Always enjoyed his work ... Haynes Johnson, Royko and Barnicle as well ... at least until Barnicle lost his mind.
got a little Barnicle story that always has made it hard for me to like him. too long to detail, just the bottom line is he went after a judge I clerked for. At least some of the other judges on the court and many lawyers around the city thought the article tried to highlight she was a Jew by using her maiden name as well as her married name. She never used her maiden name professionally. It was controversial enough that the Globe ombudsman looked into it. Barnicle claimed he got her name from how she was listed on the Radcliffe board of trustees. Back then, that was not on-line and easy to find, but the ombudsman bought it. Barnicle's article was defending an assistant DA who probably was a source. If any of you remember the Charles Stewart murder case from about 1990, where a guy killed his wife coming out of birth class and tried to pin it on "some black guy" and then jumped off the Mystic River Bridge when the story unraveled, Barnicle was all over this story because of another assistant DA source who was running the investigation searching for the phony perp. Even after Stewart jumped, Barnicle still did not put 2 and 2 together.
