of his columns would readily attest. He made a lame joke about doing more reporting during his week in limbo than he has in his column recently. He promised to cut back on his outside work, including Channel 5's Chronicle, the show that got him in so much trouble. And he and editor Matt Storin said Barnicle would work more closely with his editors in the future to avoid the kind of mess that nearly ended his career.

Well. Stockholders of the New York Times Company, which purchased the Globe for $1.1 billion in 1993, must have been pleased to learn that one of their more expensive assets is going to have to start putting in a full day's work when he comes back from his two-month unpaid suspension. It should also be interesting to see what the Sulzberger family, which owns the Times Company, does on October 1, when the five-year contracts held by Storin, publisher Ben Taylor, and other top Globe executives are believed to expire. Knowledgeable sources say the Sulzbergers were probably pleased at Storin's swift move in demanding his ethically challenged star columnist's resignation last week. It's less clear how they'll react to Barnicle's return. "We support the Globe's right to make its own decisions" is all Times corporate spokeswoman Nancy Nielsen would say following Barnicle's rise from the crypt. The Times' own page-one newsroom account of the Globe flip-flop noted that support for Barnicle among the Globe's top editors "seemed tinged with ambivalence."

Barnicle, Storin, and Taylor put the best face they could on a terrible situation Tuesday. The columnist was reasonably contrite and apologetic, if you overlook a snappish exchange with Boston magazine's Sean Flynn, who has documented some of Barnicle's past transgressions. Taylor and Storin did everything they could to make Barnicle's return look like Storin's idea, and maybe it even was. But it was a far cry from the previous Wednesday, when Storin said that Barnicle's "relationship with his readers and his employers has become untenable" and Taylor added: "Credibility will always be our most important asset." What happened between that evening and Tuesday can only be guessed. Did Taylor cave? Did Storin come to regret his shoot-from-the-hip judgment on Barnicle? Either way, they managed to make things worse.

Simply put, the Globe blew it by bringing Barnicle back. Here's a guy who, by letting the Herald catch him cribbing lines from George Carlin, humiliated the Globe just six weeks after it had forced Patricia Smith to resign. Who, in the course of swearing to the paper's top officials that he hadn't read Carlin's book, Brain Droppings, failed to tell them a crucial fact: that he'd endorsed it on Chronicle two months earlier. (That so infuriated Globe officials that they rescinded the one-month suspension they'd just hit him with and demanded he resign.) And who still hasn't offered a consistent or coherent story about how Carlin's one-liners made their way from Brain Droppings to his column. From one friend or two? By fax or by word of mouth? One if by land, two if by sea?

Mistake number one: letting the Herald get out in front of the story, in contrast to the full disclosure the Globe provided in the Smith incident. Mistake number two: taking action before all the facts were in.

Barnicle's departure could have brought to a close a year in which the Globe has repeatedly come under fire (see "The Globe's Annus Horribilis," below). Instead, observers outside 135 Morrissey Boulevard are openly mocking the paper. (ABOUT FACE! the Herald blared Wednesday, in a neat double entendre.) Insiders -- most of them, anyway -- are furious that Barnicle has gotten away with it again, and despondent that the Globe seems to have lost its way.

Serious people do not believe that what Barnicle did was as bad as what Smith did when she made up characters and quotes in at least four of her columns. But Barnicle's lapse last week should have been the last straw, the pretext needed to end a 25-year career that has been marked by numerous instances of borderline plagiarism, legal problems sparked by apparently egregious misquotes, and, as with Smith, credible accusations that he's faked some of his columns (see "Twenty-five Years of Trouble," left). It's not so much that he copied Carlin as that he writes a lazy, second-rate column, using it to reward his friends, punish his enemies, and bore the hell out of just about everyone else. His screeds in defense of former FBI agent John Connolly, the proud protector of mobsters James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "the Rifleman" Flemmi, are so corrupt that the Globe should have spiked every one of them. It is astounding that this miscreant, whose grasp of the truth is as slippery as Bill Clinton's, has been able to flip the entire paper on its head.

Certainly not everyone at the Globe was displeased with Storin's decision. Veterans such as David Nyhan and Paul Szep were reportedly happy. And deputy managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr. says he supports Storin's reversal, arguing that "in the final analysis, I think it was important not to let the wrong decision stand." Noting that Storin gave Smith a second chance after she was suspected of faking columns in 1995, Bradlee said it was fair to give Barnicle a second chance as well. Yet Barnicle has been given numerous second chances over the years.

In fact, Storin's denials notwithstanding, the decision to keep Barnicle has all the earmarks of -- yes -- a double standard. Patricia Smith, a black woman, was forced to pay a far higher price for ethical problems than a white man; in this case, a well-connected white man who was able to call on such high-profile friends as David Brudnoy, Tim Russert, and Don Imus in his hour of need.

It sure is. And it's about the survival of one of Boston's most recognizable, and controversial, media figures. Just six weeks ago, following Smith's resignation, Storin put Barnicle through a well-deserved public fact-checking exercise, and announced that he didn't think previous editors had dealt adequately with questions about Barnicle's work. Relations hit bottom when Storin appeared on Channel 2's Greater Boston and compared Barnicle to "a petulant 14-year-old." When an outraged Barnicle, dressed in sneakers, shorts, and a T-shirt, responded by chewing out Storin in front of the paper's top editors, it seemed like the act of a pathetic has-been. Now, for all Storin's rhetoric about making Barnicle work harder and requiring him actually to deal with editors, there can be little doubt who, as Barnicle himself might put it, has the biggest dick in the building.

At 54, the pugnacious, cigar-wielding Barnicle is no longer as influential as he was, say, 10 or 15 years ago. The laziness he acknowledged Tuesday long ago turned his column from a must-read into a quick skim. But Barnicle is still standing. Like a goddamn monument. The only question is to what.

Life has been good to Mike Barnicle. He helped write the screenplay for The Candidate and remains friendly with its star, Robert Redford. He rose from lowly aide to speechwriter during Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign, and to this day he is an intimate of the Kennedys. He was close enough to Tip O'Neill to have served as a pallbearer at his funeral, along with fellow Globe Irish mafiosi Robert Healy, Martin Nolan, and David Nyhan. Barnicle himself is not unaware of his good fortune. "I've got the best job in America," he said in a 1983 Boston magazine profile. "It's a beautiful day. I'm driving around. I got license, freedom, nobody breathing down my back. Hey, I'm a lucky bastard. It's a fuckin' pisser, isn't it?"

[Editor's note: After this article was published, the Phoenix was told by screenwriter Jeremy Larner that Barnicle did no work on the script for The Candidate. "I wrote every word of it," said Larner, whose script won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Also, in September 1998, Boston magazine and the Phoenix reported that Barnicle appeared to have exaggeratetd his role in Robert Kennedy's campaign. See "Media," This Just In, September 25, 1998.]

Barnicle was brought to the paper in 1973 by then-executive editor Bob Healy, who'd met him at Redford's Sundance retreat. Legendary columnist George Frazier was on his deathbed ("I'm expecting him to come in any day now to shut off the oxygen," Frazier said of Barnicle, according to Northeastern University professor Charles Fountain's 1984 Frazier biography, Another Man's Poison), and Healy hired Barnicle to write columns at $50 a pop.

Barnicle's tough-guy image and feel for the streets filled a need at the Globe, a paper whose local coverage had, for decades, come across as elite and effete. His role was never more valuable than it was in the mid-1970s, when school desegregation threw the city into racial turmoil. As the late J. Anthony Lukas describes it in Common Ground (1985), Barnicle was one of the few at the Globe who had the guts or the sense to criticize white suburban liberals for imposing their social-engineering schemes on the urban poor. He also cultivated a relationship with then-editor Tom Winship, who, observers say, indulged Barnicle and overlooked his excesses. (Winship did not return several calls seeking comment.)

Barnicle wasn't always lazy. He told extraordinary stories -- still does, occasionally -- about the dispossessed and the down on their luck, about cops and firefighters and veterans, and about the poor of all races. In a memorable putdown of Barnicle in the Columbia Journalism Review some years back, literary agent Richard Todd, a former editor for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote: "If you have just arrived from Cambodia and have been set upon by thugs, if you are stone-blind and 94 years old and the water pipes have burst, if you are a 32-year-old firefighter with eight kids and you're waiting for a heart transplant, rest easy: Mike Barnicle will find you."

But there was considerable dignity in Barnicle's stories, even if he did often indulge in florid sentimentality. I still recall crying while reading a column he wrote in 1990 in which he recalled his late father's taking him to opening day at Fenway Park. That's a gift, and it explains why he's survived -- hell, prospered -- for a quarter-century. Unfortunately, these days it's not a gift he shares all that often.

In the matter of Barnicle v. Globe, it is not necessary for the paper to prove that Barnicle broke some rule of journalistic ethics in order to take his column away. This is a newspaper, not a criminal courtroom. Newspapers are losing readers, and no paper can afford to keep a star columnist whose star has faded.

If Matt Storin doesn't think Barnicle's column is much good anymore (and if Storin doesn't hold that view, he should), then that ought to be enough. Storin's primary loyalty -- his only loyalty -- should be to the quality of the paper. The truth is that Barnicle's column has stunk for a long time. Storin's admonition to him should be simple: be good or be gone.

Barnicle has always been more about grinding some private ax than serving the public. Every columnist has his favorites, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with liking former Boston mayor Kevin White, former state treasurer Bob Crane, UMass president Bill Bulger, and every last Kennedy unto the fourth generation. But Barnicle screws his enemies without showing his hand to readers, who have a right to expect that his political commentary is on the level. His blatant water-carrying for Billy Bulger is particularly problematic, because Barnicle tries to ruin anyone who has the temerity to go after Bulger. This election season, for instance, he tortured gubernatorial candidate Joe Malone, a longtime Bulger foe, and attorney general hopeful Lois Pines, who participated in a failed coup against Bulger when he was president of the Massachusetts Senate, in 1994. But Barnicle only occasionally bothers to reveal the root of his animus.

Barnicle's August 4 effort -- coming just two days after the Carlin column -- was quintessential Barnicle. He went after John Martorano, a killer who's decided to cooperate with the FBI in its quest to track down the elusive Bulger. Barnicle quoted Eddie Walsh, "an honest cop," as saying Martorano "killed an awful lot of black people," including three women at a Roxbury club in the 1960s. "If he gets immunity," Walsh, who's now retired, told Barnicle, "they ought to put the judge in jail."

The column caused an immediate uproar, because sources inside the Globe -- not to mention Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis -- questioned how there could have been an unsolved triple murder that no one could remember. As it turned out, the murder had occurred, though Barnicle had some of the genders wrong (it was two men and one woman). But as Gelzinis reported in a devastating column on August 6, Barnicle failed to mention that "honest cop" Walsh is one of Connolly's closest friends. And that Connolly had shared with Walsh information that could have saved the life of a bookie who was prepared to rat out Bulger, had Walsh chosen to do anything with said information. Leaving out such facts is not just bias on Barnicle's part; it's gross malpractice, and it's inexplicable that the same Globe that could produce a Pulitzer-caliber Spotlight series on the FBI's Bulger connection could at the same time tolerate such sleaze.

Barnicle originally built his reputation by pounding the streets and building up contacts around the city. Occasionally he still gets out. But between appearances on Chronicle and Imus in the Morning, between commentary on MSNBC and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, there obviously isn't time for much street-pounding these days. So we get dumb (and, based on what we know now, perhaps not even original) jokes about Viagra and Jane Swift's weight. Or absolutely unverifiable slices of life, such as the one about the anonymous woman who was fired by her anonymous company after she admitted she was a smoker. (Why would Barnicle's editors publish such a column, given past unanswered allegations that he makes up characters?) Or an exasperating tendency to use words such as marvelous over and over and over. (It popped up in 31 columns between July 1, 1997, and June 30, 1998, according to a Nexis search.) Or an angry dismissal of illiterate kids in which he actually managed to misspell the name of historian David McCullough.

It would be bad enough if Barnicle were merely in the tank, or were merely lazy, or were merely inducing readers to fall into a catatonic stupor every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday morning. But it's worse. Much worse. Indeed, the most amazing aspect of the Mike Barnicle story is that he wasn't fired on any number of occasions -- beginning with one of his very first columns -- for all manner of professional malpractice.

Barnicle's nastiest habit, by far, has been his tendency -- denied by him, of course -- to put words in other people's mouths. Vicious, racist words that end up costing the Globe a lot of money. Take the day in 1973 when Barnicle wrote that a Roxbury gas-station owner had referred to blacks as "niggers." He was sued for libel, and the Globe had to pay a $40,000 award after the judge ruled Barnicle had made it up.

Twelve years later, Barnicle wrote a column that got national attention: the story of a 21-year-old woman who was shot and slightly injured during a holdup, and whose assailant was arrested after the victim's mother overheard the suspect bragging the next day. (Within days, the Globe acknowledged that Barnicle had falsely reported that the suspect had bullets in his possession when he was arrested.) Barnicle quoted the suspect's mother -- "wearing a bandana around her forehead and a sad expression on her face" -- as saying, "This whole thing has got me upset. I don't know what to think about what my son is supposed to have done. I just don't know. I don't want to talk, though, and he don't, either. That's it." Yassuh. Yet to this day, two lawyers involved in the case -- Margaret Burnham and Max Stern -- insist that the mother, whom they describe as well educated and articulate, never spoke to Barnicle.

But all this is mere prelude to Barnicle's most infamous flap: the 1990 column in which he went after Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz for having dared to criticize Billy Bulger. Near the end of the column, Barnicle recalled that, some nine years earlier, Dershowitz had told him that he loved Asian women because "they're so submissive." Dershowitz went ballistic, and the Globe's then-ombudsman, Gordon McKibben, wrote that he found Barnicle less than credible. Just last week, Brill's Content revealed that the Globe had paid Dershowitz a $75,000 settlement, hardly an exercise in standing by your man. Yet Barnicle continues to insist he did nothing wrong.

Now, making up quotes is very bad indeed, if that is in fact what he did. But it would appear that Barnicle also makes up entire characters, the very sin that cost Patricia Smith her job. In 1991, Boston magazine published articles suggesting that Barnicle had invented several colorful folks, and reported on extensive efforts it had made to track down the people Barnicle had named. By any standard, the Boston articles were detailed, solid, and well researched. But again, Barnicle simply denied any wrongdoing, and that was the end of it.

Last month Boston rehashed its 1991 investigation, reporting that even a private investigator it had hired could find no evidence of the people Barnicle named. But at Tuesday's news conference, Barnicle refused to answer questions about those columns from Boston's Sean Flynn, calling Boston a "hotel guide" and saying contemptuously: "We take care of that kind of business inside the paper. I've answered Tom Winship's questions, I've answered [former editor] Jack Driscoll's questions, and I've answered Matt Storin's questions over the course of 25 years." Maybe they weren't asking the right questions.

Nor is last week's Carlin incident the first time Barnicle has been accused of stealing material. In 1984, Barnicle wrote a Christmas Eve column that, as the Phoenix put it, "lifted the concept, tone, and several phrases" from a classic 1954 piece by Jimmy Cannon, though Barnicle's handiwork fell short of plagiarism strictly defined.

He flew closer to the plagiarism flame in 1992, when Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko complained that Barnicle had pilfered from him by rewriting an oft-reprinted 30-year-old Christmas column about a penniless couple named, fortuitously enough, Mary and Joe. Royko cited at least two other occasions when Barnicle had done the same thing.

"Barnicle usually takes the idea and theme and makes enough changes so the quality deteriorates and he still fills the space," Royko told the Washington Post. And, noting that he wrote five columns a week to Barnicle's three, Royko added, "A guy who only works three days a week ought to come up with his own ideas." Again, Barnicle stuck with what had worked so well before: he denied all.

The fall of 1989 was one of the most traumatic periods in Boston's long, racially troubled history. A young white couple from the suburbs, Charles and Carol Stuart, were shot after they drove into a black neighborhood following childbirth classes. Carol Stuart and her unborn child died. Charles Stuart was seriously injured. His description of the assailant: an unknown black man.

Police responded to the murder by swooping into Mission Hill. Every black male was a suspect. Within weeks, an arrest had been made. William Bennett, who fit the description provided by Stuart, was accused of the crime.

A few months later, with the truth closing in, Chuck Stuart jumped off the Tobin Bridge. Bennett was released. And Mike Barnicle went to work, stoking the flames of racial anger in the name of exonerating the cops, who employed his brother, Paul, and who had provided him with so many juicy tidbits over the years. Barnicle wrote racially polarizing columns claiming -- on the basis of a wisp of a rumor, as it turned out -- that Bennett had bragged about committing the murder. He reported that Bennett was a maggot who, among other things, had once shot a legless cabbie. (True but irrelevant.) "Often in error, never in doubt, he whistled the police tune in the case even after the truth came out," wrote The Connection's Christopher Lydon in the Washington Journalism Review, adding that Barnicle "followed his friendly anonymous sources into an abyss." The whole sordid episode reeked of the kind of corrupt journalism that he displayed in his John Martorano column last week. Indeed, the Stuart case led to far-reaching reforms in the police department -- reforms that, if Barnicle's praise of the boys in blue was to be believed, were entirely unnecessary.

It gets worse. Later, Barnicle reported a motive for Charles Stuart's crime: a $480,000 insurance policy he'd taken out on his wife. The evidence for that has never surfaced, and Globe managing editor Greg Moore recently conceded that a correction should have been published. Thus in one incident was Barnicle able to demonstrate a number of his varied talents: his ability to stir up racial discord; his service to friends at the expense of his readers; and his penchant for getting a key fact wrong.

Of course, even with all that, it's hard to get rid of an employee who's been loyal over the years. But Barnicle? Come on. In 1979, when the Globe refused his request to report from Cambodia, he took a leave of absence and flew over himself, ostensibly to write for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Within days, Barnicle's byline was atop the Globe's competition, the Boston Herald American, which, like the LA paper, was owned by Hearst. All was forgiven.

In 1984, Barnicle -- two years into his gig at Chronicle -- went to Winship and said he wanted to quit television so he could put more time into his column. Winship, naturally, loved the idea, and granted Barnicle the big raise he requested to compensate for his lost TV income. But Barnicle, uh, forgot to leave Chronicle. The situation was reportedly resolved only when Barnicle agreed to a slight downward revision of his Globe salary.

In 1992, he wrote of his Globe colleagues, "Missing a story seldom bothers more than a handful around here." Naturally, the column was reprinted as a full-page ad in the Herald. The headline: HERE'S WHAT MIKE BARNICLE THINKS ABOUT BOSTON GLOBE REPORTERS.

Given such a record, and given the Globe's utter lack of backbone in standing up to him over the years, probably the one person who wasn't surprised by Barnicle's resurrection this week was Barnicle himself.

Clearly, he's got his employers well trained.

The Globe had an ideal opportunity to extricate itself from its codependency with Barnicle in 1992. Times were tough, and the Taylor family, looking to unload some salaries, offered generous buyout packages to staffers who were willing to take early retirement. Barnicle, peeved over some alleged slight, announced he would grab the money and run, and disappeared for most of the summer. But the Taylors were frantic at the prospect of losing their star. They lured him back and agreed to pay him a salary that's reported to be in excess of $200,000. They also made him part of management, giving him the title of associate editor -- an ego boost that explains why Barnicle no longer enjoys the protection of the sort of contract normally given a star columnist.

The man on the spot right now is not Mike Barnicle but, rather, Matt Storin. After the Patricia Smith fiasco, he was thought by some to be on somewhat shaky ground: he handled the aftermath calmly and decisively, but he took some deserved heat when it was revealed that he submitted Smith's columns for a Pulitzer despite evidence that she'd faked columns in the past. Now, following the Barnicle incident, some wonder about Storin's ultimate fate. New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta says the New York Times Company rarely interferes with its properties; another knowledgeable source says the company appears to be content with Storin, but that was before the events of Tuesday. In such a fluid, unpredictable environment, it's not inconceivable that Storin could be made the fall guy -- ironic, given that Storin is generally regarded as being more ethically sensitive than his predecessors. And if Storin did, as he claims, engineer Barnicle's return, then he has much to answer for.

Storin has built a reputation as a strong leader, which is why many of the past week's events make little sense. Granted, he may not have been able to catch a plane back from Italy, where he was vacationing, in time to make any difference. But why (assuming it was his call) did he let the Herald expose Barnicle's wrongdoings without having the Globe do a story the same day? After all, the Globe was tipped off at about the same time as the Herald. Why did he make a snap decision to terminate Barnicle, then dither for a week while Barnicle carried on a highly effective public-relations offensive in which he cast himself as a working-class hero being punished by his jet-setting editor? Why publish a full page of letters on Sunday, as if the final decision would be based on a popularity contest?

"The leadership at the Boston Globe, when it came to the crunch, choked and failed to exhibit the kind of strong leadership which in the present context would have suggested real moral and professional authority on their part," says the Reverend Eugene Rivers, who notes the sharp contrast between the way the Barnicle and Smith cases were handled. "It's a sad day for journalism and, unfortunately, a very `white' mark on the Globe."

After the news conference, Barnicle strode out of the Globe building, trailing a pack of television reporters asking the same two or three questions over and over again. He tossed off a few easy stock replies, but saved a fuller explanation for a friendly audience: David Ropeik, a good reporter who also just happens to be a fellow employee of Barnicle's at Channel 5, where Barnicle pulls down another $150,000 or so. Inside, Globe staffers were fuming at the spectacle. "Barnicle symbolizes everything that people nationally disdain about the Globe," says a respected insider. "The ethical sloppiness, the sense that he embodies regional prejudices." Outside, Barnicle was the calm in the eye of the storm, and that storm may not abate any time soon.

It's a storm that could have been headed off if the Globe done the right thing a long time ago.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.