Kirk Minihane is back on Kevin Cullen’s trail, and this time the fight is over a recent Boston Globe column that Minihane says is built on falsehoods. The column, written two weeks ago and titled Betting on America, came from a visit Cullen made to the Boston Encore in Everett.
Minihane, who says he turned Cullen in eight years ago after suspecting a Boston Marathon bombing column was fabricated, now says the columnist is “back up to his old tricks.” He said Cullen’s latest piece is full of made-up details and challenged the basic setup of the trip, arguing that a reader booking a hotel online cannot simply wind up in the wrong one by mistake.
Cullen opened the column by writing, “I am not a gambler,” then described walking through the casino and seeing what he called the diversity of the employees and customers. He ended with the line, “It looked like America. I didn’t gamble.” That framing is now at the center of Minihane’s criticism, because he says Cullen also claimed in the piece that he meant to check into the Envoy rather than the Encore.
Minihane pushed back hard on that point. He said it is “humanly impossible” to book one hotel and check into another when the reservation is made online, and said Cullen’s explanation does not pass a basic reality check. He also disputed Cullen’s claim that the Encore had the cheapest hotel room in Boston, saying he checked 25 other luxury hotels in Boston and found all of them had lower rates than the Encore.
That argument matters because this is not the first time Cullen’s reporting and personal account have drawn scrutiny. The Boston Globe suspended him in 2018 for lying about the Boston Marathon bombing, after he had also implied in various media appearances that he was at the scene of the attack. Minihane’s role in exposing those claims gives extra weight to his latest attack, even if his tone is more mockery than solemn alarm.
He did not sound eager for Cullen to disappear. Minihane said he hopes the Boston Globe does not fire him because “he’s given us a lot of laughs over the years.” But he also said the new column crosses the same line as before: a statement that was not checked, and in his view was not true. For Cullen, the immediate problem is not the casino visit itself. It is whether readers believe anything else in the piece once that first detail is called into question.
