Blowing the Whistle

I flipped on the television in my bedroom the other day and quickly became convinced that a foreign dignitary was paying the Bay State an official visit. On the screen, a spiffy blue and white jet dubbed the “Spirit of America” landed and, flanked by numerous officials in suits and somber State Troopers flaunting crisp, fresh-pressed uniforms, its door unfurled.

Was the President of Zambia paying Mitt Romney a visit? Was Pope Benedict in the plane? I waited in rapt anticipation for the individual deemed worthy of such a triumphal greeting to emerge.

Imagine my surprise when suddenly at the door appeared a miserable and rather mousy-looking man, shackled at the wrists and ankles and with his head slung. I turned up the volume on the television set and learned that this forlorn figure was none other than Neil Entwistle, the British man charged in the murder of his wife and newly-born daughter.

Entwistle was escorted out of the plane by a contingent of armed officials large enough to invade Canada and led into a marked police car that looked freshly washed and buffed for the occasion. He was then driven to a jail in Hopkinton to be booked and fingerprinted in a caravan of cars akin to President Bush’s motorcade.

While this “Team America: World Police” treatment of Entwistle’s extradition and arrest made for gripping programming, it was an absurdly excessive and overly glamorous way to deal with the alleged murderer. When he should have been locked away in the bowels of a nondescript freight plane for his extradition flight, Entwistle was free to walk around his mini-Air Force One unencumbered with so much as handcuffs. I wouldn’t be half surprised if this alleged murderer is feasting on surf and turf and lounging on a plush leather sofa at this very moment.

Not to mention Entwistle’s celebrity treatment is an epic waste of state and federal tax dollars. Thousands were no doubt spent on chartering his private extradition jet alone.

Now, the U.S. Marshal’s service might argue that Entwistle’s posh return-flight and subsequent motorcade were necessary owing to security reasons (stemming from his tabloid cover-boy status), but this argument makes little sense. If security were really such a concern, then one might imagine that the Marshals and state police would find it more effective to extradite Entwistle in secret—outside of the media spotlight—and transport him to jail in an unmarked vehicle. Although it may be difficult in this era of 24-hour cable news to withhold information from the media, if President Bush was able to fly secretly to Iraq for Thanksgiving, this hardly seems too complex a task.

In actuality, there can be little doubt that the whole event was consciously choreographed to appease the myriad local, national, and even international television crews filming the landing at Hanscom Air Force Base. It’s truly a shame that government officials are hard at work spending our tax dollars to transform reality into Hollywood blockbusters and, in the process, pampering alleged criminals like Neil Entwistle.



Steve C. Bartenstein ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Lowell House.