In a remarkable news segment broadcast by Maine CBS/Fox affiliate WGME earlier this week, York County Sheriff Bill King warned of an outbreak of empathy inside his jail and pledged to seek new ways to prevent amity between guards and locals detained there in the future.

King’s comments follow two recent incidents in which guards were accused of improper dealings with inmates. Earlier this month, 49-year-old Jason Gilpatrick was indicted for allegedly smuggling a vape inside for a detainee. He quit when confronted with the allegation, the TV station reported. Last fall, three other corrections officers quit upon being investigated for allegedly accepting payments from a prisoner. In the headshots shown during the segment, all three former officers (two women and a man) look like nice young people in their 20s.

That seems to be the root of the problem: niceness. King warned that “some of these inmates can be very sympathetic,” but guards’ natural human empathy can be exploited by the devious criminal masterminds behind bars in Alfred.

“They’re in there with people that have lived their lives manipulating and, basically, committing crimes,” King told reporter Sam DeCoste. “They spend 24/7 trying to think of a way to compromise you.”

“You can’t share information,” King continued, “because if you do share personal information, they’re gonna use that against you.” Guards undergo “rigorous training” to resist the temptation to behave like a normal everyday person near caged people, and WGME reported that King’s department “will explore new strategies to prevent future incidents between corrections officers and inmates.”

A current job listing on Indeed seeking York County Jail guards indicates the full-time position pays $23.32 an hour. The job description says guards must work in a “conscientious, cooperative manner” and ensure “quality inmate activities [emphasis original] by preparing, executing, and managing lock downs, head counts, recreation, visits, interviews, medical passes and treatment, dining and inmate rehabilitation programs.” Guards must supervise the cleaning of cells, bring inmates fresh linens and other supplies, and accompany them to and from all court appearances.

Guards are also trained to detect signs of suicidal behavior by inmates and to prevent suicide, which must be tricky while strictly maintaining an impersonal approach. Applicants must have a high school diploma and be “[c]apable of physically controlling violent, unruly members of the inmate population.”

Corrections officer Nicholas Raucci told DeCoste that York County Jail guards spend “ninety-nine percent” of their work time with inmates, and that incarcerated people “can and will try to befriend the officers.”

Sheriff King didn’t elaborate on the new tactics or procedures he’s considering to prevent friendliness between inmates and staff, and that’s a pity. It leaves viewers like me (and maybe you?) to wonder how this will be achieved — and at what terrible social costs.

Our need to make meaningful human connections has been hardwired over hundreds of millennia by evolution. How will this innate impulse to be sociable be eradicated from York County corrections staff while they’re attending to inmates’ every personal need and affair? Is the elimination of one’s humanity a tolerable type of training or something more akin to A Clockwork Orange?

In practice, how are guards expected to answer common personal questions without revealing any “personal information”? Like:

How’s it goin’ today, officer?

Did you have a good weekend?

Looks like you got some sun…

Haven’t seen ya in awhile. You finally take a vacation?

How long you worked here?

You like this job? You like helping people?

Why are you such an asshole?

You grow up around here?

You got kids, too?

I lost my two best friends in Iraq. You a veteran, too?

How do you deal with PTSD?

Crazy blizzard out there. How’s was your drive in this morning?

My momma made the best rhubarb pie. Ever had rhubarb pie?

I tried to think of ways to answer these questions without revealing anything personal in nature, and I failed, because it’s impossible. Only stony silence, a change of subject, or adoption of some AI persona and tone, like, “Many former soldiers have found therapy helpful in dealing with symptoms of PTSD,” would meet the standard of conduct now expected at York County Jail.

So what’s the new strategy, Sheriff Bill? Force your corrections officers to comport themselves like Nazi concentration camp guards? Lest an inmate, what? Blow a vape cloud?

How will all these inmates respond to being treated as subhuman, as animals unworthy of even small talk, from morning till night for days and weeks and months on end? Will such distrustful and demeaning treatment make them better or more law-abiding citizens upon release? Will this treatment help or harm the majority of inmates who, studies have shown for decades, suffer from mental illness, addiction and/or have histories of trauma or neglect?

Why ensure prisoners’ only real conversations are with other prisoners, especially in light of the sheriff’s belief that they’re spending every hour plotting nefarious deeds? And if someone thrown in jail can’t or won’t connect with other inmates for some reason, is it a safe or humane policy to mandate that all the guards shun this isolated inmate, too?

What of the guards themselves? What’s it like for them to have to rebuff every friendly word and gesture made by those they’re bound to live and closely work with for 40 or more hours a week? How do they turn this stony persona on and off at the start and end of each workday? And should they?

Surely, every manipulative sociopath roaming York County has not been brought to justice. Some of these evil geniuses may be plotting as I write this to get chummy with a York County corrections officer in hopes of turning them into a vape smuggler, or worse.

If you work for Sheriff Bill, it’s probably best to just be a dick to everyone, all the time.

Late last month, the Portland Press Herald reported that the Portland City Council is considering adopting what’s called a PILOT (Payment In Lieu Of Taxes) program, by which nonprofits, which pay no property taxes, would be asked to contribute some money each year to help pay for the municipal services they receive. Numerous other cities, including Boston, have already instituted PILOT programs to help ease the tax burden on residents and commercial landlords in their so-called service center communities, where nonprofits of all kinds are concentrated. A council vote on Portland’s PILOT proposal is expected to take place later this month.

There’s about $4 billion’ worth of real estate in Portland owned by hospitals, religious organizations, colleges and universities, cultural institutions, social-service providers and others. The value of all the taxable real estate in Portland is about $20 billion. Accordingly, the city’s finance department estimates that the property taxes the rest of us pay (directly or indirectly, via rent) could be cut by almost 20 percent if nonprofits paid their fair share.

The PILOT program would be voluntary — chip in if you feel like it, but there’d be no consequences if, for example, you tell the tax collector to pound sand because you’re doing the Lord’s work. And city staff have carved out a host of huge exemptions and loopholes, such as exempting the first $10 million’ worth of property value from the PILOT calculations, basing the payment requested on only 40 percent of a property’s value, and further reducing the ask by half if the nonprofit provides SILOT (Services In Lieu Of Taxes).

To no one’s surprise, nonprofits oppose this. But what got under my skin was a comment reportedly made by Jennifer Hutchins, who leads the Maine Association of Nonprofits.

The city floated the idea of compiling a list of nonprofits that participate in the PILOT program. “Hutchins said that while the program would be voluntary, she is opposed to the ‘tone’ of the proposal that would maintain a public list of which organizations are making payments,” the Herald reported.

Excuse me, but the tone of making obscure municipal tax data publicly available is offensive? A list that simply acknowledges generous nonprofits, rather than calling out those that refuse to help, is insulting to those who pay nothing? Well then, better cover your eyes, because here comes some real fucking tone…

Isn’t this the same collection of selfless and socially minded property owners who, when the city asked if anyone was willing to open their doors during climate emergencies to help shelter homeless people this winter, all said no? Yes it is.

Aren’t we mostly talking about behemoths like MaineHealth that pay top administrators princely salaries, engage in aggressive property speculation and acquisition — like MaineHealth’s $16.8 million purchase of Union Station Plaza in 2022 — and have been, for many years now, basically closed to anyone seeking a primary care doctor, while running emergency rooms with unacceptably long wait times and crippling costs to patients? Yup.

And — hold my beer — the people who own all the churches, synagogues and mosques in town don’t appreciate being asked to help pay for police, firefighters, paramedics, public health workers, road crews, trash collectors, librarians and all the other people working day and night on their behalf? Furthermore, the reason they think they shouldn’t contribute toward our common welfare is because they worship a sky god who demands they love and help everyone? Gimme a break.

Seriously, why not give me a tax break? As the owner of a news publication that informs and inspires civic dialogue and democracy, supports struggling writers and visual artists, boosts local commerce through advertising and promotes the arts and humanities to everyone, for free, almost every day of the year, don’t I deserve a tax-free space to live and work in? I’m sure as hell not making any profit at this occupation, and wouldn’t our community be diminished without a forum for alternative local journalism?

Nevermind. I don’t need any government handouts. The Bollard is instituting a new program, called PSILOT, which stands for Paid Subscriptions In Lieu Of Taxes, by which readers can support our work — for as little as $8 per month, or $1.44 per week if you sign up for the year at $75 — while cheating the murderous and racist federal government out of the cash it demands. Just underestimate your income by 75 bucks, or inflate a deduction by the same sum, when you do your taxes this year. The bean counters toiling at the severely understaffed IRS will never find a discrepancy that small, but it’ll help us big-time.

Thanks in advance for signing up, and sorry if my tone offended you or your celestial deity, but be assured that we will not be publishing a list of our paid subscribers or a list of the tens of thousands reading for free. Almighty God knows who you are, and She will save or damn you accordingly.

The Portland Police Department put out a press release yesterday about a remarkable arrest that led to eight criminal charges. According to the cops, a 34-year-old man “wearing ballistic plates under his clothing” and carrying a handgun “kicked in the front door of a residence” in the Munjoy South housing project early Sunday afternoon, “threatened a resident with a firearm, and struck him with the weapon before fleeing the scene.”

A couple hours later, the suspect was spotted riding an electric scooter in the Old Port. Police gave chase, but he scooted away. The South Portland cops joined the low-speed pursuit and brought their dog along, and the man eventually “crashed his scooter into a police cruiser” near the Holiday Inn on Spring Street and was apprehended.

Police claim the scooter-rider, Falmouth resident Devon Dwyer, had 91 grams of fentanyl on him, as well as some meth. The charges include “Assault, Reckless Conduct with a Dangerous Weapon … Refusing to Submit to Arrest or Detention [and] Criminal Mischief.”

On Jan. 21, a gang of gun-toting masked thugs in four unmarked vehicles “boxed in” a car driven by a Guinean asylum seeker on Preble Street, smashed his driver’s side window — spraying glass on his one-month-old baby — abducted him and fled the scene within minutes, leaving his wife, who doesn’t have a driver’s license, alone with their child in the windowless car in the cold. It was later determined that the missing man, Hassane Barry, a ride-share and AAA tow-truck driver who had no criminal history, is trapped in a cage surrounded by armed men in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he remains as of this writing.

You’d think the Portland Police Department, which operates two “Community Policing Centers” within a few blocks of this violent abduction in broad daylight, could have easily found probable cause to make multiple charges in this case, too, including kidnapping, false imprisonment, destruction of property, terrorizing, endangering the welfare of a child, impersonating an officer, and driving to endanger (Preble is a one-way street near a school).

But there’s no indication our police force was even aware this abduction occurred until the local paper ran a story about it a week later. The PPD issued no press release about it, and there’s also no indication they sent officers to the scene, attempted to interview the victim or his wife, attempted to help his imperiled wife and baby, wrote a report or conducted any investigation whatsoever.

It appears our local cops ignored these crimes because they assumed, after the fact, that the perpetrators were ICE agents. This is the new normal when it comes to protecting public safety in Maine’s largest city — the sight of masked men with guns jumping out of unmarked vehicles, smashing up cars and violently abducting people should be assumed by citizens and police alike to be perfectly legal behavior conducted by duly authorized government agents. No need to dial 911 — no help will be sent — and please don’t rubberneck when you see this happening on the side of the road, as slowed traffic can cause accidents.

Reasonable Portlanders may wonder at this point why the fuck we even have a police force if dangerous and traumatizing incidents like this don’t move them to lift a finger.

They might also reasonably wonder how far this assumption of impunity extends. If Portland police witness a fellow cop, or a county sheriff’s deputy, or a state trooper wearing a mask and a ballistic vest that misidentifies their law-enforcement agency smash in a car window, showering a baby in glass, drag an unarmed and non-combative civilian at gunpoint into an unmarked vehicle and flee the scene, leaving the infant in mortal danger, would they likewise shrug it off and drive on? Are clear violations of standard law-enforcement operating procedures unworthy of even a raised eyebrow? It sure as hell looks that way.

The PPD has been aggressively responding to other ICE-related incidents. On Jan. 27, they conducted a mass arrest at Sen. Susan Collins’ office at One Canal Plaza, cuffing, stuffing and jailing nine peaceful protesters whom they charged with Criminal Trespass. A few days prior, they mobilized to confront people banging drums and blowing whistles outside a hotel in the Old Port where ICE agents were believed to be spending the night, and arrested and jailed six people on Disorderly Conduct charges.

Oh, the Portland cops are real tough when they get a call that someone shoplifted a steak or a homeless person is napping in a doorway. Last spring, while investigating an allegation of petty burglary, they joined a SWAT team of South Portland cops and descended on a house in Deering Center near a school, where they pounced on a 16-year-old student, got him handcuffed on the ground, drew their guns and threatened to shoot him dead. Turns out it was the wrong Black kid. His parents, who say the cops kept threatening to shoot their child even after they realized their mistake, filed a federal lawsuit against the cities of Portland, South Portland their police departments last month.

In a statement released last week, Portland Mayor Mark Dion, a former Portland cop and Cumberland County Sheriff, noted that “constitutional rights” were “violated” and “families torn apart” by ICE’s operations in our city. Collins’ office had just announced that the terrifying surge and purge was over, and the mayor gave credit for ICE’s retreat to the everyday Portlanders who confronted them, not the cops.

“I want to recognize our residents for quickly and loudly speaking out against the actions of ICE in our community, and for all the ways in which they banded together to support those most affected,” Dion said in the statement. “I believe their collective work is what got us to this point.”

Cool. As an anarchist, it warms my heart to see the mayor acknowledge that only neighbors can protect other neighbors from heinous and flagrant human rights violations perpetrated by masked government goons with guns; that it’s the responsibility of workaday people, not police, to prevent families from being “torn apart” by unconstitutional kidnappings on our streets.

I’m reporting for public safety duty, Mr. Mayor. I’ve got a cell phone that can record video better than a body cam, a retractable baton, two fists, a popular print magazine and a Substack read by a horde of others ready for action. Like our uniformed police officers, I drive all over town almost every day in the course of my business. Unlike them, I’m ready to step in to protect fellow Portlanders and their families in these dangerous situations.

You can almost feel bad for the PPD. ICE showed up on their turf, roughed up and terrorized the people they’re sworn to protect, broke local laws and violated federal rights in plain sight, and all our cops could do was cower. Excuse the locker room talk here, but the Portland Police Department looks like a bunch of weak-ass pussies. High school girls and grandmas jumped in to confront ICE agents in our neighborhoods while they sat in their cruisers with the heat on watching real men and women fix power lines and sewers. Can’t be great for the understaffed department’s expensive and extensive recruitment efforts. I’m guessing the PPD doesn’t offer $50,000 signing bonuses.

And speaking of funding, it’s budget season at City Hall again. Shall we continue to pay for a police force that’s lost its legitimacy in the eyes of so many Portland residents? How are we supposed to respect the Portland cops when we know they’re bullies who only pick on people they perceive as weak? When masked assholes who couldn’t make it through the academy show up with guns and run roughshod over our town, Portland police are nowhere to be found. They stay mum, then have the audacity to trumpet their capture of some dopey clown they chased around on a scooter last Sunday afternoon.

We, the people of Portland, are not impressed.

What the Hell Happened

In his annual State of the City Address last night, Portland Mayor Mark Dion told constituents to expect widespread hunger, increased homelessness, and the likely death of elderly people on fixed incomes due to hardship in the year ahead.

A former Democratic state legislator, Dion made no public appeal to fellow Democrats in control of Maine’s budget and governorship, who could provide the funding needed to keep people fed, sheltered and alive. To the contrary, he ominously warned of “Federal budget cuts that will likely shred the safety nets that many of our residents have come to rely on,” according to the text of the relatively short speech delivered at City Hall.

“Our taxpayers are trying, as best they can, to navigate what it takes to buy groceries or pay their power bill,” said Mayor Dion. “And let us not forget that while some households can weather this storm better than others, the horizon for those on fixed incomes is bleak and for many of our elders it may turn out to be impossible to hold on.

“Washington decisions always play out as a local challenge,” he added, as if state government doesn’t exist. “Our City will continue to inform, advocate and be an active partner with our federal delegation. We will need their leadership now more than ever.”

Earlier in the address, in the context of federal cuts to food, health and housing aid, Mayor Dion said, “we have entered a time where [sic] our idea of what we mean when we say ‘democracy’ is under assault.”

As for the thousands of citizens already made homeless around here, those trying to literally weather storms inside tents and makeshift shelters without expensive groceries or electricity, Dion boasted that Park Rangers “have removed 752 camps from public land” so far this year — an average of 15 per week — and “have accomplished their work without the need to arrest any of the individuals who were involved in those activities.”

A former Portland police officer and Cumberland County Sheriff, Dion called for the reintroduction of armed cops inside city schools. He also announced a new law enforcement program, Urban Rangers, to “assist police in the patrol of our downtown.” The Rangers will be based out of a new police station at the corner of Congress and Elm streets, and will begin patrolling next year.

Now halfway through his first four-year term, Mayor Dion said he’s had over 280 “conversations or meetings” with local business owners and residents since taking office, and the feedback he’s received makes Portland sound like a drug-infested slum.

“Needle waste, open public use of drugs and individuals caught up in the stupor of their abuse is what folks see,” he said. “Public compassion is running low when they consistently walk around individuals sprawled on the sidewalk, witness others shooting up in a bus stop or ask someone nodding off from a recent injection to clear a doorway.”

Dion reiterated his call for community health programs to distribute fewer free needles, calling them “symbolic of the conditions that must be addressed” to prevent drug addiction. The actual social and biological conditions that cause drug addiction went unmentioned.

The liberal city’s top elected leader also called for a reduction in the number of affordable housing units developers are required to build to meet Portland’s Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) requirements. Real estate developers can, alternatively, contribute money into a city fund dedicated to affordable-housing construction in lieu of building apartments, the IZ rules state, and those payments would, presumably, likewise be reduced if Dion can convince City Councilors to give these land speculators and their wealthy investors a big financial break.

Mayor Dion called Portland a “city of tenants,” noting that Maine’s biggest burg has 19,670 long-term rental apartments. Though he pledged to improve “enforcement practices to guarantee safety and rent stability for apartment residents,” Dion said the city’s rent control ordinance should be changed to benefit landlords’ financial interests.

“While the current rent control ordinance functions to address tenant rights,” he said, “those rules are less attentive to providing needed support to landlords who must secure capital to fund expected maintenance of the properties and absorb rising property taxes as well as other costs to preserve the viability of a rental property.” Dion urged the city council’s housing subcommittee to “continue their efforts at striking a balance on this key housing policy question,” implying the current law is unfairly tilted in favor of renters.

The mayor made no mention of the kidnappings and imprisonment of local children and parents by masked federal agents that have outraged residents old and young, bringing over 500 students to the steps of City Hall in protest earlier this month.

Mayor Dion’s remarks on Portland’s response to the climate catastrophe acknowledged “tangible negative consequence for our marine economy and the physical integrity of the Commercial Street corridor,” as well as, “flooding events that have invaded the Bayside neighborhood on a recurring basis,” but called for no action beyond more strategizing, like updating “building practices” for a future in which large parts of Portland are underwater.

The city’s political leader ended his speech not with a call for solidarity and practical, collective efforts to stop all the terrible suffering and death he expects in 2026, but with a plea for supernatural assistance. “Good night,” Mayor Dion concluded, “and may God bless Portland.”

Have you heard that the City of Portland has more than tripled the fine for not moving your vehicle during a snow parking ban? If so, their thinking goes, good, because that’s the whole point of the big increase — for you to be aware of it and hence fear the consequences for you and your family this winter, as if rising food prices, health insurance costs and fascism weren’t enough to keep you worried these days.

The fine has gone from $40 to $130, and if your ride is towed, you’re still on the hook (sorry) for at least $135 to the private wrecking company. The city will waive the ticket hike if you’re towed — “resulting in a more equitable penalty,” they say in the press release — so you’d pay the old $40 fine plus $135 to the sketchy dude at the junkyard (almost certainly in cash; plus possibly $80 more if you have an electric or all-wheel-drive vehicle, or if “some other necessity exists,” according to the city’s website), plus cab or ride-share money to get to an ATM and then out to the outskirts of whatever town said junkyard is located, because the city also announced they’re closing the in-town, public impound lot, as they can’t find enough off-street parking spots in Portland to use during storms, either.

Cool.

Why is this being done? Well, it seems some of us renters — and really, it’s only folks too poor to own or have ready access to a driveway or private garage who are impacted by this — have caught wise that the City of Portland is broke, too, and they’re taking advantage of this government austerity to stay inside, rip bong hits and stream shit during snowstorms, figuring that’s worth forty bucks, if a ticket is issued at all.

“Over the last several years, compliance during snow parking bans has suffered due to a lack of enforcement resources,” the Nov. 7 announcement reads. “City staff rely on private tow truck companies to assist them during active parking bans, and fewer tow trucks have been available. While declaring parking bans can be inconvenient, the resulting lack of compliance makes it harder to perform timely snow removal operations and maintain accessibility for first responders and residents. That low fine, as well as the relatively small degree of towing and the lack of time and resources to equitably enforce violators contributed to a lack of compliance.”

There’s that magic word again: equitable. We must believe this is being done in pursuit of that core American value: equality. Nevermind the aforementioned, obvious fact that only those with the least ability to pay these fines and fees are subjected to them; that property owners are exempt by virtue of their wealth. The massive fine increase passed 8-1, with only Councilor Kate Sykes objecting and both councilors representing on-peninsula districts — Wes Pelletier of the West End and Parkside and Sarah Michniewicz of the East End and Bayside — in favor.

“This is a very tough problem and the only dial we have to turn is the amount,” Pelletier reportedly said during the Nov. 3 meeting.

What a bleak, malicious and ignorant thing to say.

Bleak, because when the city says it lacks enforcement resources, what it means is it doesn’t have enough money to enforce its ordinances by paying officers to ticket drivers and take their cars away. The city’s primary source of funds is property taxes, and you know who writes those checks. So when the budget’s tight — and it’s always tight, ain’t it? — the poor and working class must be threatened and forced to pay more as a punishment.

Malicious, because, for one thing, it provides for no valid excuses, like an unexpected flight out of state to attend a loved one, or personal injury or hospitalization, or lack of internet access during a blizzard, or unavoidable work commitments, etc. It takes an emergency situation (a hugely disruptive storm) and makes it exponentially worse by piling more stress and expense upon everyone who doesn’t own or have access to a private patch of asphalt. It assumes those who fail to move their vehicle do so only for lazy, self-serving reasons — which is to say, it assumes the worst of our neighbors. And it further assumes that the only way to force these selfish slackers to comply is to threaten them with a more unaffordable fine and the loss of the car or truck they need to earn a living. Apparently, that’s all we animals on a lease understand.

Ignorant, because increasing the fine isn’t “the only dial we have to turn.” There doesn’t even have to be a dial. After all, the problem really isn’t a lack of money for enforcement or an insufficiently painful penalty, it’s a lack of community-mindedness. How might we, as city residents, best encourage more care and respect for our neighbors? You don’t have to be a parent to know threats and pain only go so far and are ultimately counterproductive, increasing fear, animosity, distrust and distress.

A compassionate city would tow vehicles only when doing so is necessary to provide room for plows, emergency vehicles and others’ vehicles to pass. On most streets, that’s a very infrequent situation, and even then, fines should be waived if the driver has a valid excuse. Getting snowed in by a plow is incentive enough for most people to move their ride to a snow-ban lot or downtown garage.

There’s also the “dial” of public outreach and accountability. This could take many forms, like increased public education and communication via text and e-mail. Instead of more enforcement and higher fines (including the payment of any unpaid tickets, required to regain possession of your towed vehicle), fees and related expenses and that can easily exceed $400 or $500 — enough to keep food off the table, heating or electric bills unpaid, or even prompt eviction — our local government could proactively contact drivers to determine why their vehicle was left on the street and encourage cooperation, rather than threaten or impose ruinous consequences.

Would more people comply if violation resulted in a phone call or in-person visit from city staff (they have all our numbers and addresses in the registration system) who approach the problem like a kind but concerned neighbor seeking cooperation to ensure community safety, rather than a Robocop blindly issuing threats and punishments? Is the idea of treating renters like reasonable human beings in these rare situations unworthy of consideration, much less an attempt?

Respect, the saying goes, is a two-way street. The City of Portland, long rued by drivers for its confusing grid of one-way byways, is stuck on a senselessly cruel path that only takes us in one direction: further down into the hell of social anxiety, alienation, and decay.

Members of the St. Andrew’s Society of Maine got some really good news and some really bad news around the same time and in the wrong order.

The good news came first. After hosting the annual Maine Highland Games and Scottish Festival for decades, the group’s event was chosen as the venue for this year’s Scottish Heavy Athletics Men’s World Championships!

The bad news: Last fall, Thomas Point Beach and Campground, a family-owned business in Brunswick that had long been the festival’s venue, was sold to Modern America Campgrounds (MAP), a conglomerate that owns over 30 campgrounds in New England and New York, mostly in Maine and New Hampshire. The new owners informed the Scottish cultural organization that they weren’t interested in hosting the games or the festival this summer.

Following the sale, organizers of the popular Thomas Point Bluegrass Festival called it quits after 45 years, and both the Maine Folk Festival and the Point Reggae Music and Arts Festival were canceled. With athletes from around the world already planning to travel to Maine for the Heavy Athletics Championships, the St. Andrew’s Society was under heavy pressure to find a new home with enough space for parking, camping, and safely hurling very heavy objects.

Shari Rodden, secretary of the St. Andrew’s Society and co-organizer of the Maine Highland Games, said it’s a huge honor and a big expense to host the world championships, but donors and sponsors stepped up to cover the cost, and the folks in charge of Windsor Fairgrounds “really stepped up” by making their venue in the small town east of Augusta available on Aug. 16 and 17. The annual Windsor Fair starts the following weekend, which doesn’t leave a lot of turnaround time for break-down and set-up, but the date for the championships had already been set. The Society plans to make Windsor Fairgrounds the festival and games’ new home, but will schedule the event on a different weekend in future years.

Rodden said losing Thomas Point Beach has been “a blessing in disguise.” Although the organizers would’ve liked to have had more notice before MAP kicked them out this year, the event had outgrown the Brunswick location. Windsor Fairgrounds offers much more parking, better restroom facilities, and a more central location for the heavy athletic events.

That’s important, because when you’re throwing stones, hammers and trees around, you need a lot of space. At Thomas Point Beach, those competitions were held a fair distance away from the festival to ensure crowd safety. In Windsor, there’s a racetrack with an infield that provides plenty of space to throw heavy stuff and safely watch it fly.

The rules of Scottish Heavy Athletics are refreshingly simple. It basically comes down to throwing or pushing a very heavy thing farther or higher or straighter than one’s competitors can. In brief, the games include:

• Sheaf Toss – Use a pitchfork to throw a 20-pound bag of straw over a crossbar that’s incrementally raised until the winner is determined.

• Caber Toss – Lift a tree trunk (caber) and hold it upright, then run and toss it upward and forward end over end. The throws are judged by how straight the caber lands. (Unlike fussy modern sports that standardize the size and weight of a game’s central object, cabers can be between 16 and 22 feet long and weigh between 100 and 180 pounds.)

• Hammer Throw – Without moving one’s feet, throw a 22-pound hammer attached to a four-foot handle. Wind-ups over the head are permitted (and highly encouraged by spectators).

• Stone Put – Like shot put, but with a big rock. Athletes competing in Open Stone Put can move as they throw the 16-to-22-pound rock, but those hurling the Braemar Stone, which weighs between 20 and 26 pounds, must do so from standing position.

• Weight for Distance and Height – For distance, athletes throw a 56-pound iron weight connected by a short chain to a ring handle. For height, the same weight is directly attached to a ring handle and thrown over a crossbar.

The games are, of course, just one of the festival’s many attractions. There’ll be bagpipes and dancing, collies and sheep, and whisky and haggis in abundance to give attendees the experience of traditional Scottish culture and rural life.

“No disrespect to Ren fairs,” Rodden said, referring to Renaissance fairs, “but they’re all over the place. This is the real deal.”

— Tom Major

Toss ideas for future sports coverage to Tom Major at leagueofbollards@gmail.com.

A grand jury in Cumberland County indicted two men accused of an assault and robbery last summer at a Westbrook tavern that led to a deadly shooting in Portland’s Morrill’s Corner neighborhood later that night.

Bill Holmes, 49, longtime leader of the Portland street gang FSU, and Troy McHugh, 52, the widow of shooting victim Susan McHugh, were indicted earlier this month on multiple charges: two counts of robbery for McHugh, one involving a firearm, and three counts against Holmes, including one assault charge and two robbery charges, one involving the threat of violence. Both men have made bail and been released from custody.

The beef allegedly began on July 30 of last year, when Holmes observed members of Higher Calling, a Christian-based motorcycle club, wearing club patches on the back patio of Brookside, a bar and restaurant on Route 302. Holmes and his associates, including Troy McHugh, allegedly roughed up the younger bikers, including Christopher Marriott, 32, who appears to be a Higher Calling member.

Following that fracas, Holmes and his friends returned to Portland, and members of The Outlaws motorcycle club, with whom Higher Calling is affiliated, were made aware of the alleged assault and theft of one or more Higher Calling patches. A large group of Outlaws confronted Holmes, the McHughs and their son, Travis Frechette, in an auto-repair-shop parking lot, some allegedly wielding hammers. Police say shots were fired by both groups and a bullet fatally struck Susan McHugh. Holmes and Troy McHugh were both injured but remained uncharged with any crime until now.

Outlaw biker Aaron Karp, 47, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in this case and was sentenced to 15 years in Maine State Prison with all but five suspended. Four others associated with the club face aggravated assault charges and are awaiting trial.

Holmes could not be reached for comment. His attorney, Rob Andrews, declined to comment at this time, citing a lack of information about the case; it’s unclear who’s representing McHugh. The office of Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris declined comment on grounds that the case, initiated by the Portland Police Department, is still active.

Bail conditions prevent Holmes and McHugh from contacting one another or Marriott. They also prevent McHugh from contacting his son, Frechette, whom Holmes is also barred from contacting. Frechette was not indicted.

Tensions between Outlaws and FSU members have remained high, sustaining concern in the community that a gang-style war of retribution could erupt. Holmes’ car, a vintage Pontiac GTO, was vandalized in Portland a couple weeks ago, with all or most of its windows smashed. An investigation of that incident has been initiated.*

*The status of this investigation has been updated from the original post.

On April 15, Border Patrol agents tackled a 27-year-old Salvadoran man to the pavement on Massachusetts Avenue in Portland. They zip-tied his limbs and threw him into the back of an unmarked vehicle. “It looked like someone getting kidnapped,” a witness told reporters. That’s because it was: a state-sponsored abduction, a spectacle of fear, and a message.

Eyidi Ambila, a man from the Democratic Republic of Congo, served a short sentence in Cumberland County Jail and has since been caged for over eight months by ICE with no new charges, no passport, and nowhere to be deported. This is not immigration enforcement — it’s indefinite detention and state-sanctioned cruelty. A federal judge ruled that Ambila can stay in the U.S. while appealing his deportation, acknowledging that returning him could mean arbitrary arrest, prolonged imprisonment, or torture. Let that sink in: the government admits deportation could lead to torture and still wants to deport him. He’s not a threat. He’s not a flight risk. He’s a living example of a system that dehumanizes, disappears, and discards.

Marcos Henrique and Lucas Segobia, two skilled immigrant workers en route to a job in Maine, were abducted by ICE without charges. They were disappeared for over 36 hours and moved from one facility to another, while ICE lied to their families about their location. Jail staff refused responsibility. It was only after public pressure that officials finally told their families where they were detained, but the respite was brief — ICE, against their families’ wishes, moved them out of state.

These are not outliers. These are the cases that made it into the press. In April, documents obtained by the ACLU revealed that Cumberland County Jail was detaining 80 people for ICE, and Two Bridges Jail in Wiscasset another 25. That’s over 100 people disappeared into the deportation pipeline with the full cooperation of local law enforcement. This is not policy failure — it’s policy success. It is not an accident — it is the infrastructure of repression being put to work to manage the turbulence of a dying world.

We are living in the chaos of a collapsing order. Since the 1970s, the twin engines of neoliberal globalization and carceral expansion have reshaped the United States: dismantling public institutions, deregulating capital, and replacing mass employment with mass policing, imprisonment, and deportation. What we are witnessing now is not an aberration but the terminal stage of this conjuncture — a world where crisis is met not with care or redistribution, but with cages and scapegoats. Immigration enforcement emerged to discipline labor, to create a hyper-exploited strata of the labor market. Now it is being used by the Trump Administration to impose a blatantly fascist order.

To confront this reality, we start with a simple demand: End Cooperation Between Cumberland County Jail and ICE. And we understand that this demand is also a call to end suffering now, dismantle the deportation machine, and that it opens the door to new solidarities and new ways of life.

The Event: Spectacle, Terror, and the Demand for Community Defense

The spectacle of forced removal is meant to terrify. It’s meant to be seen. It teaches entire communities to live in fear and sends a warning: no one is safe. The raids, the unmarked vans, the zip-ties — this is fascism in rehearsal. These moments are not isolated incidents; they are performances of state power. The goal is not merely removal. It is submission.

But for every spectacle of fear, we must respond with a celebration of solidarity. These bewildering, terrifying events demand community defense. They demand mutual aid. They demand we show up: outside jails, inside courtrooms, on the streets. The Trump administration wants fear to go viral. Resistance must spread faster.

The Conjuncture: Neoliberalism, The Carceral State, and Crimmigration

Beneath the immediate spectacle is a broader structure of political economy. Over the last four decades, both parties have built the crimmigration regime — a fusion of carceral control and immigration enforcement designed to regulate the labor market and manage surplus populations. Reagan began immigrant detention. Clinton passed the laws that made mass deportation possible. Bush II created ICE, consolidating immigration enforcement into a nationwide, federal police force. Obama used these tools to deport more people than any president in history. And Trump, despite all his gratuitous authoritarianism, has, in both terms, been unable to match the monthly deportation numbers of his Democratic predecessors.

The system was not built to ensure justice. It was built to create a precarious workforce and a permanent underclass. It fabricates social order by dividing workers, criminalizing mobility, and treating migration as a security threat. The Trump administration is now using this bipartisan machinery to impose a more openly fascist order.

This is why ending ICE cooperation in Cumberland County matters. It’s not just a local demand. It’s a strike at the pillars of the crimmigration system. It removes key logistical support. It complicates ICE’s ability to function. It interrupts the flow of bodies from street to cell to deportation. It is a lever of disruption — and it must be pulled.

The Longue Durée: Capitalism, Racial Division, and the Possibility of a New World

Zoom out further, and the contours of a deeper struggle emerge. The United States is a settler-colonial state founded on land theft, racial hierarchy, and labor exploitation. From slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, from the reservation to the ghetto to the border, the same logics persist. Capitalism appropriates and exploits labor and then organizes abandonment. It produces surplus people: unemployed, unhoused, undocumented, untreated. It punishes these victims and twists and contorts their situations to make them appear as enemies to be contained, excluded, and expelled.

But from within that hell, new worlds are being born.

Presente! Maine is showing us how. Their land- and food-sovereignty programs, mutual aid work, and wellness initiatives are rooted in the labor and leadership of Maine’s Latine immigrant communities — most of whom work in the very sectors propping up this state’s tourism and agricultural economies. This is not charity. It is not service. It is revolutionary infrastructure. It builds autonomy. It deepens solidarity. It models a different way to live — with the land, with each other, and beyond the violence of borders and bosses.

This campaign is part of that same struggle. It’s not just about removing ICE from our jails. It’s about removing ICE from our future so we can build something better, something more humane, something that can unite New and Old Mainers.

We Are Not Asking — We Are Organizing

Of course, movements that threaten power face opposition — not just from reactionaries, but from liberals who want to manage dissent. We see it already. Some prominent liberal immigration advocacy organizations oppose ending ICE cooperation with the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, arguing that keeping people detained in Maine aids their legal defense. But proximity is not justice. Marcos and Lucas were hidden for 36 hours. Their families were lied to. Eyidi has been held for months with no end in sight. The system is built on opacity and cruelty. Local detention doesn’t protect — it enables.

The point is not to make the system more efficient. The point is to make it impossible.

Real change doesn’t come from appealing to authority. It comes from disrupting business as usual. From making the status quo ungovernable. From forcing elites to choose between justice and disorder. This is how power concedes. This is how history shifts.

We are not asking for better policies. We are not asking for a seat at the table. We are organizing to break the table in half.

For Marcos and Lucas.
For Eyidi.
For every neighbor taken in silence.
For every worker forced into the shadows.
For every life destroyed, for every family shattered by the perpetual police war in the name of security and order.

End ICE cooperation in Cumberland County.
Free them all.
Stop the deportation machine.

No ICE for ME is a grassroots campaign for community defense and collective liberation. We stand against detention, deportation, and all forms of institutionalized violence. We fight to dismantle the deportation machine and organize a future grounded in solidarity, mutual aid, and the common good.

A 70-year-old Portland woman who was terrorized in late April by a deranged neighbor impersonating a police officer is questioning the way the real Portland cops responded to her emergency call.

Patricia Geon, a recently retired hospital administrator, said the 911 operator, acting at the direction of officers at the scene, repeatedly urged her to leave the safety of her apartment while the neighbor, a 40-year-old nurse with substance-abuse problems, was still inside the building, armed with multiple firearms, heavily intoxicated and in the midst of a mental crisis.

The suspect, Heidi Fuller, was arrested after cops debated how to deal with her for over two hours — apparently unwilling to attempt to contact Fuller at her apartment upstairs. After unwittingly exiting her apartment that night, Fuller was apprehended and charged with Impersonating a Public Servant and Terrorizing, though the former charge is not being pursued by the district attorney’s office.

According to Geon, around 6:20 p.m. on April 29, a Tuesday, she’d just returned from a medical appointment when she was startled by heavy pounding on her door. “‘Portland police! Portland police! Open the door now!’” the assailant shouted, “like somebody trying to talk in a deep voice,” Geon recalled. “‘I have a gun!” the voice continued. “‘I’ll shoot you!’”

Terrified, Geon called 911. The sharp pounding — which sounded suspiciously like the barrel or butt of a gun, rather than a fleshy fist — continued for as long as 10 minutes, she said. Geon asked the emergency-response operator is she could hear the pounding and brought her phone near the door, but fearing gunfire, she retreated into her bathroom to hide in the shower.

While sheltering in place, Geon realized the voice was that of Fuller, a troubled neighbor who lived upstairs. She provided Fuller’s name and apartment number to the operator, in addition to sharing her fear — based on statements Fuller had previous made to Geon regarding her affinity for guns — that Fuller was, in fact, armed.

“The operator said, ‘OK, the police have arrived. They’re there now. They're across the street. They want you to leave the building and walk across the street to talk to them.’

“I said, ‘You don't understand, this is not a matter of walking out my door. She could still be standing outside my door,’” Geon told The Bollard during an interview late last month. “I said, ‘No, I'm not walking out the door. If she's standing out there and she has a gun, I will be shot. … I'm not going to take a bullet for a cop. … They kept insisting that I walk out, walk across the street to talk to them. And I refused. I said, ‘I'm not leaving the building. I'm not leaving my apartment.’”

After what seemed like a half hour or longer, Geon said officers entered the West End apartment building and met with her inside. “There was four [officers] standing outside my door like almost for two hours, discussing: ‘What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?’ … They didn't know what to do.

“They had no idea how a handle it,” said Geon, a Latina woman raised in Los Angeles by a family that included several cops. “As far as I'm concerned, zero idea.”

During this time, the officers made no attempt to reach Fuller upstairs, Geon said, and it was only after Fuller walked out of her unit and appeared, unarmed, at the top of the stairs that police confronted and arrested her. After obtaining a search warrant for Fuller’s apartment later that night, they found two handguns and ammunition, according to the department’s press release at the time.

“That was very disturbing,” Geon said of the weapons’ discovery. She told the officers, “‘I was not protected. Why did you put me through this? Why would you want me to walk out a door at any time? If anything, you should have said, ‘Is there any way we can get you out of there?’”

On May 23, Geon’s son, Kenneth Geon, wrote an e-mail to Portland Police Chief Mark Dubois similarly questioning the department’s response.

“I would’ve assumed that it was the officers [sic] duty to at least approach the building right away and see the location of my mother’s neighbor,” Kenneth’s e-mail read. “[N]ot only did they not come to the building right away, but they hid down the street on the corner. Was this laziness? Were they afraid? Did they not think that my mother was in danger?”

“I am giving you an opportunity to explain yourself and explain the negligent actions of your police officers,” Kenneth’s message concluded. “I would say that the whole department owes my dear mother an apology in the least.”

Patricia Geon said her son has not received a response from Chief Dubois, but that she has since been in touch with the victims’ advocate assigned to her case.

Geon said her landlord is struggling to find the legal leverage necessary to evict Fuller, whose belongings are still in the unit but who has not been seen there by Geon in person since the death threats. To Geon’s knowledge, Fuller still has keys to the building and has a court date scheduled for September to face charges resulting from the incident.

“I was traumatized,” Geon said. “I still feel very unprotected. I feel unsafe. I have nightmares. I started to have seizures.”

Geon said she and Fuller had previously been on cordial terms, and that she empathizes with her attacker, who’d recently been employed as a nurse, given the stresses of hospital work Geon witnessed while working in admissions for eight years. “I felt sorry for her in some ways, because she's got a problem,” said Geon, “but when it went to the extent of threatening my life, that's where I have to say enough is enough.”

In response to The Bollard’s queries, Portland Police Department spokesperson Brad Nadeau wrote via e-mail, “Responding officers make decisions on how to best handle incidents with the safety of all involved as a primary concern. Part of the decision-making process is an attempt to de-escalate incidents.

“In this case,” Nadeau continued, “officers explained their actions to [Geon] after they learned the suspect had left the immediate area. The complainant was uncomfortable with their initial instructions, so the officers altered their approach and went into her apartment. There was an initial concern that their presence would escalate the situation.”

Informed of Nadeau’s comments, Geon questioned how officers outside the building could have known Fuller’s location inside. Although the pounding on Geon’s door had stopped, it was not clear to her where Fuller was as she refused the operator’s directions to walk outside.

Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris’ office decided not to pursue the Impersonating a Public Servant charge against Fuller, but added a charge of Criminal Threatening to the Terrorizing charge brought by police. Both are Class D crimes in Maine — misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine.

“In cases that I have worked on in which Impersonating is charged, there is usually some effective impersonating that has occurred, meaning someone has been at least somewhat temporarily fooled or otherwise placed at risk due to their belief that a Defendant is in fact a public servant,” Sartoris wrote last week in response to our questions.

“I am confident that the more serious charges are supported by the evidence,” Sartoris concluded.

Fuller could not be reached for comment.

The mistaken capture, at gunpoint, of a Black Deering High School student last Tuesday morning in Portland has sparked public outrage. The 16-year-old student’s mother called the traumatic encounter an example of racial profiling, and she’s right about that. But the rot goes much deeper, down into the core assumptions that frame and guide our government’s response to crime.

It’s key to keep in mind the reason this heavily armed police raid was planned and undertaken: to arrest another Black kid, 19-year-old Miles Hibbard, and search his home, a modestly sized white house that had Black Lives Matter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg signs out front when the Google Maps surveillance vehicle drove by.

Hibbard is a suspect in a burglary; in other words, police had a suspicion the youth had stolen something of value in the recent past (details have not been provided), and a judge deemed their evidence of Hibbard’s guilt sufficiently strong to sign a search warrant. The post-incident press statement disseminated by the City of South Portland claims Hibbard “is known to associate with individuals who carry and use firearms in the commission of crimes,” and that “officers also had reason to believe that there may be ammunition in the home.”

Details to support those vague claims are also omitted from the statement, but the claims and the actions they prompted last Tuesday reveal the toxic, racist and vicious mentality of South Portland and Portland police. They believed Hibbard was not only a teen who may have taken something of significant value that didn’t belong to him, but a young Black man willing to murder police with a firearm in broad daylight outside his home if approached by authorities.

That’s why South Portland dispatched a four-man SWAT team, in addition to multiple detectives joined by multiple armed Portland police officers, to apprehend Hibbard. That’s why the sight of an unarmed kid who vaguely resembled Hibbard exiting a car and walking near Hibbard’s house prompted them to pounce on the student as if he were a rabid Rottweiler, order him at gunpoint to lie on the ground or be shot to death, handcuff him and drag the teen away while other armed officers confronted the driver still sitting in the car.

The city’s statement stresses that the terrorized student was released after less than five minutes — once officers realized they’d arrested and threatened to shoot the wrong Black kid — and goes on to say Hibbard was subsequently arrested “at his workplace in Cape Elizabeth.” They appended his babyfaced mug shots.

“I believe our officers acted reasonably and appropriately given the circumstances and information they had at the time,” South Portland Police Chief Dan Ahern said, according to the statement. The chief said his department will be “reviewing this incident to ensure that all protocols and procedures were followed.”

The department’s internal “review” will undoubtedly find their fellow officers acted “reasonably and appropriately,” as the boss already believes and wants everyone else to believe. The public will continue to believe otherwise.

To wit, let’s say the cops were correct to expect Hibbard was likely to open fire upon seeing uniformed officers approach him on the sidewalk outside his home. If so, why the fuck did they attempt to execute their arrest and search warrants within 100 yards of the entrance to a high school during lunchtime, when students are all over the surrounding streets and sidewalks? They apparently knew where Hibbard worked — in one of Maine’s wealthiest and most peaceful towns — but eschewed the idea of approaching him at his place of employment in favor of a SWAT raid conducted during lunch break right outside a school in a dense residential neighborhood.

The only thing officers had at the scene to identify Hibbard was a “description” of him “developed from a driver’s license photograph,” the statement reads. If I understand English correctly, that means the cops didn’t even have an image of their suspect — only someone’s written description of what Hibbard’s face looks like in the tiny photo on his license. The top cop in South Portland would have us believe it’s “reasonable and appropriate” to conduct a daytime neighborhood SWAT raid based on that level of intel.

The staggering incompetence of these cops is par for the course. What I wish to point out here is the obvious insanity of the “criminal justice” system of which they are the most lethal arm.

Again, the key thing to recall is that something of value was allegedly stolen in South Portland, prompting this whole mess. Police aren’t saying what it was, which leads me to believe it wasn’t especially important to anyone — like an irreplaceable family heirloom or the original draft of the Declaration of Independence; something that might raise this pilfering to a higher level of moral or community concern.

Regardless, our common understanding of justice demands the person or persons who took it should either return the object or, if that’s not possible, compensate its owner for its value. A sincere apology, a promise not to do it again, and perhaps some extra measure of recompense for the hurt feelings and inconvenience of the aggrieved party, as well as the cost the community incurred in pursuit of justice, would also be reasonable and appropriate, right? Furthermore, all this should take place in a public forum, like a courthouse, so the community knows who the transgressor is, what they did, and that they’ve taken actions to fully atone for their misdeed.

Is this not your understanding, dear reader? Or do you agree with local law enforcement that the reasonable response to a burglary is to send a posse of highly trained officers armed to the teeth into a residential neighborhood at lunchtime to capture anyone in the vicinity who resembles the suspected burglar — based on notes gleaned from somebody’s description of an image of his face as it appears in an inch-by-inch-and-a-half driver’s license photo?

Do you agree it’s reasonable and appropriate to assume a teen who lives in a nice suburban neighborhood and has never been arrested for anything will attempt to shoot and kill police officers on sight? Is alleged association with armed criminals and suspicion of bullets in a drawer at home sufficient insight into the suspect’s character to conclude he’d face death and murder police officers rather than answer questions about a break-in? Would it be somehow unreasonable or inappropriate to attempt to question or arrest this kid by methods short of a multi-agency SWAT operation? Had he, for example, been ignoring officers’ phone calls and messages requesting he come down to the station for a chat?

The Portland and South Portland police departments have a lot more explaining to do. Racial profiling is just the ugly tip of the iceberg exposed by this incident. An approach to public safety that’s practically indistinguishable from the Old West’s racist and genocidal “frontier justice” must be confronted, exposed and discredited for what it is: an abomination.

The widow of the woman killed last summer during a melee in Portland’s Morrill’s Corner is expressing outrage over a plea deal that would keep the prime suspect in the murder case imprisoned for only four more years, at most. The man whom police allege murdered Susan McHugh in a Meineke parking lot on July 30, Aaron Karp, is believed likely to plead guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for a 15-year sentence with all but five years suspended.

Karp, a member of the Outlaws motorcycle club, has been imprisoned without bail since last summer, so the deal would free him by 2030 — or a year or more earlier, depending on his conduct behind bars. A hearing on the offer is scheduled for tomorrow morning in Cumberland County Superior Court. Karp’s attorney, Verne Paradie Jr., did not respond to a request for comment, but details of the deal were confirmed by multiple sources connected to the case.

“The plea deal that was arranged would have the person who murdered Susan out of prison in less than 5 years,” Troy McHugh wrote on social media earlier this month. “It’s disgusting to think that our Susan’s life is only worth 5 years of this [murderer’s] freedom.”

McHugh urged supporters to send victims’ impact letters to the court protesting the proposed sentence, and assured those who wrote that they could remain anonymous. “The family understands that some people feel unsafe if their name is made public,” he wrote.

The deadly confrontation in the auto-shop parking lot stemmed from an altercation earlier that day between two groups: longtime local FSU street-gang leader Bill Holmes, McHugh, and Travis Frechette, Susan and Troy McHugh’s son; and members of the Christian-themed Higher Calling motorcycle club, which was affiliated with the Outlaws. Holmes allegedly objected to the bikers wearing their club patches on the patio at Brookside, a restaurant and bar in Westbrook, and a fight ensued.

Following that fracas, Karp and about half a dozen other Outlaws confronted Holmes, Frechette and the McHughs in the Meineke parking lot, where Susan McHugh allegedly fired a pistol in an attempt to defend her husband, son and friend from attackers wielding what police termed “mini sledgehammers” and other weapons. Police and prosecutors say Karp fired nine shots in return, killing McHugh, and lesser changes were brought against six other Outlaws, including New Hampshire-based biker Kris Haken, who did time in that state for shooting a bystander during a brawl between Outlaws and Hell’s Angels in 2010. Haken is apparently still on the lam and Portland police have described him as “dangerous” and possibly armed.

Since The Bollard reported details of this story last summer, we’ve stressed the unique public safety threats spawned by this deadly dispute between FSU and the Outlaws and Higher Calling clubs. Cops and prosecutors are undoubtedly frustrated by a lack of cooperation by club members sworn to protect their brothers — and by the grainy surveillance video of the Morrill’s Corner attack, in which it’s difficult to identify the participants and the exact sequence of the violent acts. But the public has been frustrated by the cops’ unwillingness to share details about the case and their apparent indifference to the possibility these attacks mark the start of a citywide war of retribution between FSU and the biker clubs.

Although video at Brookside shows Holmes and others beating Higher Calling members, no charges have been filed against Holmes, who continues to frequent local restaurants and other public gathering places. With the exception of Karp and Susan McHugh, everyone alleged to have been involved in the attacks is a free man.

Holmes has declined to comment, but is said to have been trying to reach a peaceful resolution with higher-ups in the Outlaws organization, of which he was a member over 20 years ago. The prospect for a truce seems dim at present, sources say. Holmes suffered a serious skull injury during the Meineke attack, from either a bullet or a hammer, and Portland police were sufficiently concerned about his safety to post officers outside his hospital room, but let him walk out unprotected a couple days later.

Neither the Portland Police Department nor the office of Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris has taken any discernible steps to diffuse the threat of a gang war. To the contrary, the cops seem confused about the very nature of the dispute, repeatedly referring to FSU as a “motorcycle club,” despite the group’s origin and history in the hardcore punk scene, in which Susan McHugh was a show promoter.

Karp’s advocates are not entirely pleased with the proposed plea deal. One source close to him, who spoke to The Bollard on condition of anonymity, expressed belief that Karp could make a plausible self-defense argument based on allegations that Susan McHugh fired her weapon first. Karp’s camp is also said to be dumbfounded by the apparent unwillingness of police to file charges against Holmes and his cohort for the Brookside beat-down. So the bad blood between these notoriously violent groups continues to flow unabated.

UPDATE: Sure enough, Karp accepted the plea deal described above, a manslaughter charge, on April 10.

Portland police and parking-enforcement officers are illegally ticketing and likely towing vehicles for violating snow-emergency parking bans after the bans have ended — the latest in a series of petty crackdowns targeting the low-income residents and workers of downtown neighborhoods.

Last Saturday night, Rob Smith, who lives downtown, parked his car in the Spring Street Parking Garage next to Cross Insurance Arena in compliance with the snow ban announced that morning. The city-owned garage, managed by its Parking Division, charges $3 during parking bans, and drivers must be out by 8 a.m. to avoid additional charges.

Smith got his car out shortly before the 8 a.m. deadline and, as snow continued to fall heavily, parked on his poorly plowed street. When he returned to his vehicle around noon on Sunday, he found a $40 ticket, written at 10:41 a.m. that morning, for violating the previous night’s parking ban, which ended at 6 a.m. He noticed about half a dozen other vehicles on his short block were also ticketed.

Smith said a city parking-enforcement officer told him the substantial amount of snow on his car that morning was proof it hadn’t been moved the previous night. Smith countered that the snow wasn’t evidence of anything. Besides the fact he had paid to park in a municipal garage, he pointed out that had he legally parked in an uncovered lot or driveway Saturday night and then moved his vehicle onto the street, it would have looked about the same.

The city is refusing to void the ticket. Smith was told he can appeal it through a court process. “I spend all day trying to find parking,” he said, “and now I have to spend time trying to appeal a ticket that shouldn’t have been given to me.”

Portland officials have done an exceptionally bad job keeping streets free of snow this winter, prompting a high volume of complaints. City spokeswoman Jessica Grondin, quoted in a Feb. 12 Portland Press Herald article about the problem, blamed two factors: the weather and people who fail to heed parking-ban alerts.

The newspaper reported that Portland police and parking enforcers ticketed over 400 vehicles and had 275 of them towed by private wrecker companies during earlier snow bans this month. City officials said they can’t force the companies to haul away all the vehicles they want removed, and the lack of total enforcement is enticing more drivers to break the law.

“More people [are] taking their chances, for sure,” Grondin told the daily. She appealed to the public to have a sense of mutual respect. “These are your neighbors. This is a community,” she continued. “Nobody wants to be complying and then find out someone else didn’t comply, and now they’re traipsing through snow or can’t park again.”

But what if you did comply and were ticketed or towed after the ban ended because an officer playing detective speculated that snow on your vehicle was proof of its exact whereabouts the previous night?

Grondin was unavailable for comment this week and city “communications specialist” Maureen Puia did not respond to questions by our 8 a.m. deadline today. Police spokesman Brad Nadeau also failed to respond, so it’s unclear how many vehicles were ticketed and towed during the three-night stretch of bans in effect Saturday through Monday.

Portland officials fumbled the response to last weekend’s storm, announcing a second citywide parking ban on Sunday morning three and a half hours after the first one expired. Many residents dutifully arose at dawn that frigid morning, scraped off their vehicles and moved them for fear of being towed past the usual 7 a.m. deadline, unaware that in the previous morning’s bizarrely formatted e-mail announcing the ban, in extremely tiny type, the city advised drivers not to move their vehicles until “the storm is over.”

If the ticketing and towing of snow-covered vehicles found on streets after parking bans are over is a new enforcement practice, it constitutes further escalation in the city’s campaign to harass and siphon cash from low-income residents and workers downtown. Like the recent practice of ticketing vehicles parked on public streets that appear to have expired registrations, and the longtime practice of ticketing and towing vehicles in violation of weekly street-sweeping bans, this enforcement almost exclusively applies to renters who lack off-street parking at home. Propertied Portlanders are exempt from these laws by design. The poorest Portlanders, who may not have 24/7 Internet access to receive ban alerts and updates, or the QR-code-reading smart phones and credit cards necessary to park in public garages, are most vulnerable to these class-based enforcement practices.

Portland’s public works director, Mike Murray, confirmed to the Press Herald that enforcement is focused downtown, where most residents and workers don’t have off-street parking, and adjacent neighborhoods like Oakdale, where people “also struggle to comply,” as the reporter phrased it.

Federal authorities have pulled the food-stamp retail license of a mom-and-pop neighborhood market in Portland’s West End due to what appears to be an administrative snafu at the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), which administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Congresswoman Chellie Pingree’s office is attempting to rectify the situation, but without a speedy resolution, the market’s owners say they may not make it through the month.

Late last summer or fall, an undercover FNS compliance agent allegedly bought non-food items with an EBT card during two visits to Fresh Approach, a small grocery store, deli and butcher shop across from Reiche Community School. Chet Knights, who owns the market with his wife Peg, said that in addition to some eligible food items, the agent was mistakenly allowed to purchase a box of tissues and some dishwashing liquid on the first visit, and some paper towels and toilet paper during a second sting operation. Knights estimates the items amounted to maybe $10 in sales, combined.

Fresh Approach was fined $5,700 for the violations, their first such offense, and the FNS agreed to accept payment in monthly installments of about $1,000 (at an additional 4 percent interest rate).

The first payment was initially scheduled to be made on Feb. 2, but Peg Knights contacted the FNS and arranged with them to have that date moved to Feb. 10, the same day EBT credits are issued. The market operates on a tight budget, Chet Knights said, and paying the installment so soon after rent and credit-card fees are due would have been a problem.

Now they’ve got an even bigger problem.

Last week, the FNS revoked Fresh Approach’s license to conduct EBT transactions because the installment payment was not received on Feb. 2. Peg Knights contacted the FNS regarding their earlier agreement to extend the due date, but different officials there denied an extension had been granted. It seems “the person across the hall didn’t talk to the person on the other side of hall,” Chet Knights said.

The couple paid the February installment last week anyway, but the FNS still refuses to restore their license. Come Monday, the hundreds of low-income people in Portland who rely on Fresh Approach for food will be out of luck, and the market will be on the brink of closing after decades doing business on the peninsula. Valentine’s Day would mark Fresh Approach’s 33rd anniversary.

EBT sales account for about a quarter of the store’s revenue, Chet Knights said. He mentioned one customer who buys a tunafish sandwich almost every day with an EBT card, and said people receiving food assistance come from Biddeford, Brunswick and beyond for the bulk meat-package deals the market offers.

To lose their EBT license “after thirty-three years playing by the rules is devastating,” Chet Knights said.

In accordance with FNS regulations, Fresh Approach’s cashiers are trained and routinely reminded to exclude non-food items from EBT transactions. “We made a mistake and we own it,” said Knights. “Should we be punished? Yes, we should we punished. But should we be put out of business? No.”

In addition to tobacco, alcohol and heated prepared foods, the list of prohibited EBT items includes pet food, diapers, feminine hygiene products, and soap. A review of license-revocation decisions on the FNS website indicates nearly all are the result of intentional fraud involving many thousands of dollars.

Big grocery stores and convenience-store chains typically have bar-code systems that automatically separate non-food items from EBT transactions. Fresh Approach has a price-tag gun and “a cash register from 1975,” Chet Knights said with a rueful chuckle.

As a result of that technology gap, mom-and-pop neighborhood markets and corner stores appear to be the primary targets of this type of enforcement. The Washington, D.C.-based law firm Olsson Frank Weeda Terman Matz notes on its site that the FNS issues violation letters to “more than 2,000 small grocery and convenience stores each year alleging that they have engaged in illegal trafficking in SNAP benefits,” a term that includes the sale of prohibited items.

Government spending on SNAP benefits more than doubled from 2019 to 2023, when it amounted to $145 billion and the program served over 42 million people, more than 12 percent of the U.S. population. The increase has drawn scrutiny from conservative policymakers who decry reports of corruption and theft involving the program. Yet the sale of non-food items didn’t make “The Food-Stamp Fraud Top Ten” compiled by Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute in an article published by National Review in 2023. Edwards’ list includes practices such as the sale of EBT cards for cash, reselling food bought with EBT cards, and phishing and card skimming schemes.

Officials at the FNS are deaf to the Knights’ appeals. “It’s just not open for discussion. There’s nobody to talk to,” Chet Knights said. “They’re very unsympathetic.”

The couple reached out to Pingree’s office for assistance and were told an effort will be made to cut through the red tape and remedy the situation. But “nothing’s going to happen overnight,” Chet Knights said, and without EBT sales, “I simply will not survive. … I don’t know how long I’m gonna last.”

UPDATE: Two neighbors have launched a GoFundMe campaign, with the market’s blessing, to raise funds to get them through until the USDA’s error is fixed.

Around 8 p.m. on the night of New Year’s Day, 70-year-old Bill Lundgren, a divorced hospice and Meals On Wheels volunteer who teaches English at Southern Maine Community College, went to a neighborhood bar near his Deering Center home for dinner and a couple cocktails. There he saw Thomas Puschock, 41, a construction supervisor who also frequented the place, and the two acquaintances struck up a casual conversation during which Puschock remarked that he didn’t have a ride home.

“I'm leaving in a little bit,” Lundgren offered. “If you can put up with being slobbered over by two Springer Spaniels, I'll give you a ride.”

Puschock gratefully accepted, and around 9 p.m., soon after they crossed Washington Avenue heading north on Allen Ave., Puschock asked Lundgren to pull over. He did so, figuring they were near Puschock’s home, and suddenly something horrible happened. Without warning or the slightest provocation, Lundgren said, Puschock began viciously punching him in the face and head, possessed by a blind drunken rage.

“If I wouldn't have gotten out of my car, I think he would have killed me,” Lundgren told The Bollard last weekend during an interview at his home. He opened his driver’s side door and tumbled out onto the pavement as his dogs panicked in the back. Puschock exited from his side and fled into the wooded neighborhood nearby. Passengers in a vehicle behind Lundgren’s stopped when they saw him hit the frozen ground and approached to administer aid.

“I can’t even see, I'm bleeding so badly,” Lundgren recalled. He believes the good samaritans were off-duty first-responders. “They were awesome,” he said. “They just took control. They got the blood off my face and calmed me down.” They also placed an emergency call to help the stunned and beaten senior, who underwent major back surgery about a year ago, then left after police arrived.

“When the cops showed up, I'm like, Oh, good. Finally this nightmare is about to end,” Lundgren recalled. “Instead, it was just fucking starting.”

“From the moment they got out of their car, I was a criminal,” he continued. “The first thing that they should have done with me is taking me to the emergency room. Instead, they were hell-bent on filling their DUI quota for the month, and they were convinced that I was drunk.”

The two Portland police officers, both white men, demanded Lundgren perform a field sobriety test. “I said, ‘Guys, I just got the shit kicked out of me. I can barely stand up and you want me to walk a straight line?’”

They did. And after another field test, this one of the assault victim’s eye movements, “they didn't say I failed, but that's when they cuffed me,” said Lundgren, “and they cuffed me violently and fucking threw me in the back of the car. It was physical abuse.”

Lundgren was livid and “bewildered,” thinking, “Holy shit, I'm the criminal here suddenly. How the fuck did that happen?”

He’d told the officers he’d been assaulted and even called the bar at the scene to get Puschock’s last name for them. The patrolmen seemed wholly uninterested and unconcerned about the attack, or that a violent man in a drunken rage was then wandering among the houses and businesses nearby in sub-freezing temperature. “‘Oh, there's three outstanding warrants out for him right now,’” Lundgren said he was told offhandedly. “‘Don't worry about him. There's other officers pursuing him.’”

The handcuffs were extremely tight and had been applied by forcing Lundgren’s arms behind him. Laying on his back, with his hands and shackled wrists crushed beneath his body weight, was too painful, so he sprawled across the backseat on his stomach as the cruiser slowly drove to the Cumberland County Jail six miles away.

“I'm in the backseat of the squad car screaming because I was in such agony,” Lundgren recalled. “I might have a low threshold of pain, but it was the most painful thing I ever experienced in my life. And they were getting off on it,” he said of the two Portland cops. “They thought it was amusing. They’re just kind of smirking. And when I would say, ‘Can you loosen these [handcuffs] up?’ they would say, ‘No. That'd be a violation of policy. Once they're on, they're on.’

“I said, ‘You're fucking torturing me,’ which is what it was,” Lundgren added. “They didn't give a shit.”

Upon arriving at the jail, the cops pulled Lundgren out of the cruiser by his feet and marched him, still handcuffed, inside, where they attempted to give him a breathalyzer test. Apparently, the machine there wasn’t working properly, and lacking a functional breathalyzer elsewhere in Portland, the officers drove him to a police station somewhere in South Portland and made him blow into another device.

The result, according to Lundgren, was a blood-alcohol level of .06, below the legal threshold for a drunk driving charge (.08), and a level that accords with Lundgren’s story that he’d consumed two mixed drinks and a full meal before leaving the restaurant an hour or so prior to the test.

The cops were “crestfallen” upon seeing that result, said Lundgren, but they had a theory they believed would justify charging him with drunk driving anyway. “‘If that first breathalyzer would’ve worked, you would have been charged with the DUI,’” they said, according to Lundgren. Whereupon he exploded in indignant anger again.

“‘And that's my fault that you can't get technicians to get equipment that works, you fucking morons?’” he screamed at them. “I was in their face. … They're such incompetent motherfuckers.”

Finally, Lundgren was transported in the cop car to the emergency room at Maine Medical Center in Portland’s West End, admitted as an “incarcerated suspect.” A young ER doctor eventually stitched up the gashed brow above his right eye and bandaged his badly bruised right ear. Lundgren wrist, ribs and back were also in significant pain, he was having difficulty taking deep breaths, and he was experiencing what his doctor later called “brain fog” caused by a severe concussion, the effects of which continued for over a week.

The nightmare also continued into the following week.

The Portland Police Department had called Maietta Towing to remove Lundgren’s Toyota Tacoma pickup from the scene, but when Lundgren called to retrieve it the following morning, neither the cops nor the South Portland wrecker company could find it. After numerous phone calls and about two hours, the truck was finally located in a tow lot; Lundgren had to pay $150 to get it back.

His traumatized dogs had been brought to the Animal Refuge League in Westbrook, where he had to pay another $125 to regain custody of them following a prolonged application process and a mini-investigation shelter staff undertook to confirm he’s their rightful owner (despite the fact both Spaniels have chips indicating Lundgren owns them and they live at his house).

On Friday, Jan. 3, Lundgren went to police headquarters on Middle Street to file a complaint against the two officers. He was told a copy of the incident report would be sent to him in five days, and a senior officer there sat him down to chat.

The erudite English professor refers to this smooth-talking supervisor as Mr. Oleaginous, or Officer Friendly. Speaking of the patrolmen, this officer said, “‘Well, you know, you were contentious with them,’” according to Lundgren, who replied, “‘I was not contentious with them until they were fucking with me. They started it.’”

The senior officer also repeated the patrolmen’s contention that Lundgren had been too drunk to drive that night, saying, “‘You probably were over the limit when they first encountered you,’” Lundgren recalled.

“‘That's fucking speculation,’” Lundgren shot back. “‘You have no fucking idea.’ And again, I mentioned, if you can't get your breathalyzer to work, that's on you. I should have been taken to the hospital immediately, and they could have done a simple blood test right there to determine my blood alcohol content.”

On Tuesday, Jan. 7, The Bollard e-mailed Portland police spokesman Brad Nadeau with questions about the cops’ response to Lundgren’s assault, as well as their response to another, similar incident that happened in Portland last spring.

In that incident (the details of which are the subject of a forthcoming article in this investigative series), a Portland brewery owner badly injured in a traffic accident after work was cuffed, stuffed, and booked on suspicion of OUI by Portland police responding to the medical emergency call made by a bystander on his behalf. Only after a nurse at the jail directed officers to bring him to a hospital for emergency treatment were his injuries addressed, and those injuries may have been aggravated by being transported, half hog-tied, in the backseat of a police vehicle for many miles.

The victim in this case is currently challenging the OUI charge Portland police filed against him that day; a dispositional conference is scheduled for next month.

The Bollard asked the department last Tuesday to explain its policy when officers encounter an assault or traffic accident victim whom they believe may have been drinking. We also queried them regarding their apparent lack of breathalyzers, asked why seemingly no effort was being made to apprehend Puschock that night or in the days afterward, and requested the names of the two responding officers and the supervisor who met with Lundgren on Jan. 3.

Nationally, concern has been raised that grant and incentive programs promoting OUI enforcement can lead officers to pursue bogus or marginal drunk driving cases, so we also asked Nadeau if the PPD currently has any such grants or programs.

The spokesman briefly responded via e-mail a few hours later: “We are not going to comment on these active/open cases.” When The Bollard followed up the next day to confirm that all the information we’d requested was considered secret, Nadeau provided a link to the PPD’s Standard Operating Procedures and also wrote: “Mr. Lundgren was charged on 1/1/25, the day of his arrest. In this case, we are not able to release the names of anyone involved with the active investigation.”

When Lundgren, also on Jan. 8, followed up to get the incident report he’d been promised five days prior, police said he’d have to ask a judge to order the department to produce that document during the discovery period of his forthcoming criminal prosecution; his first court date is also next month. The cops claim Lundgren received a summons for OUI the night he was attacked, but Lundgren said he has no memory of that, nor any related documents. If he was formally charged, he has no memory of being read his rights, but acknowledged that the state of shock he was experiencing, combined with the concussion, may have affected his memory of events after the attack.

Puschock, meanwhile, is still a free man. Reached by cell phone on Jan. 8, he told The Bollard he hadn’t been contacted by the police. He denied that he has any active warrants, but acknowledged he’s on probation, the terms of which prohibit him from drinking alcohol. His criminal record since 2018 includes multiple arrests in Portland on charges including aggravated assault, domestic violence assault and aggravated criminal trespass.

When Lundgren finally got his truck back on Jan. 2, he discovered Puschock’s wallet inside and called him. Puschock arrived at his house around lunchtime with a co-worker and a sandwich he’d made for Lundgren. Puschock’s face was badly scraped up and puffy.

Lundgren said he confronted his attacker/acquaintance. “I said, ‘Thomas, what the fuck was that all about last night?’ He's like, ‘What? I don't know what you're talking about.’ I said, ‘You tried to kill me,’ and he got immediately so contrite, and immediately he knew that he had done it, and [said] he had blacked out. He had absolutely no recollection of it.” Lundgren also said Puschock told him he’d done something similar before: beating up a friend for seemingly no reason during a drunken blackout.

Speaking with The Bollard, Puschock denied that he told Lundgren about a previous fight, but also told us he has no memory of assaulting Lundgren on New Year’s Night. He said the first thing he remembers about the incident was seeing police lights in the area as he tried to find the wooded trail back to his home in East Deering. Puschock added that unlike his face, his hands were unscarred the next day, so he isn’t certain that he actually attacked Lundgren.

Lundgren formally filed assault charges against Puschock on Jan. 9, and while he was at police headquarters, they informed him that the department initiated its own charges against Puschock on the night of the incident.

Court documents pertaining to the police department’s OUI charge against Lundgren identify one of the two officers who responded to the assault call: Cody Curtsinger, who was sworn in during the summer of 2022, according to a PPD Facebook post. The officer in the case last April against the brewer is identified in court documents as Matthew Payoczkowski, who joined the force in 2019.

In the Standard Operating Procedures manual, the section on “alcohol enforcement countermeasures” reads: “The Portland Police Department recognizes that operating under the influence of alcohol or drugs is a serious problem that threatens the safety of the public. In an effort to combat this problem, the Department urges all officers to be alert for the signs of alcohol and/or drug impairment in all contacts with motorists, and make every effort to apprehend violators.”

But in Section Two, under “Professional Conduct and Responsibility,” it says that while on duty, officers shall “at all times take appropriate action to protect life and property; aid the injured; preserve the peace; prevent crime; detect and arrest violators of the law; and enforce Federal, State and local laws…”

The injunctions to “aid the injured” while also making “every effort to apprehend violators” in situations that may involve OUI appear to be at odds, with the compulsion to make arrests prevailing over the medical needs of injured people, at least in these two cases.

“I don't really like cops, but I've always kind of trusted them to do the right thing,” said Lundgren. “I have had really good experiences with them, too, like when my weed got stolen.”

Lundgren called the Portland police a few years ago when someone stole marijuana he’d been legally growing in his backyard garden. “That cop was so awesome, and helpful, and just courteous. These guys [on New Year’s Night] were the absolute antithesis of that. … [T]hey were so egregiously invested in fucking me up, and it just really destroyed any confidence I will ever have in the police ever again. … I'm never trusting a cop ever again, after the way that they treated me.”

Lundgren has contributed numerous book reviews to The Bollard over the years, as well as a couple cover stories, including “Up Long Creek Without a Paddle” [Sept. 2019], about his work on a 2006 project designed to help kids incarcerated in Maine’s youth prison tell their stories. He sees the world through a reader’s eyes.

“It's like I ended up in the middle of a Kafka novel, The Trial,” the professor said of his recent ordeal. “For 500 pages, he's on trial, and they never tell him what for. They never tell him what he's being charged with. This is very similar. God damn.”

The Portland Police Department disclosed this morning that it has rounded up five more men in connection with the deadly July 30 shootout in Portland’s Morrill’s Corner neighborhood and is searching for a sixth suspect, Kris Haken. Haken, who’s lived in New Hampshire, was lightly wounded that night and identified by police as a participant in the melee, but was inexplicably allowed to leave without arrest or charge, as were several other participants. The PPD now describes Haken as “dangerous” and potentially armed, and is warning the public not to approach him if seen.

The Bollard identified Haken on Sept. 3 as a member of the Outlaws motorcycle club and a participant in the confrontation, which led to the death of 54-year-old Susan McHugh and the arrest of Outlaws member Aaron Karp, currently held without bail at the Cumberland County Jail. We further reported that Haken — a U.S. Army veteran in his mid-40s afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder following tours in Iraq and Afghanistan — shot and wounded a teenage bystander with a shotgun during a 2010 brawl between Outlaws and members of the Hell’s Angels at a pizzeria in Manchester, N.H. Haken was sentenced in 2011 to serve up to 20 years in state prison for second-degree assault and reckless conduct, but was free by the summer of 2017.

Portland police have consistently obfuscated the nature of the dispute and the identities and affiliations of those involved, and today’s press release was no exception. They’ve waited nearly four months to identify Haken as a threat to public safety and are not identifying the five men recently arrested as fellow members of the Outlaws, even though quick social media searches reveal most clearly are. They include 45-year-old Jim Keenan of Bath; Nate Walsh, 48, of Lewiston; Portlander Caleb Pelkey, 33; and Jim Moody, 30, of Bowdoin. Kaleb Cidre, a 22-year-old from Windham, was the fifth man arrested, but it’s not immediately obvious from his posts that he’s a member of a motorcycle club or aspires to be.

The cops’ secrecy has worsened fears of further retaliatory violence stemming from the initial incident at Brookside, a Westbrook restaurant and bar. Earlier on the evening of July 30, a member or members of a motorcycle club affiliated with the Outlaws, Higher Calling, were confronted and assaulted by Bill Holmes, longtime leader of the Portland chapter of the street gang FSU, and Travis Frechette, McHugh’s son. Although Holmes is a former Outlaw who left the club on good terms many years ago and has done tattoo work for club members, his assault on Higher Calling members, including the demand that they remove symbols identifying themselves as such, crossed a red line in outlaw-biker culture, leading to the deadly melee in a Meineke parking lot on Forest Avenue in Portland.

Holmes was seriously injured by either a hammer blow or a bullet to his skull that night, and Portland police sufficiently feared for his safety to post guards outside his hospital room, but allowed him to walk free three days later. Sources say the cops confiscated Holmes’ cell phone and have refused to return it, but he has not been arrested or charged with a crime.

Likewise, Frechette, despite his FSU ties and the fact cops say he participated in the Brookside assault and robbery and subsequently fired eight shots at Karp and other Outlaws in the middle of one of Portland’s busiest intersections, is free and has not been publicly charged with any crimes. Although the question of self-defense in Karp’s case will only be determined in court, the PPD is proceeding on the assumption that McHugh, Frechette, her husband Troy McHugh (who allegedly owned the gun Susan McHugh fired at the Outlaws before she was shot) and Holmes were victims acting in self-defense.

In the wake of the July 30 murder and assaults, authorities acknowledge there’s a high likelihood of violent retaliation, but steadfastly refuse to publicly acknowledge or explain the inter- and intra-gang dynamics at play — a secrecy that only fosters more fear. For example, in the Oct. 21 court order denying Karp bail, the Superior Court justice wrote that “this murder and the Forest Avenue assaults that directly preceded it … appear to be an escalation in level of violence towards individuals who had likely committed the offenses of assault and robbery at the Brookside establishment [Holmes and Frechette]. The court cannot conclude that there is no risk to the public or other individuals if Mr. Karp were to be released on bail.”

Based on discussions with inside sources, here’s what The Bollard knows:

• Holmes is obviously on Higher Calling and the Outlaws’ shit list and in serious danger of a retaliatory attack in a public place. Efforts by Holmes and others to broker a peaceful resolution have yet to result in an appreciable reduction in tensions or risk to public safety.

• National-level leaders of the Outlaws are unlikely to get directly involved in the dispute, due to the relatively small size of FSU (they’ve got much bigger rivalries to contend with), but may be exerting pressure on the local chapter to resolve the offense Holmes and Frechette committed by assaulting and de-patching Higher Calling members.

• Relations between Holmes and erstwhile allies Frechette and Troy McHugh have been strained since the incident that took Susan McHugh’s life, potentially causing a dangerous rift within FSU and the hardcore-music community in which Susan McHugh worked as a concert promoter.

Were the public made aware of these dynamics, they could take steps to reduce the risk of retaliatory violence that authorities believe is a clear and present danger. But rather than constructively engage with (or even fully acknowledge) the clubs involved, the PPD keeps hiding key details. As the Portland Press Herald noted in their article earlier this morning, department spokesman Brad Nadeau “declined to share any information on whether police believe the [five recently arrested] men are connected with either [the Outlaws or Higher Calling] motorcycle club.”

The backlash against The Bollard’s advocacy on behalf of imprisoned justice advocate Leo Hylton began even before this month’s print edition hit the streets Oct. 2. And it got real ugly real quick.

On Oct. 1, Steve Robinson, editor-in-chief of the conservative digital news outlet The Maine Wire (and a Bollard subscriber who got the PDF of this month’s issue two days prior), published a commentary on his website backing Gov. Janet Mills’ opposition to parole and clemency for inmates like Leo. Either Robinson or the website’s administrator then allowed its readers to publicly call for this Black man’s lynching and castration.

The hate speech exposes the broad agreement on carceral policy between our Democratic governor and Donald Trump’s supporters in Maine, a state with some of the most merciless prison policies on the planet.

Robinson rehashes, at length, the gory details of the violent burglary attempt perpetrated by Leo and his foster brother, Daniel Fortune, in 2008. He manages to work in the word machete about a dozen times, and describes Leo as a “34-year-old man who attempted to hack an innocent 10-year-old girl to death.”

Except, of course, Leo was barely 18 when, in a panic, he committed those violent acts. The grown man whose fitness for release we’re actually debating is, among many other things, a PhD student, a professional restorative-justice consultant and practitioner, a hospice worker, a prison tutor and counselor, a civil rights leader and justice-reform organizer, a radio host heard on two Maine stations (Justice Radio, broadcast on WMPG and WERU), a Bollard columnist and contributor since 2020, and a barber.

I personally look forward to being described by Robinson in a future editorial as a “53-year-old man who attempted to have sex with a 17-year-old girl” [during his junior year at Fairport High]. At least we can laugh sometimes at this guy, whose media literacy also leads him to believe The Bollard is a “newspaper.”

Considerably less entertaining are the comments of Robinson’s readers, most of whom post anonymously with, apparently, zero moderation.

“Keep this animal locked up for life!” exclaimed “Cal.”

“This is a perfect person for the death penalty,” “Joe Walker” (possibly his real name) opined.

“Reinstate the death penalty nationwide for scum like this,” “T C” agreed.

“Patricia Zebley” also agreed, and unhelpfully advocated death by hanging: “evil scum needs to swing,” they typed, adding, “of course, make sure he hears the gospel and has the opportunity to repent, before he assumes room temp.”

Among Leo’s proudest accomplishments is the fact this former high-school dropout co-taught a course at Colby College with anthropology professor Catherine Besteman. Leo and Catherine also co-authored a deeply researched three-part series on justice-reform proposals, “Toward a Cage-Free Maine: A Restorative Pathway to Decarceration and Abolition,” published in The Bollard early last year.

Robinson chose to characterize Leo’s research and educational collaboration with Besteman, who is white, as “an extremely close personal relationship,” and one of the trolls took the bait.

“This monster deserves to rot in hell for the trauma that family endured,” the commenter, writing as “No just for Victims of Crime in Maine,” stated. “While they are at it at [Maine State Prison in] Warren or Colby, make sure you chop his nuts off so he doesn’t screw this Colby idiot and have kids in the future.”

Look, I’ve got a few bad habits, but regularly reading The Maine Wire is not among them, much less the anonymous hate speech posted there or anywhere else online. I repeat these vile comments to illustrate the harmful ripple effects of Mills’ pro-prison policies, specifically her staunch opposition to reinstating parole in Maine and her unwillingness to grant exceptional candidates for clemency (Leo being just one among several in recent years) the opportunity to make their case to her clemency board in person.

There’s an inherent cruelty and nihilism to Mills’ position that pollutes the public sphere the same way Trump’s speeches do, stoking our worst attributes — our fears, our prejudices, and most worrisome this election season, our vengefulness.

“Is Hylton a changed man?” Robinson wrote. “Who knows. Sure. Who cares.”

Like Mills, whose clemency board recently rejected Leo’s 600-page petition for a hearing after 16 years behind bars, Robinson displays a medieval indifference to whether people change for the better or get worse inside our prisons. What’s most important to Mills and Robinson is that prisoners suffer for their crimes, ostensibly to deter others from attempting similar sins. Centuries of this carceral philosophy have produced the current state of our union, whereby we cage more people at gunpoint than any other nation, yet still don’t feel safe.

All sides here say public safety is our goal; we just have different ideas about how to achieve it. Restorative justice scholars and practitioners like Leo propose modern, evidence-based approaches that emphasize personal accountability, rehabilitation, reconciliation and healing. Old school tough-on-crime types like Robinson, Trump and Mills (a career prosecutor before becoming governor), cling to the pro-prison policies of past eras despite their obvious and miserable failure. They focus on the awfulness of past crimes no one can change, rather than the positive steps we could take today to make our neighborhoods much safer.

I encourage you to read Robinson’s commentary and ask yourself: Which side of this debate am I on?    

Must our city government destroy everything that makes Portland special?

This is no longer a rhetorical question. I’m honestly wondering what’s left.

At its meeting this past Monday, the Portland City Council voted to allow a minor-league soccer team to take over Fitzpatrick Stadium, home of the Portland Bulldogs for generations, and erase the public high school’s mascot from the city-owned facility. The popular running track there will also likely be gone in a couple years to accommodate the paid players, and the scheduling and frequent re-striping of the field will henceforth be done on the soccer team’s timeline, with student athletes grudgingly accommodated (or not), as has been the case at other city-owned sports facilities leased for much of the year to for-profit companies, like the Expo.

In typical fashion, Monday’s meeting was a shit show, with councilors and members of the public confounded by the details of the deal — details revealed shortly before the amended agreement was scheduled for a vote, then approved without further delay for clarification, over vociferous public objection, in order to accommodate the sports franchise’s preferred plan.   

“We haven’t been really included or represented in any of these conversations,” Spencer Allen, the high school’s athletic director, told councilors at the meeting. “When the proposed amendment [to the deal] came out Friday, there was nothing in it that we talked about.”

Parents, students and alumni, who showed up en masse to oppose their city’s contract with the Hearts of Pine soccer club, got a hard lesson in Portland-style democracy. “This is a joke!” a frustrated attendee shouted from the gallery at one point. “I feel like I’m watching real-time destruction of trust in our democracy tonight,” said Frank Gallagher, an opponent of the deal who performs on the city’s streets and stages as the musician Plague Dad.

City Councilor Roberto Rodriguez, who joined three other councilors to rush approval of the amended agreement, said “even though the public would likely leave the meeting feeling unheard, he felt satisfied with the night’s discussion,” the Portland Press Herald reported. Of course he did. Having failed to discernibly improve this city one iota after nearly a decade on our school board and council, Rodriguez quit “public service” last winter and is just riding out his lame-duck term as an at-large councilor, so he doesn’t need any of these livid voters’ votes anymore.

This latest insult arrived the same day Portlanders took another bruising ball to the crotch with the corporate rebranding of Hadlock Field. Named in honor of legendary Portland High baseball coach and physics teacher Edson Hadlock Jr., the city-owned stadium is leased to the Portland Sea Dogs, the minor-league baseball team recently acquired by the private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners through its subsidiary, Diamond Baseball Holdings (DBH).

As explained here last April, DBH begged, disingenuously threatened to leave, and was then duly handed a multi-million-dollar tax break from state lawmakers to upgrade the ballpark to new league standards — much the same way the soccer franchise is remaking “Fitzy,” as the old-timers call it, to satisfy the demands of its league administrators.

Hadlock’s new name, DBH announced Monday, is Dental Dam Park, a friendly reminder to fans to always practice safe oral sex.

Wait … damn AI autocorrect! Make that Delta Dental Park, which, as Bangor Daily News photojournalist Troy Bennett noted in a personal blog post, is also the name of the home field leased by the Sea Dogs’ closest rival, the New Hampshire Fisher Cats — a team also owned by DBH, which has snapped up over 30 minor-league baseball teams, over a quarter of the entire league, in a monopolistic, speculative-capital spending spree destined to destroy the pastime in our lifetimes.   

Technically, the beautiful ballpark Portlanders collectively built, own and manage is now “Delta Dental Park at Hadlock Field,” the kind of crass corporate insertion that gave Kansas City unpronounceable GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium and turned our Cumberland County Civic Center into Cross Insurance Center — wait, that’s in Bangor; the Portland one is Cross Insurance Arena, which has the benefit of being both infuriating and confusing as hell. (I wonder if Cross offers affordable dental coverage that Delta will accept, or whether the receptionist will just tell me to eat ass with my cavity-riddled chompers…)

Why must Portlanders keep bending over for corporate interests? Because corporations have money (our money, of course) and we, the people, are broke.

Hearts of Pine President Kevin Schohl said this right out loud two nights ago. “We’re trying to pay $800,000 for upgrades that the city can’t afford,” he told our city’s leaders in Council Chambers, according to the daily paper. If anyone in city government rose to dispute Schohl’s claim that we can’t afford to take care of own most cherished public properties, it wasn’t reported — probably because everyone in City Hall believes this stubborn old lie and has been making terrible policy decisions based on it for decades.

Portland’s government, like every other city and state government in the richest nation on Earth, can raise as much money as its people need through taxes, fees and bonds to fund every public service we want. Austerity budgeting is a political choice made by spineless politicians fearful of angering the rich, not an economic law of nature. Never forget this.

And never forget this, too:

• Twenty years ago, when the city needed to make costly repairs to our Maine State Pier, councilors decided to try to lease it for the foreseeable future to politically connected hotel developers who’d turn the public’s most valuable piece of waterfront property into a high-end tourist trap for cruise-ship passengers. Following a nasty and greedy fight among the developers and city officials, nothing came of this odious scheme and our sagging pier still looks like shit.

• A few years later, folks noticed Congress Square Park was really going downhill and needed upgrades. City Hall’s response: we can’t afford to fix it up, so let’s sell a big chunk to the adjacent hotel chain for its guests’ exclusive enjoyment. Portland voters’ response: Fuck you! (The sale was defeated at the polls and an arts nonprofit now organizes free public events there.)

• Even the cops get dissed by Portland City Scrooge. Five years ago, then-City Manager Jon Jennings proposed to sell police headquarters downtown and instead lease commercial office space in Libbytown from a private developer/landlord for all our police and fire department administration. Due to decades of official neglect, the PPD’s Middle Street headquarters needed costly upgrades to be handicap-accessible, replace windows (at an estimated cost of $600,000, about double the bill when the problem was identified in 2013), and stop the water leaking into the basement evidence room. That scheme, and the cops, also went nowhere.   

• The treacherous condition of the crooked cobblestones all along Wharf Street, the most photographed byway in Maine, are also the embarrassing result of decades of near-total neglect by City Hall, whose road- and sidewalk-maintenance practices pale in comparison to those of ancient city-states. Seriously, it’s like we’re intentionally creating Roman ruins for the whole world to gawk at and wonder what went so horribly wrong.

I could go on … and hell, I think I will! How about the cancellation of the massively popular Old Port Festival (too much public expense)? Maine’s largest city can’t afford to pay its symphony orchestra to saw away for a couple hours on the Fourth of July, so that’s gone, too, along with most other city-supported, free or low-cost arts and cultural events (Alive at Five is long dead, New Year’s Portland was last rung in last century, etc.). So many millions of wonderful memories about special times spent in Portland, never even made.

To save public money while simultaneously bilking the poor out of their last 40 bucks, Portland’s outsourced most of its parking enforcement to Passport, a fintech start-up that shouldn’t be trusted to valet a car, let alone collect all our bank card data and put our drivers’ licenses and livelihoods  at risk.

Did I leave anything out? Oh yeah, housing. For many decades now, the city has shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of tax breaks into real estate investors’ and developers’ personal bank accounts to build affordable shelter, and in return we’ve received a housing crisis so severe that the jail can’t hold all the homeless and the low-wage workers needed to keep our hospitality economy humming cannot rent a roof within 50 miles. Public health? Quite possibly an oxymoron these days. Public transportation that meets anyone’s daily needs? Stop trippin’…

I remember a year or so ago when then-Mayor Kate Snyder was reduced to tears atop the dais by frustrated and angry members of the public calling councilors nasty names on Zoom and such. City leaders are big proponents of decorum and propriety while they blithely ignore their constituents’ demands again and again and again. Growing antagonism among the populace toward elected and unelected officials (lawmakers, department heads, cops, meter readers, tax collectors and their ilk) is getting so bad that few people want to become public servants anymore even with the insufficient health and retirement benefits.

To an anarchist like me, this is fantastic news! The Portland police and county deputies and jail guards are basically abolishing themselves! But I also understand how people with, say, a home of their own, or children, or a retirement to look forward to someday may disagree. I wish you folks continued good luck, and I agree with you about this: it sucks when your city is sold out from under you by politicians who don’t give a damn what you want or say.

At least we can still safely perform oral in peace — that is, until the neo-fascist Christian nationalist Republican Party takes power again early next year. See ya at the barricades…

The day after millions of people in this country recalled the stirring national unity that followed 9/11, Portland Mayor Mark Dion published an opinion piece in the state’s largest newspaper expressing his core belief that homeless and addicted Americans are not members of the “public” whom he’s paid and obliged to serve. It was an especially ugly slip of the mask for an ex-cop and jail boss who won his office by appealing to “liberal” Portland voters.

But his own words make it clear that the city’s highest elected official thinks “illicit drug users” and “unhoused” humans are not only not members of the “public” or proper “Portlanders,” and certainly not the “private citizens” whose desire to “make their spaces safe again” must be addressed; they are, by Dion’s definition, outsiders who pose a threat to the public, and by meeting their needs, the city is failing to address the needs of the housed legal-drug users who comprise the public.

I’ll let the medical experts and advocates debunk Dion’s evidence-free criticism of needle-exchange programs in today’s Portland Press Herald op-ed, “Needle waste is a public safety hazard of Portland’s own making.” My expertise is copy editing, and while reading the mayor’s homework I found numerous whoopsies where he dipped his pen into the fascist inkwell.

In Paragraph 1, Mayor Dion sets the framework for his argument, stating that he’s been “assessing the relationship between needle exchange services and intravenous drug abuse in our city” [emphasis added], thereby demonizing people suffering the brain disease of addiction as abusers right off the bat and equating the provision of lifesaving healthcare services to the encouragement of what he elsewhere calls “IV self-abuse.” It’s a pretty ham-fisted rhetorical jab at the faces of our neediest neighbors, but at least enlightened readers can immediately recognize Dion’s an ignorant hater and treat him accordingly in the future.

In Paragraph 2, the grammatical divide between those abusers and the public opens with this rhetorical trick: “a public health strategy aimed at suppressing the transmission of blood-borne infections … now presents a daunting hazard to Portlanders.” Note here how our Mayor-Sheriff neatly and discretely excludes needle-users from the broader category of people he calls “Portlanders,” who apparently must be protected from the hazard created by this ill-conceived strategy to protect public health — even if changing that strategy to provide fewer clean needles, as Dion proposes, will surely result in more sickness and death among “IV self-abusers” and members of the almighty public who don’t inject hard drugs but may love someone who does.

In the next graph (as we call ’em in the news biz) there’s the aforementioned Trumpian dog whistle about the imperative of propertied Portlanders to “make their spaces safe again.” And a few graphs later we get this gem, in which Dion writes of the need to “balance the needs of the unhoused with those of the public” [emphasis mine].

You don’t have to be Bill Safire to see that the leader of this city does not consider homeless people to be members of the public either. To the contrary, the unhoused have needs that compete with those of the public in this framing, and meeting the needs of these unsheltered auslanders must be balanced or, put another way, made equally important as satisfying the needs of people who have one or more homes. In this case, Dion was referring to the way the city meets the needs of the housed by sending cops to destroy the makeshift shelters of the unhoused — in the interest of the public’s safety, naturally.

Toward the end, Dion trips over his own rhetorical dick, writing that “Portland residents and business owners … no longer want to go where everyone is going,” clumsily omitting to put Some at the start of that sentence to indicate that everyone does not include some housed people and bosses who feel physically threatened by the sight of improperly discarded medical implements.

But in the next-to-last graph, Dion gets his groove back and gives his stubby rhetorical dagger a little twist, declaring: “Advancing equity for both community and addict interests must be the foundation of a needle exchange program” [emphasis mine]. Again (calling all militant grammarians!), Portland’s mayor has drawn a clear divide between addicts and our community, two distinct entities, by his absurdly cruel logic, whose interests must somehow be equalized. One entity is comprised of people suffering from a deadly brain disease who are interested in making it through the day without debilitating withdrawal symptoms while avoiding infection from used syringes. The other is literally everyone in town, most of us healthy and housed and thus perfectly positioned to help the other group, but according to our fearful leader, it’s not in the community’s interest to see evidence of the addicts’ daily desperation, so they must suffer to help us feel a bit better.

“Compassion without clear limits is no compassion at all,” Dion writes, waxing philosophic in direct contradiction to the teachings of old softies like Jesus and the Buddha, as well as the definition of compassion itself. But in the mayor’s formulation, it does make sense: he obviously has no compassion at all.

It’s been over a month since a shootout at Morrill’s Corner in Portland took the life of one woman and sent three men to the hospital, and Portland police are still refusing to disclose the identities of the injured victims. Meanwhile, among locals who know the fatal attack stemmed from bad blood between rival outlaw motorcycle clubs, fears of retaliatory violence have been mounting.

The Bollard’s discovery of the identity of the third injured victim is unlikely to quell those concerns or stop people from asking why the cops are keeping key details secret. It also exemplifies the abject failure of law enforcement’s approach to “biker gang” violence.

Kris Haken, 45, a member of the Outlaws motorcycle club who lives in New Hampshire, was treated and released from a Portland hospital the night of July 30. In a story for our September print issue, “Biker Club Beef Led to Morrill’s Corner Shootout,” we erroneously identified that injured man as Travis Frechette, the son of Susan McHugh, a concert promoter from Gray who died after being shot that night. The other injured men are McHugh’s husband, Troy McHugh, and infamous Portland “gang” leader Bill Holmes, a former Outlaw who’s been involved with FSU (Fuck Shit Up), a ragtag posse that made headlines in Portland 30 years ago for their drunken teenage street fights.

Police have arrested and jailed Aaron Karp, 47, an Outlaw who worked at a tattoo and piercing shop across Forest Avenue from the parking lot where the July 30 attack occurred. In the Aug. 9 court order caging Karp for murder without bail, Haken’s name is listed along with Holmes’ and Troy McHugh’s (whose surname, handwritten, is misspelled in the filing) as persons with whom Karp is to have “no direct or indirect contact” in the event he is released.

The Bollard reported that the July 30 incident began at Brookside, a restaurant and bar in Westbrook, where Holmes assaulted a member of Higher Calling, a Christian-based motorcycle club affiliated with the Outlaws, allegedly for wearing a club patch on the premises. Shortly after that assault, Holmes and others, including Susan McHugh, were attacked by a group of 10 or more people in the parking lot of a Meineke auto-repair shop. At least 18 shots were fired and people were beaten with hammers, fists and boots, according to sources and video footage.

Haken made headlines in the spring of 2010 following an outlaw-biker brawl at a pizzeria in Manchester, N.H. Sources said that fight started when a man named Fernando Daraujo, then 40, was sitting with about a half dozen people at a table while wearing an Outlaws shirt. A Hell’s Angel at the bar noticed Daraujo’s shirt and left the restaurant, but about 20 minutes later, roughly 20 Angels and members of an affiliated club, Milford & Co., showed up to rumble.

“The Outlaws really didn't start fighting. They were edgy but did not start the fight,” Petros Kostakis, a co-owner of the pizzeria, told the New Hampshire Union Leader.

“Basically, [the Hell's Angels] said, 'You guys need to come outside or it's going to happen right here in the bar,’” another (anonymous) source told the newspaper. This source said an Angel then threw a punch and all hell broke loose. “Nobody knew what was going on. There were things flying everywhere, people flying everywhere," the witness told the Union Leader.

Kostakis, who told the paper he was “scared for my life, scared for my employees," fired several handgun shots into the air in the parking lot to disperse the warring crowd. Additional gunshots, more hand-to-hand combat, and an alleged stabbing attempt also took place.

Haken, a U.S. Army veteran who reportedly was a prospective member of the Outlaws at the time, got into his girlfriend’s vehicle, grabbed a 20-gauge shotgun and fired in the direction of three high school students who were uninvolved in the dispute and trying to escape the melee. One teen was hit by pellets in the hand and leg and seriously injured.

The cops, prosecutors and judge all piled on Haken, who got what The Telegraph, a Nashua, N.H., newspaper, called a “rare maximum sentence” after pleading guilty to second-degree assault and reckless conduct: 10 to 20 years in state prison. Haken’s lawyer, in a bid to reduce the sentence, pointed out that his client, then 32, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Haken expressed remorse for the shooting in court, as well.

But in what The Telegraph also described as a “relatively rare occurrence,” Manchester Police Chief David Mara testified at the hearing and said “a long sentence would send a message that Manchester won’t tolerate gang violence,” according to the county attorney. It was a tough case to prosecute, an assistant county attorney told the newspaper: “Nobody wanted to testify because it involved the Hell’s Angels and Outlaws.”

The pizzeria brawl led to eight indictments, in total, against motorcycle club members. Cops also hit Daraujo, the man wearing an Outlaws shirt, with two charges for selling cocaine unrelated to the fight. And Kostakis, the panicked pizzeria owner who fired his gun to try to stop the rumble, was arrested and charged with reckless conduct.

The judge in Haken’s case did agree to shave two and a half years from his sentence if the wounded soldier “adheres to getting treatment for his disorder along with other programs ordered by corrections officials,” a county attorney said. And it appears Haken did adhere to those conditions. Sentenced in October of 2011, he was posting on Facebook in the summer of 2017. In addition to posts with Outlaw brothers (including members in Maine), his page is dedicated to family, pets, vacation footage and fundraisers for people in need.

In an Aug. 6 press release, Portland police said the injuries requiring hospitalization on July 30 were all “from this altercation” at Morrill’s Corner. If, in fact, Haken was hurt as a result of inter-club violence, that clearly indicates the failure of law enforcement’s anti-gang strategy here, whereby a long prison sentence intended to send a strong “message” that such violence is intolerable, followed by years locked in a cage at gunpoint, will persuade a wounded war veteran to abandon his biker brothers and pursue a quiet, law-abiding life. The mental-health treatment and “programs” offered in New Hampshire’s prison system also appear to have been ineffective.

Haken’s social-media profiles indicate he’s studied at the University of New Hampshire-Manchester and worked for a waste-services company in Portsmouth. His Facebook page says he’s also a “Digital creator.” Haken did not respond to a Facebook message seeking comment.

Bollard columnist Samuel James also writes a Substack, Banned Histories of Race in America, where he recently posted a piece titled, “Five unfortunate facts about police.” The fourth fact, “Propaganda is the only reason the police aren’t viewed as gangsters and imbeciles,” would make a hilarious Hollywood comedy in the style of the Keystone Kops, a series of silent slapstick flicks made in the nineteen teens. We don’t have the budget to make this movie at present, but here’s the script based on events that actually happened recently in Oxford County, Maine. If you’re a rich movie producer who also finds this funny and won’t mind becoming the target of every Blue Lives Matter goon in New England, reach out to me or Sam about easy financing options and let’s put this baby on the silver screen!

Oh, and here’s the link to the soundtrack, Boots Randolph’s classic, “Yakety Sax.” Listen to it as you read to get the full effect.

INTERTITLE CARD: OXFORD COUNTY 10 YEARS AGO

Sped up footage of the SHERIFF manically running around his office pinching male and female deputies’ behinds, snapping bra straps, and doing that coordinated hand gesture/tongue-poking-cheek gag suggestive of a blow job. Pulling the waistband of his stretchy sheriff pants way out, he angles an old-fashioned camera on a stand so it’s pointing at his junk, and poof! — we see the flashbulb smoke rise. The SHERIFF runs around handing these photos to his deputies and shocked townspeople.

CARD: OXFORD COUNTY COMMISSIONERS CHAMBERS 2017

Three white-haired guys in suits behind a high bench wag their fingers at the SHERIFF, who looks dutifully doleful.

CARD: “OK, I quit. 10-7, good buddy.”

The SHERIFF waddles out of the commissioners’ chambers.

CARD: OXFORD COUNTY, SUMMER 2022

A young WOMAN is sitting in her parked car with an open can marked XXX (indicating booze). A DEPUTY approaches, points at the can, wags his finger at the WOMAN and writes her a ticket. The new SHERIFF approaches the DEPUTY and berates him over citing the WOMAN, who, he indicates with that fingers-making-a-little-heart gesture, is a good person. The incredulous DEPUTY points to the can and the car, and calls over another deputy to witness what’s happening.

The SHERIFF is enraged, steam spewing out both ears.

CARD: “I can shred any frickin’ traffic ticket I want! I don’t work for the county commissioners … You all work for me. And if I tell you not to write any fucking tickets ever again, you won’t write any tickets ever again! You know what I’m saying? That’s the sheriff. It’s a constitutional office!”

The SHERIFF scoots (with the aid of sped-up footage) back to his office, opens a door marked “Evidence Room,” and pulls out an armful of guns, which he proceeds to sell to a line of shady strangers who come in with cash and leave with the confiscated weapons. The SHERIFF haphazardly stuffs bills into his elastic clown pants and runs out to buy more guns at a store next-door. The CLERK there offers the SHERIFF a receipt, which the lawman scoffs at before scooting away.

Two guys approach the SHERIFF, who asks them:

CARD: “You fellers licensed lawmen?”

Both guys shrug their shoulders and shake their heads to indicate they are not. The SHERIFF gives them some of his new guns and points them toward a big building that says “School.” The SHERIFF orders them:

CARD: “Go on, then — git! Go protec’ them childrun!”

Both armed men scoot into the school.

CARD: MAY 2024, OXFORD COUNTY

Two DEPUTIES roust a SCAMP sleeping in a chicken coop and remonstrate with him, waving pieces of paper that read “Bail Conditions.” The SCAMP is coughing uncontrollably, so they hustle him (sped-up film–style) into a big building marked “Hospital.” Then the SCAMP, now dressed in a hospital gown with hands cuffed behind his back, and one of the deputies emerge, get into a pickup truck marked “Oxford Kounty Kops,” and drive to another building marked “Jail.”

Once parked, the DEPUTY gets out of the truck and walks into the jail. Peering about, the SCAMP, with astonished excitement, sees keys dangling from the ignition and a gun under the seat. He deftly slips his cuffed hands under his feet so they’re in front of him again and hops into the driver’s seat. The panicked DEPUTY emerges from the jail and weakly bitch-slaps the SCAMP in the face through the open truck window, but the SCAMP just laughs, shifts into reverse and punches the pedal, sending the hapless DEPUTY flying from the running board. Joined by several other lawmen wearing different badges, they frantically give chase.

The SCAMP crashes the pickup after lawmen lay a cartoonishly spiky mat on the road, and he and the cops engage in a goofy gun battle replete with all the usual ducking and terrible aim. The SCAMP sees an SUV labeled “Oxford Kounty Kops” idling nearby with the door open and keys in the ignition. He joyfully hops in and takes off again, resulting in another comical chase and gun battle, but this time the SCAMP is hit and caught as he attempts to escape by running through the woods, arms flailing wildly, like a loose chicken’s wings.

CARD: OXFORD COUNTY COMMISSIONERS CHAMBERS 2024

The three suited COMMISSIONERS exaggeratedly remonstrate with the SHERIFF, pointing first to the traffic ticket, which has been torn in two, then to a picture of the empty Evidence Room, where a few bills and handguns still lay scattered across the floor, and finally at the two guys with guns he sent into the school. The commissioner in the middle sternly declares:

CARD: “YOU’RE FIRED!!!”

The SHERIFF is angry again, steam shooting from both ear holes.

CARD: “I don’t work for you! It’s a constitutional office!”

The confused COMMISSIONERS call the GOVERNOR on one of those huge horn-shaped black phones, and the GOVERNOR shrugs. She turns to an old, bewigged JUDGE beside her, who whispers in her ear. The GOVERNOR leans into the talking horn of her phone as the COMMISSIONERS scrunch together to hear her verdict.

CARD: “Eh, all that stuff’s no big deal. He should still be the sheriff. And he’s right: you can’t fire him. You know, ’cause the Constitution and whatnot.”

CARD: “THE END”

CREDITS…

Written & Directed by Chris Busby
Based on a post by Samuel James and local news reports
Music by Boots Randolph
Edited by Boots Riley, A.C.E. (Assuming someone gives us Cash Enough to hire him)

Cast
Former Oxford County Sheriff Wayne Gallant: Benny Hill
Current Oxford County Sheriff Christopher Wainwright: Himself (’cause the Constitution and whatnot)
Oxford County Commissioners: Themselves
The Scamp: Charlie Chaplin, C.G.I.
The Governor: Tilda Swinton after a monthlong bender
Deputies: Any dumbass actor with a guild card or not