It was a couple of years ago and I no longer have access to the codebase, but the business logic of that piece of code called for a boolean. The problem was th

It was a couple of years ago and I no longer have access to the codebase, but the business logic of that piece of code called for a boolean. The problem was they they also (ab)used that field for the lock. It either should have been a separate field (of type Object, as you suggested) or use the existing Boolean, but call it "lock" or "monitor" or somesuch.