VIII
I fall asleep more easily than I expected. I dream I am at home, taking a nap, listening to Diana’s voice. For the most part this is exactly the same as dreaming of a pampering massage, expert fingers lightly tracing circles on my back. There are a few harsh moments when her voice is more direct, drawn directly from this current nightmare, but just a few. Mostly I can hear the bells, the far-off carillon, and before I know it I am gone, my shirt folded into a little pillow propped against the crook of my right arm.
But I do not sleep soundly. Through the night there are many uncomfortable moments. Men snore and fart all around me. A few times I begin to think about Diana or Rachel or Sam or even my colleagues and my office but I am vigilant against such active thoughts, turning instead back to the Bose in my mind to listen to Diana’s voice from those old days when I would listen to her on the radio and let her words lure me into the comfort of sleep.
I awaken for good, before seven, to the rattling of trays. Breakfast is being served. A tray is passed through a lot in the door to me, with three pancakes, some syrup and butter, and a container of apple juice. As soon as I take it and set it on the bed I am handed a cup of black coffee and a container of milk. Better than I often eat for breakfast at home.
As I chew my first bite of the syrupy pancakes I am trying to remember the last time I had breakfast without a newspaper to read. Ten years? Twenty years? Well, get used to it.
Even more than I miss information I miss the two things that are often the emotional high points of my day.
One is simple: my morning wakeup from Sam, who is almost always the first one awake in the house, and who manages to contain his exuberance for entire moments before he bursts with excitement and hurtles across the floor to wake Diana and me up with our morning “grippy hugs.”
The second is more situational, and depends on the opportunities that present themselves. Ever since the first night we ever spent together almost ten years ago, Diana has always found a way near the beginning of every day to focus her love on me with laser intensity. Sometimes it is words and the music of her voice, sometimes it is carnal and a little shocking, sometimes it is nothing more than the intimation of bliss that can come when I feel her lips against my neck and she clasps her body against mine and whispers my name – “Stanley” -- in a way that melts any edge that exists for me at the start of a day. I am a lucky man.
Except, not today.
I am still eating when the C.O. who passed out the pancakes is back at the little window slot in the door.
“Branford.”
“Yes?”
“Shift commander says to give you this.”
He slides a newspaper through the slot to me. Not the Transcript. It is a copy of this morning’s Boston Herald. The Herald is a right-wing tabloid newspaper that, it irks me to admit, often does a better job of covering the real street-level news of the city than either of its better-funded rivals, my paper and the Globe. Most people do not know this. What most people do tend to know about the Herald is that it is relentlessly Republican in its editorial slant, that it emulates the New York Post and the Daily News in its use of catchy upper-case full-page headlines, and that it sells a lot of papers on the backs of the subjects and victims of scandals and salacious rumors. It is safe to say that Michael Jackson, Tonya Harding, O.J., Monica Lewinsky, and Paris Hilton all have thicker clipping files in the Herald morgue than any number of statesman, diplomats, and non-scandalous newsmakers.
This Herald does not have a full-page headline. I wish it did. What it does have, covering nearly the full font page, is a full-color, full-length photograph of me standing in front of the bright neon “Little Girls” sign as I left the place last night. I look confused and disoriented, and that was before I was arrested. Below the photo are a headline and story in very large type that jump quickly to Page Four:
Transcript ‘Conscience’ A Con?
Stanley T. Branford, the Boston newspaperman for over a decade as “the conscience of the Boston Morning Transcript,” was arrested by state troopers last night and is scheduled to be arraigned in Suffolk Superior Court this morning on over one hundred counts of larceny over $250.
Branford, a married father of two, was apprehended as he left the infamous “Little Girls” adult entertainment complex in Chelsea and was being held last night at Boston’s Nashua Street Jail.
Attorney General Carter Bagley said last night that he was “saddened” by the arrest, but he asserted that “individuals who commit the kinds of crimes with which we are charging Mr. Branford must never feel that they can take comfort behind the power of past friendships, political power, or even the patronage of a powerful publisher.”
Bagley’s past campaign have been endorsed by Branford’s newspaper, the Transcript, and Branford often writes such endorsement editorials for his paper.
Although Branford was the subject of several compromising photographs taken at the “Little Girls” nude dancing complex last night by prize-winning Herald photographer Frank Grossman, state police were tightlipped on whether any sex-related charges would be forthcoming against Branford.
“We do have his home computer, and that’s all we are going to say at this time,” said a state police source who is familiar with the case, speaking on condition he not be identified. Another source, however, confirmed that authorities are in possession of credit card records that purport to show that Branford has spent thousands of dollars at the “Little Girls” complex in recent weeks.
The charges against Branford will probably remain somewhat sketchy until his arraignment today, but AG Bagley confirmed last night that the case has developed “with lightning speed” over the past two to three days following the receipt of an anonymous tip by authorities on Tuesday.
“Often a case involving white-collar crime will proceed very deliberately at the investigative level, but this was a situation where there was some clear and unimpeachable documentation staring us in the face, and we could not allow the victimization of our citizens to continue unabated.
“It is nice to be able to take a little more time to dot all the i’s, but we had to balance that with our responsibility to protect the public from a man who has been looting millions of dollars from the accounts of innocent and unsuspecting victims,” Bagley explained.
Branford’s alleged scheme appears to have involved a cyber-space identity theft, whereby he was gathering information about his victims from the internet or from physical documents, then siphoning off funds from their banks, securities, and credit card accounts.
A state police report obtained last night by the Herald alleges that Branford has stolen over $5 million from his victims during this month alone, and refers to 112 counts of larceny over $250.
“Five million may be just the tip of the iceberg,” said the unidentified state police source. “Unfortunately there may be layers and layers of victims here, and the banks involved will also be looking to recover any funds for which they may be liable as well.”
A Harvard Medical School expert in forensic psychiatry observed last night that “it should never surprise us to see a seemingly exemplary public man take extraordinary and desperate actions of apparent self-sabotage in order to expose the chinks in his own moral armor.”
“Speaking hypothetically about such a fellow, we may speculate that he must have been feeling intense pain and insecurity about his public reputation for morality,” said Dr. Gustav Winegarden. “He probably felt that he had little control over the force or form of this ultimate eruption of what community standards may define as bad behavior. In some ways it is a situation where the nature of the crimes is likely to point us as far away as the criminal, if you will, can imagine from what might be seen as his public profile. Thus a man who does not have any history of greed might steal millions of dollars, or a good family man might involve himself inappropriately with photographs of children. A man who is seen as an old-school throwback kind of newspaperman could very well teach himself how to use a computer to hack into the financial accounts of innocent victims so he can take their money like a thief in the night.
“I have not interviewed Mr. Branford specifically, so there is some speculation involved in these pronouncements, just as there would be if I had interviewed him,” said Winegarden.
Boston Morning Transcript publisher Crocker Talbot said last night the newspaper would probably wait until after Branford’s arraignment to issue any statements about his status as an employee of the paper, but he also told the Herald “the Transcript has taken appropriate steps to firewall and quarantine Mr. Branford’s computer and his company account while we conduct our own investigation and cooperate with authorities to the greatest extent we can.”
Branford has been employed at the Transcript since the 1970s, when he began as a copy boy before working his way up through the ranks until his name was added to the newspaper’s editorial masthead as its Editorial Page Editor in 2001.
Dick Napoli, the newspaper’s assistant city editor, said last night that Branford had never held any computer-related positions or received any special computer training during his tenure at the paper.
“If Stanley Branford is a hacker, that’s news to us,” said Napoli. “But of course we didn’t know he was a thief or a pedophile either.”
Branford is married to Diana Ryerson, co-host of the highly acclaimed public radio program “Hither and Yon” and a former local television new anchor. Branford has two children, including a teenaged daughter from his first marriage, which ended in his wife’s death.
“I have always thought of Stanley Branford and the Boston Morning Transcript as being totally synonymous with one another,” said former Boston mayor Raymond Flynn in a statement delivered to the media late last night.
Talbot refused last night to comment on whether Branford’s name would appear on the editorial masthead in today’s editions of the Transcript, or on whether the editorials that would appear in today’s editions would be the product of Branford’s work.
It isn’t hard now to understand why the C.O. handed me the newspaper: it isn’t really special treatment, at least not in a positive way. What Amy would call it, though a little rough and urban, strikes me as very eloquent just this moment: “Mindfuck 101.” My heartbeat began to race as I read the story, and now as I survey the several accompanying photographs it only gets worse. For a moment I sit and look straight ahead at the dirty gray wall in front of me and I try to get some control over my breathing and my heart rate. The jump-page headline reads:
Self-Destruction of a Public ‘Conscience’
All but one of the photographs were taken last night at “Little Girls.” In one of them Roller Girl is leading me to a seat at the runway, with my hand holding her upper arm for guidance. Another picture shows me handing a large lollipop to the woman who introduced herself to me as Myst. In another, I am standing a few feet from the exit. Heather and Britney stand facing me, and in the background behind me, out of focus, is a naked woman on the dance floor. Heather is reaching into the front of my trousers. The photographer is very good: a picture taken an instant later would have shown my displeasure and would also have been unprintable due to its content.
The fourth and final picture’s cutline reads:
IN HAPPIER TIMES: Branford with his family in an undated photo
It seems to be taken from the Christmas card Diana and I sent out last year: the four of us are schussing downhill in a toboggan with wild, reckless, joyful laughing faces. I recall that the photographer, unseen here, was Gwyneth Gannon.
It is hard for me to imagine that my life could be any more over than it feels right now. How could this have happened? Although I do not understand it, there is another sense in which all the pieces of the puzzle are locked into place and I understand perfectly: my life is over. The kinds of expressions that I see in this holiday photograph do not exist anywhere in any imaginable future of mine. It does not matter what has happened in my life, because the combined weight of everything that has been visible in the past 24 hours is simply beyond any explanation. Although not many of my friends and neighbors read the Herald, I am sure that they will all buy and read today’s edition. They will read this story and look at these photographs and, because they are reasonable men and women who do not go around wearing tinfoil headpieces and looking for elaborate conspiracies, they will presume me guilty. Their hearts will be full of regret and sadness for me and for my family, and they will say to themselves, “Something must have gone terribly wrong for Stanley.” By allowing for that entrance of the catastrophic unknown into what they thought they knew of me, they will let themselves off the hook for having, apparently, misjudged my character.
So they will, at the end of the day, find me guilty.
Guilty of stealing millions of dollars.
Guilty of some kind of vague activity involving pornography, the Herald article strongly suggests. Child pornography, as a matter of fact, once one considers the slant of Winegarden’s comments in combination with these photographs.
But the other shoe will soon drop on that part of the story: all the AG’S office will have to do to guarantee several additional news cycles for their version of my story will be to describe, or disseminate, some of the material they pull off my home computer’s hard drive.
I understand for the first time that my earlier notion, that all I will have to do is connect the dots about “the bank mix-up,” is now rendered absolutely delusional by the weight of what people have been exposed to.
Okay, my identity has been stolen. Silly me, for not understanding right away that that was the simple part. The more complicated part is that I have apparently been framed.
Framed for a thief, and a pretty big-time thief at that. Then, like the icing on the cake, framed for a pervert.
Who would do such a thing to me? Is it just some random thief and pervert who needed to find somebody else to finger for his crimes?
I don’t buy it. If some guy were just looking for somebody to take the hit for his crimes, he would not select a scapegoat who has the moral credentials, if you will, that I bring to the table. Or brought to the table. My “moral credentials” are all gone now, and a lot of good they did me.
One thing I know: I need to find out who is the alter-Stanley, and why is he destroying my life.
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