DiMasi Going Back to Kentucky Prison

For those of us who have had tremendous losses in our lives, there is no joy in reporting someone else’s demise.

For the North End’s Sal DiMasi, this is a month of great strain and heavy loss.

The Federal government shipped him from the lock-up in Kentucky to a lock-up in Rhode Island. The premise of that trip appears uncertain although there is the wide belief that he was sent to Rhode Island to be questioned in a grand jury investigating the Probation Department scandal and wanting to hear whatever he knew about it.

This chapter has apparently come and gone.

No one knows whether DiMasi spoke to the grand jury or not. And if he went before the grand jury, no one knows what he was asked and whether or not he answered and what exactly he had to say.

So it could be all about everything or all about nothing.

His request, however, to remain incarcerated locally was denied.

The court found no reason to let him stay and so, he is being readied now for transport back to Kentucky.

Of greater concern to DiMasi is the foreclosure on his Commercial Street condominium.

After a long period of time of failing to pay the mortgage, taxes and condominium fees, he has once again come to the end of the rope in the foreclosure process.

A Superior Court judge has OK’d the bank’s request to go through with the foreclosure which will likely end in the repossession of the property and the later sale of it at public auction.

All of this compounds DiMasi’s predicament.

He is already facing a sentence that cannot be changed and which he is already serving.

Although the foreclosure is a postscript to everything that came before, it is still unsettling, even to a man serving the next 7 years in a Federal lock-up.

Again, if you’ve ever lost your home or had to leave it because you couldn’t pay for it, that by itself is very difficult to forget or to get over.

However, when you’re incarcerated, there is absolutely nothing you can do and so, DiMasi can fret and fume all he wants, but it changes nothing and he has lost the power to control his own destiny.

I feel for him, even though he didn’t do the right thing and still hasn’t owned up to it, because he was always a pretty classy guy – no skinflint, loud mouth ignoramus.

He was Sal DiMasi, who was one of the state’s most powerful elected public officials, who even had the audacity to stare down the governor.

He’s not staring down anyone anymore – and certainly not a governor.

He has been reduced to an empty shell, North End guy thrown into the pen and stripped of nearly everything that is near and dear to him.

It is an impossible place to be for DiMasi who, by all standards, is having a very bad March in this, the 66th year of his life.