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Howie’s Friday column

Kiko’s kooky defense: It’s the drugs talking
By Howie Carr | Friday, November 16, 2007 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists

The jailbird victim du jour is Roberto “Kiko” Pulido, the crooked Boston cop and erstwhile proprietor of Hyde Park’s world-renowned after-hours club, the “Boom-Boom Room.”

In what is becoming a tradition, Kiko is making his pitch for mercy, not directly to the federal judge who’ll be sentencing him in Febuary, but indirectly, through the local broadsheet.

Earlier this week it was Toby Kerns, the natural-born knucklehead who dreamed of turning Marshfield High into another Columbine. That loser threw himself on the mercy of the court of public opinion, and it worked, dammit.

Instead of 40 years, a bleeding-heart state judge gave Toby 10 months.

Now comes Kiko Pulido, who pleaded out last week to multiple felonies, including providing security for cocaine and heroin dealers who turned out to be undercover FBI agents. Among other sidelines, he bragged of selling the Social Security numbers of drivers he stopped, peddling steroids and dealing in stolen gift cards.

Kiko once asserted on tape that he had made certain his fellow bent cops understood that, “If something goes bad and they’re at fault, somebody is going to pay, either with their life or their children’s lives.”

Pretty cold, threatening to kill somebody’s kids, but Kiko can explain everything. That wasn’t him talking, it was the steroids he was hooked on. Kiko was just kidding.

And do you know whose fault it is that he committed all these crimes while on steroids?

Not Kiko’s, of course. No, he points the finger at the Boston Police Department. By phone from a New Hampshire jail, he told the broadsheet the BPD should have given him more help, and treatment, for his addiction.

Of course, when Kiko tested positive for cocaine in 1999, he claimed he was innocent. Kiko appealed his suspension, with the help of the Boston police union, whose president is Thomas Nee, who happens to be the father of Toby Kerns’ alleged co-conspirator in the Marshfield High massacre plot. Small world, isn’t it?

But back to Kiko’s drug problems. At first he was angry that the BPD brass accused him of being a druggie. Now he’s peeved at the same BPD brass for not getting him help for the addiction he loudly claimed he didn’t have.

So let’s go over some of the other reasons Kiko thinks he deserves a lenient sentence:
# He has two mortgages on his houses, plural, in Florida and Hyde Park.
# The feds made him pay 40 grand for his own lawyer - not fair!
# He likes to “read his Bible” and he’s “got God in his heart.”
# He didn’t father a child until he was 16.
# He only has six children, by three or four different women.
# At his first wedding, he insisted that the only beverages served were “sparkling apple and grape juice.”
# Kiko is such a trusting soul that when the informant who ratted him out got married last year, Kiko was not only his best man, but paid for the honeymoon - is there no honor among drug-dealing stool pigeons?
# He’s the son of poor immigrants from Cuba, and when he claimed on tape that his 74-year-old mom could spot a narc a mile away, that was the steroids talking again.
# In 2005, Kiko suffered a stroke “brought on by overwork.”

Kiko liked to mix work and pleasure, the way he did at the Boom-Boom Room. Featured attractions were drugs and hookers, both of which were available at popular prices.

Kiko’s not asking for any special treatment from the judge, you understand. He’d settle for what Toby Kerns got, only at Club Fed.

Of course, Kiko’s sentence will be harsher, but I doubt he gets the max. In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.