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Likely Democrat voters seem to have been disproportionately affected by Farak’s crimes, including Hispanic drug dealers as well as the tens of thousands of people who got AIDS tests at the Hinton lab in Jamaica Plain where Farak first worked, and for which she later continued performing various tests after her transfer to the now-shuttered Amherst lab.
Last month a local lawyer requested that the Department of Public Health release the number of HIV tests performed during Farak’s employment at the state labs, which eventually might lead to demands that the thousands who were tested in that decade be notified that their HIV tests were possibly compromised.
Farak was apparently quite secretive about her drug use. Her wife, whom she married in 2005 after the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts, told a state grand jury she only saw Farak use cocaine once.
According to the judge, Farak began by ingesting the lab’s drug “standards” — the pure samples against which confiscated narcotics are tested. After nearly exhausting the lab’s official supply, by 2009 she was turning to “police-submitted samples” to satisfy her desperate cravings.
With such a prodigious habit, Farak had to figure out a way to cover up how much she was stealing from the lab. When she was arrested in 2013, state police discovered in her effects a special kit she used to create fake substitutes for the stolen contraband in all their varied colors and textures. Farak’s fake-drug kit, the judge wrote, included “a bar of soap with a razor blade, baking soda, candle wax, off-white flakes and oven-baked clay.”
Farak was represented in court by a now 62-year-old Northampton attorney named Elaine Pourinski. In at least one email, Kaczmerak refers to Pourinski as “the gym teacher.”
Farak was busted in January 2013. She had spent the morning testifying in a drug case in Springfield, then gone out to her car at lunch to smoke crack cocaine. As she returned to the courthouse, Farak was met by two state police detectives, who took her to a conference room and began questioning her.
When the cops asked Farak why she had a crack pipe at her workstation at the drug lab in Amherst, Farak answered, “I think I’m going to hold off talking and talk to my [Massachusetts Organization of State Engineers & Scientists union] representative, if that’s all right.”
In some ways, Farak was a typical dysfunctional Massachusetts state worker. On the rare occasions when she was not smoking crack cocaine in the lab, the judge wrote, “she experienced severe lethargy, irritability, and the inability to focus and be productive, to the point where she would call in sick for work.”
No wonder her coworkers at the lab didn’t notice anything amiss until the very end. Farak was just behaving like the stereotypical hack state worker of Bay State lore.
Farak corresponded with her fellow drug-lab chemist Annie Dookhan, who also served a prison term for falsifying thousands of pieces of evidence at the Jamaica Plain lab.
Two weeks ago, a federal judge in Boston ordered Dookhan to pay $2 million to a 53-year-old Dorchester man who spent 15 months in prison after being convicted by a jury of selling a rock of crack cocaine to an undercover cop in Chinatown in 2008. The judge ruled that when Dookhan testified at trial that the rock had tested positive for cocaine, she had given “false testimony to convict an innocent man.” The “cocaine” was in fact a cashew. In an interview, Dookhan’s victim said, “I knew she was lying. Ain’t no way, no how a cashew can turn into cocaine.”
In his decision last week, Judge Carey pointed out the differences between the two felonious state chemists. While Dookhan had acted out of some twisted desire to assist prosecutors, he wrote, Farak had a different aim in working hard — “to know what the substances were in case she wanted to use them herself … Farak’s motive was simply to feed her own drug addiction.”
One defendant whose conviction was tossed last week was Rolando Penate, who served time for heroin distribution. Farak certified that she had tested Penate’s drugs on Jan. 9, 2012, the same day her “worksheet” showed she had smoked crack in the morning and then at lunch ingested LSD confiscated in a police drug raid.
“She later recalled,” Carey wrote, “that the sensation of colors in the wind left her unable to function well at work, to drive her car, or to attend therapy… She did not recall running any tests that day [but] Farak endorsed certificates of analysis, including in the Penate case.”
Penate was sentenced to five to seven years. Carey ruled that the attempts by Penate’s lawyer to obtain the evidence of Farak’s crimes against his client were met with “stonewalling” by assistant attorneys general Kaczmerak and Foster — “misconduct so egregious… [that it] qualifies as a fraud upon the court.”
Healey now says she is only running for re-election, but some local Democrats believe that after her rabid anti-Trump stylings this year, she represents their party’s only hope of regaining the corner office in 2018.
And she has made all the right moves — when state legislators included her in their wildly unpopular 40 percent pay raises for themselves earlier this year, she wisely turned down her proposed $44,418 increase. Gov. Baker, her would-be opponent next year, and GOP Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, her more likely foe in 2022, also spurned the pay raises.
As for the former assistant attorney generals who committed “fraud upon the court,” after a nationwide search Kris Foster was hired to a $94,000-a-year job in the office of Democrat state Treasurer Deb Goldberg.
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And Kaczmerak, who dismissed the theft of 51 oxies and called the female defense attorney from Northampton “the gym teacher” — she is now on a different state payroll, as an assistant clerk magistrate in Boston.
In fact, under that same pay-raise bill, Kaczmerak had her salary hiked on Saturday, from $107,638 to $111,563 a year. It was her second $3,925 salary increase in five months. And Kaczmerak will get two additional pay raises in the next year, raising her salary to $119,414 a year by next July.
On the payroll at the courthouse in Boston, Kaczmerak no longer has to worry about an “avalanche of work” ever coming her way.
Meanwhile, it has been more than 10 days since Healey last filed a lawsuit against President Trump. But it is a holiday week.
Howie Carr is a syndicated radio talk show host in Boston. You can hear his show at howiecarrshow.com, and you can order his new book, “Kennedy Babylon: A Century of Scandal and Depravity, Vol. 1,” at Amazon.com.[lz_pagination]
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