My Sunday Feeling

My buddy Don has an expression that he uses from time to time.  And it goes something like this: "It's amazing how stupid rich people can be." 

This time he was referring, not to the currant occupant of the Oval Office whose sexual misdeeds are a matter of public record and need not be recounted in this space. Rather he was referring to the pickle Patriots' owner Bob Kraft finds himself in after law enforcement in Jupiter, Florida busted a bunch of massage parlors over there for offering services a little more intimate than trigger point therapy and facials.  Kraft is accused, along with about 165 other guys, of soliciting prostitutes working at the massage joints in question.  And, in keeping with Don's mantra, a former President of Citigroup and a Wall Street billionaire also went down, if you will pardon the expression.

Not only were these rich old goats busted at massage parlors, these particular establishments were under the gaze of a multi-jurisdictional task force involving Special Agents of both Homeland Security and the IRS suspecting them of engaging in human trafficking.  And as is often the case in such matters, to hear law enforcement tell it, the women who worked for this chain of parlors were little more than slaves who were forced to work virtually nonstop in fairly squalid conditions.   This news must please Roger Goodell to no end.  The owner of the Super Bowl champs caught up in a prostitution bust involving human trafficking.  That's a hell of a way to start your Friday if your the Commissioner of the NFL.

Meanwhile, somewhere Jim Irsay is smiling.   


Which brings me back to Don's maxim.  

All things considered, and leaving out the apparent fact that the sex workers involved here may well turn out to be the real victims, I pretty don't care what consenting adults do behind closed doors.  One of the best things I do is I mind my own business.  And I'm not particularly judgmental.  People do what they do.  

But you would think that a recognizable and famous guy like Kraft for whom money is no object would have a little more sense than to go to a massage parlor if indeed he has an occasional itch for extra curricular activity that needs to be scratched.

An acquaintance of mine who knows how this kind of thing works on the professional golf tour told me once that the way you do it is your take out an American Express Black Card in the name of your caddie and you let him make the arrangements for you.  As you might have guessed, this discussion came up during the Tiger Woods imbroglio which proved that Tiger had never heard of this sort of money laundering or just was too arrogant to think he would ever get caught.  My guess is the latter.

I would think Kraft could have disported himself in a more discrete fashion in any of a number of ways.  Or talk to some of his players.  Some of them would know how to go about this low commerce.

I don't get it.

A spokesperson for Kraft says he denies the charges.  The cops, God help us, say they got him on video.  It's amazing how stupid rich people can be.

But Jim Irsay's looking pretty good.