Posted by Every workday for the past seven years, Paul R. Arsenault made his rounds of Boston’s 7,200 parking meters in a fresh blue uniform, carrying with him a special key and the responsibility for fixing his share of the hundreds of meters across the city that are jammed or broken.But on a cold, clear morning this week, it all came to an end. Police detectives working with an officer from the anticorruption unit confronted him, read him his rights, and took him downtown, removing from his black repairman’s van pieces of evidence.
The evidence: 34 quarters from his left pants pocket and 96 quarters and two nickels in a plastic sandwich baggie in his lunchbox.
”He was obviously taking taxpayers’ money and shoving it in his pocket, and that will not be tolerated,” said Thomas J. Tinlin, acting transportation commissioner.