Time for Bob Kraft to recede into the background

A couple of things for the record:

While acknowledging that his organization has a decent record, philanthropically speaking, I’ve never been a big fan of New England Patriots’ owner Bob Kraft. (And being besties with Trump has only a small bit to do with it.)

While I’ve never been a big fan of Bob Kraft, he has every right to have a girlfriend young enough to be his daughter, maybe even his granddaughter. Even if he started dating her three and a half minutes after his wife died.

While I think that prostitution is a really terrible, disgusting, unsavory and pathetic way to make a living, I’m okay when the transaction is between consenting adults. So if a horndog old billionaire wants to pay for sex, let old billionaire horndogs be horndogs.

But jeez louise.

There is a mega distance between pay-for-play congress between consenting adults and sexual exploitation, the trafficking networks (and pimps) exploiting young men and women and treating them just brutally.

For those who haven’t watched any news during the last few days, Kraft has been charged with soliciting prostitution. And it wasn’t just any old prostitution Kraft was allegedly soliciting.

He is charged with having massage-parlor sex (HJ or BJ: not yet revealed, but there are supposedly videos) in a cut-rate, strip-mall joint in Florida where the women providing the “massages” were sex-trade victims. The story is that these women were imported from China, illegally, and, once here in the land of the free: stripped of their passports; threatened with violence towards loved ones back home if they spoke out or tried to escape; sleeping on the massage beds where they worked; eating whatever they could cook on a hotplate outside the backdoor of the massage parlor; and forced to work without days off, servicing up to 1,500 men per year.

This past year, one of those men was allegedly Bob Kraft.

One thought that comes to mind is what in the world was a guy worth billions doing in a place like the Orchids of Asia Day Spa.

I’m sure Kraft was a generous tipper, but the charge for the services provided was $59 for a half hour, $79 for a full 60 minutes. Or, about what I pay, give or take, for a mani-pedi. (Of course, it’s not clear what the women actually made for their efforts. Likely, most of the take went into the pockets of those running the scheme.) Anyway, you’d think that someone with Kraft’s resources would have gone a bit higher end.

But, hey, part of the attraction was probably that the “massage therapists” spoke virtually no English, and were unlikely to recognize a quasi-celebrity like Kraft.

Do I think that Kraft knew the background of the women giving him a few minutes pleasure on his two recorded trips to the Orchids of Asia? Why  would he have? They were just anonymous young things, with an emphasis on the things.

If he’d given it any thought, he surely would have figured they weren’t here on an H1B Visa, let alone an H2B visa, let alone the sort of Einstein Visa that Melania Trump somehow managed to nab.

If Kraft bothered to notice anything about his surroundings, he surely would have noted that they weren’t up to the usual standards that a multi-billionaire was used to. But why bother to notice.

It was just one of those horn dog guy things. Anyone, any place’ll do.

Pathetic, tawdry, shameful.

(What’s also pathetic, tawdry, shameful: folks flocking to the strip mall to take selfies in front of the now-closed massage parlor. As it turns out, my friend John was in Jupiter, Florida, this past weekend, visiting his elderly mother. When John visits his mom, they usually do take-out Thai from a restaurant in the same little strip mall as Orchids of Asia. He predicted that crowds would be there, making parking difficult. And he was right.

(What is wrong with people? Forget I asked. The combination of prurience, sports-related celebrity, old-goat billionaire. Simply irresistible. I guess this is nothing new. My mother was a girl in Chicago at the height of the gangster era, and she remembered reading that theatergoers at the Biograph Theater, outside of which notorious criminal John Dillinger was shot and killed by G-men, dipped their handkerchiefs in Dillinger’s blood so they’d have a souvenir. So wanting a selfie outside a place where someone sort of famous had some sort of sex is to be expected.)

Kraft’s involvement in this awful story is getting most of the attention. But most of the attention should be going to the beyond-dreadful situation of trafficked sex workers. Here’s hoping that the young woman caught up in this awful world get the help they need. Unfortunately, initial word is that many of the women are reluctant to talk, since they believe that if they tell the truth, loved ones back in China will be harmed. Anyway, would that ICE spent more time cleaning up sex trafficking than they do on rousting brown-skinned folks who’ve overstayed their visas.

But Kraft’s involvement can’t be overlooked – especially in Boston, where every move made by those who are part of our world of sport is chronicled on the front-page.

Kraft seems to revel in the limelight, but the limelight he seems to thrive in is being handed the Super Bowl trophy. Riding in the lead duck boat in the Super Bowl Victory Parade. Getting hugged by Tom Brady.Getting honored for his philanthropy. Being seen out and about with this girlfriend. Hobnobbing with the rich and famous. Rubbing shoulders with Trump at Mar a Lago.

Even after the charges against him were publicized, Kraft was still looking for the limelight, showing up at pre-Oscar galas thrown in lush Hollywood estates by fellow billionaitres like Barry DIller.

But I think it’s time for Bob Kraft to pull back a bit, to fade out, to recede into the background.

There is speculation that Kraft will receive some sort of sanction from the National Football League for “conduct unbecoming”, or whatever it is they call it.

As far as I’m concerned, there are few organizations as farcically sanctimonious when they feel the need, as full of hot air phony baloney, as the NFL. But I’m all for them punishing Bob Kraft. Tell him he can’t show up at Gillette Stadium to watch the Patriots for a few games. Kick him off some of their showboat committees.

I really don’t want to see his face anytime soon.

Kraft is 77. Time to retire, Mr. Kraft. Time to retire.