Criminal privilege

The jokes wrote themselves, when all this hit the fan. Deflategate jokes. Jokes about Robert Kraft getting a seventh "ring" to go with his six Super Bowl rings. The sort of jokes that bloom like English flower gardens whenever the rich and powerful do something that strips away their cultured veneer.

But after awhile, you stop laughing.

After awhile you wonder what sort of mindlessness compels one of the most powerful men in American sports to frequent a seedy strip-mall massage parlor whose workforce, according to Jupiter, Fla., police, are little more than slaves.

Robert Kraft is reportedly worth $6.6 billion. How does he wind up in a place where young women, most from China, are lured into a human trafficking ring that condemns them to virtual servitude, never being given days off or allowed to leave the premises?

It is the ultimate intersection of the powerful and the powerless, and if it does not expose in stark relief the vast chasm between, nothing ever will.  Men such as Kraft frequent these sorts of places because they can; it is not mindlessness after all, but the bulletproof arrogance vast wealth confers.  And the women they pay a pittance to service them?

If men such as Kraft cannot conceive of a world where there is any consequence, the women cannot conceive of a world that isn't entirely consequence -- the consequence of powerlessness.

One would hope that Kraft getting caught up in this sting -- and despite the protestations of his attorneys, they've got him on surveillance video -- would perhaps balance those scales a bit. But it's hard to not to be skeptical of that.

Men with Robert Kraft's virtually limitless means and status, after all, rarely meet a problem they can't make disappear by throwing money at it. And if the NFL finds it necessary to come down on one its most powerful figures, it strains credulity to think it will come down in any way that actually punishes him.

I mean, he only further exploited already exploited women. It's not like he knelt during the National Anthem or anything.

Then he'd really be in trouble.