Michael Cassar

A short while ago, I wished you goodnight. But then I remembered that there is something important I must clear up before the morning.

In one of the blog-posts which the magistrate earlier today said she considered defamatory, I described how we were at lunch at Da Pippo in Valletta one day with some other women, and how two strange and sleazy-looking men began sending drinks to our table.

I and the others present did not want the drinks and tried to send them back, but Magistrate Herrera said we should accept them because she knew the men at that table in the corner, who had been staring at us throughout lunch. Reluctantly, we accepted the drinks but that wasn’t enough, because she signalled the two sleazy men to come over and then they stuck to our table while she flirted wildly and everyone else cringed.

Magistrate Herrera remembered this lunch, though it was one of very many we ate together (because we had friends in common).

She even recalled something I hadn’t mentioned myself: that there was an equally sleazy employee of the US Embassy present, another one of the men she used to entertain. Except that isn’t how she described him in court. She said ‘an official of the American Embassy’, to make him sound like a respectable diplomat, which he wasn’t at all.

And then she did something terrible in court. She said that the policeman who sent drinks to our table, the one whom I described as sleazy and embarrassing and by whose presence I felt compromised, was Michael Cassar, former head of the Vice Squad.

She said this because Michael Cassar is well respected and there is nothing remotely sleazy about him.

Michael Cassar certainly didn’t send drinks to our table and he certainly did not come and sit with us. And I certainly do not think he is sleazy. He was not at the restaurant, then or ever that I can remember.

Magistrate Herrera failed to factor into her strategic calculations that I know Michael Cassar and he knows me. I hold him in high regard and have written in praise of him.

Consuelo Herrera should have had the good sense to work out that someone who has been a journalist for longer than she has been a magistrate would know the head of the Vice Squad and be on speaking terms with him.

I would always accept a drink from Michael Cassar, I don’t think he is remotely sleazy, I am not embarrassed to have him at my table, and in fact, I should send him a couple of drinks myself for all the work he has done, risking his life with bombs behind his door.

By falsely naming Michael Cassar, a policeman I admire, to make herself look better while making me out to be a liar, Magistrate Herrera has forced me to reveal the real identity of one of the sleazy policemen from whom she accepted drinks, then called to our table, and after that, flirted with.

He is former police inspector Patrick Spiteri, who was later made to resign from the police force and then prosecuted by Police Commissioner John Rizzo and Michael Cassar for taking protection money from groups of people who organised illegal gambling, and for stealing a firearm from Police Headquarters and taking it home, which firearm was found during a police raid on his house.

He was arraigned before Magistrate Herrera.

I didn’t know who he was at that lunch. I just knew that he was a policeman and I could sense that he was up to no good. Then because he thought I was the magistrate’s friend, having seen me at lunch with her, he kept coming up to me at the sort of social events where one never normally sees police inspectors. One day, perplexed by the fact that he seemed to be really ‘social’ for a policeman, I asked after him and somebody told me who he was. Then the next thing I heard, he was being prosecuted for extortion and taking protection money and the rest.

I don’t know who the other policeman at that lunch was and I haven’t seen him since. Nor would I recognise him now. I just remember that he was totally gross, that his behaviour was completely inappropriate, and that when he boasted endlessly about his several-weeks-holiday in the Caribbean, I remarked inwardly that policemen’s salaries must be very generous nowadays.