Crooked and Crookeder

On the dais, chuckling with the House chaplain, DiMasi was joined by former speakers of the House, including his immediate predecessor, Thomas Finneran, who’d been convicted of obstructing justice, and Finneran’s predecessor, Charles Flaherty, who’d been convicted of tax fraud. Within the month, DiMasi had resigned from the House. Within six months, on June 2, he had been indicted on federal charges of using his influence to steer two state contracts, worth $17.5 million, to Cognos, a Burlington-based software company. His friend and former campaign treasurer, Richard Vitale, had already been indicted on state charges regarding Vitale’s work as a lobbyist for the state’s ticket brokers. As strange as that tableau at the House podium had looked back in January, it looked even more surreal as the year went on.

DiMasi’s indictment punctuated a two-year stretch in which Massachusetts public officials of varying rank and station made the news in explosions of bizarre and unethical behavior. Both state Senator Dianne Wilkerson and Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner were arrested on charges of bribe-taking after being caught on videotape in FBI sting operations; most memorably, Wilkerson was shown stuffing cash into her brassiere. State Senator James Marzilli, on the other hand, was arrested and charged with accosting and propositioning women on the streets of Lowell. Elsewhere, there was well-publicized jiggery-pokery involving public pensions, Governor Deval Patrick’s attempt to install state Senator Marian Walsh in a $175,000 patronage job, and the revelation that state Treasurer Timothy Cahill awarded a $21 million contract to a company that also was paying one of his top fund-raisers. A cloud of public outrage surrounded everything that went on, and Patrick responded this year by proposing a massive overhaul of the state’s ethics and lobbying laws, including new and wide-ranging powers for investigators to tap phones and subpoena records. The Legislature passed some -- but not all -- of the proposals the governor had presented to it.

On the subject of corruption, Massachusetts always has been just a little off plumb. For one thing, we’ve taken a kind of mad pride in political chicanery. Much of that stems from the days in which the WASP establishment worked to circumscribe the rising political power of the various immigrant communities. “It’s always been a tricky argument,” explains Scott Harshbarger, a former state attorney general. “The Brahmins were losing power, so they were defining grass-roots politics and the ways guys were getting votes as being corrupt.” From this came the local myth of James Michael Curley, political Robin Hood. The face of the rising power of immigrant Boston, whether as a mayor or a congressman, Curley was forever inveighing so loudly against the old Yankee plutocrats who were keeping the Irish down that his constituents didn’t notice -- or chose not to notice -- that he and his cronies were making out very well. This kicked off a kind of generational alibi that did not begin to dissipate for decades and that lives on today because of the virtual one-party rule. “Politicians grow up here, and they say, ‘We’re Massachusetts Democrats, immune from challenge,’ ” says writer Jack Beatty. “ ‘When I grow up, I want to get my finger in the till.’ It’s almost a habit that’s passed on,” explains the author of The Rascal King, the definitive Curley biography.

Truth be told, however, this might be the same kind of vaulting provincial pride that we see in our passion for the Red Sox. Once, you needed to pay politicians directly to do business here, but even that period in Massachusetts history doesn’t compare to, say, the voluptuous historic corruption of Louisiana. In 1945, Curley was elected mayor of Boston while under a federal indictment that eventually landed him in the hoosegow, yet how does that compare with Maryland’s Spiro Agnew, who literally took envelopes of cash from local developers in his office while serving as vice president of the United States? All our current scandals together don’t add up to what broke loose in New Jersey in July, when, after a two-year investigation into official corruption, the FBI rounded up dozens of people -- including two mayors, two state assemblymen, and five rabbis -- on allegations that included money laundering and the sale of black-market body parts.

Remarkably, Massachusetts politics are much cleaner now than they’ve ever been. “Looking at [former US senator] Ed Brooke’s biography, in the 1960s and 1970s, when he came in as a reformer, all the stuff they had to clean up, it doesn’t happen anymore,” says Massachusetts Attorney General (and US Senate hopeful) Martha Coakley. And Harshbarger, upon reading about Wilkerson’s alleged secreting of ill-gotten booty in her lingerie, thought: “The thing was so retro. Cash in a brown paper bag, that’s not how it’s done anymore.”

Instead, what we have is a tightly knit fabric of power and influence, some of it legal and some of it not, some of it ethical and some of it not. “It is a lot more subtle,” says John Foley, a supervisory special agent with the Boston office of the FBI whose brief includes public corruption cases. “These are people who are very savvy as to the means and methods that we use, and who are involved in what we call ‘the soft extortion,’ where the contribution is handed over with a smile.” At least part of the reason for the spate of high-profile cases is that Foley and the FBI have treated corruption cases more like investigations into traditional organized crime families, including the use of stings like those in which Wilkerson and Turner were ensnared. This renewed vigor also has consequences outside the courtroom.

Corruption has become as hard to define as it has been to eradicate. Certainly, the crimes of which Wilkerson, Turner, and DiMasi are accused are obvious cases. But much of the rest of what is referred to as “corruption” can fairly be defined as “anything that makes me angry.” It is a stew of that which is manifestly illegal, that which is legal but ethically dubious, and that which is legal but guaranteed to raise public hackles, particularly in a time of economic downturn. The perception of “corruption” also feeds on the general political philosophy, ascendant since the rise of Ronald Reagan, that “government” is, at best, incompetent and, at worst, a haven for thieves. Which is partly why the current incidents of public corruption raise a level of public anger that condemns the whole of “politics,” while huge scandals in the private sector, which have every bit the same impact on the public, flare briefly and then die away.

For example, there seems to be an equal amount of anger aimed at the government employees who game the public pension system and at those who simply end up with a pension that the public reckons to be excessive at a time when the private sector has all but abandoned the concept of pensions. “A person can abuse the [public pension] system,” Harshbarger says. “We should have solved that problem by now. But corporate America can take right out of your pocket millions, if not billions, and we don’t see anything like the same degree of anger or focus.”

This all plays out in a culture of outrage, in which the pathetic story of James Marzilli ends up vaguely mixed into the larger scandals involving money and the public interest. It’s all “corruption,” which, the less clearly defined it is, the more virulent it seems to make people. However, it’s not a chain with interconnected links, but, rather, an ill-defined cloud. “The frontier has clearly moved,” Coakley says. “I’ve been a state prosecutor, a federal prosecutor, and I’ve done defense work. You know, people don’t change. The kind of things people do don’t change. Our job has always been to understand when temptations arise, and how do you minimize that?

“You can always do more rules and enforcement, but you’re not going to stop people from finding loopholes and ways around it, if they’re wont to do that,” Coakley says. “We’ve always had corruption around the edges, but I don’t think the basic thing is corrupt. A lot of what government used to be was basically corrupt relationships.”

It is not as it was. There are garish outbursts of personal venality. There are individuals who succumb to what Coakley describes, in her best Catholic catechism formulation, as “the occasions of sin.” There is money changing hands and cash in brassieres, all of it vivid on clandestine videotape. There is gropery and mopery on the park benches of Lowell. There is a fathomless reservoir of public outrage, so easily brought to a boil today that the fine distinctions between what is truly corrupt and what is simply personally aggravating to a sufficient number of taxpayers get lost in the froth. But, while they’re arguably inevitable in politics awash in money and shot through with a stubborn culture of discreet influence trading, these offenses are endemic but not systemic. Not the way they once were.

It is not as it was here, a little over three decades ago, when the state was utterly for sale, when pay-for-play was conducted in Massachusetts in so nakedly obvious a way that, in retrospect, it makes the modern depredations of former Illinois governor Rod (“This is [expletive] golden”) Blagojevich -- to say nothing of the alleged nickel-and-dime grifting of Dianne Wilkerson -- look like the work of kids selling substandard lemonade on the sidewalk. The era, which spanned decades and several governors and which was both bipartisan and multigenerational, was best defined by the testimony of one William Masiello, a prominent bagman of the 1970s. His clients got the contracts. The politicians got fat. And the Commonwealth got a whole lot of public buildings that fell apart as soon as they were put up. Asked by an investigative commission of the time how the system worked, Billy Masiello replied with what had become the de facto state motto of Massachusetts, at least in terms of how its politics operated.

“If a hand is open,” he told the commission, “someone will find a way to fill that hand for something in return.”

There once were three adjoining hotel rooms in downtown Boston. If you were a rising architect who wanted to do business here, you were ushered into the first of them, where you got to meet an aide to the governor, who talked vaguely of how tough it was for someone to run for office in Massachusetts and how much money it cost and wouldn’t you like to help, and how much would you like to help, specifically? You may have noticed the other people in the room, all of whom were busily making phone calls and talking to people on the other end about how much money it cost to run for office. If you were politically astute, you might even have noticed that one of the people on the phone, pitching hard for contributions, was the assistant state treasurer.

If your answers to the questions, especially your answer to the last one, were satisfactory, you were ushered into the second room, where you got to meet the governor himself. The aide would talk about your great desire to do work for the Commonwealth. The governor would smile, agree that you were a stout fellow who should do work for the Commonwealth, and then hand you off to the aide again, who would bring you into the third room, in which you were told quite plainly what was the price in campaign cash for doing business in the Commonwealth. If you said that you didn’t have the money at the moment, you were told that the gentleman over in the corner was the president of a bank. He was willing, right there on the spot, to loan you the money you needed to meet the price you just had been quoted. The banker would sign off the loan, discount it immediately, and the money would go zipping right into the campaign account. A little while later, you would get a contract to build, say, a jail in Worcester County, which would function splendidly except for the fact that the mechanism for automatically locking the cells failed to lock any cells. And maybe you noticed, one day in the papers, that the aide who had brokered the deal had become a judge. This was how it worked for decades in Massachusetts.

What finally broke the system was a deal struck with a New York-based construction management firm named McKee-Berger-Mansueto. In 1969, the firm -- known as MBM -- received a contract to manage the construction of the new UMass-Boston campus in Dorchester. Subsequent investigations over the next 11 years revealed that MBM had landed the deal in the customary way -- bribing its way into it through carefully laundered campaign contributions to nearly the entire Massachusetts political establishment. (One check went from the ubiquitous Masiello through then state senator James A. Kelly Jr. and eventually into then Boston mayor Kevin White’s gubernatorial campaign.) Eventually, two state senators -- Joseph DiCarlo and Ronald McKenzie, both of whom had received campaign contributions from MBM -- went to prison for their efforts to stifle a legislative inquiry into the UMass contract.

By 1978, there was a rising reform impulse in Massachusetts. Two legislators -- Phil Johnston, a Democrat, and Republican Andrew Card, who eventually would become chief of staff to President George W. Bush -- agitated for an independent commission to investigate the whole tangled mess of how public buildings in Massachusetts got built. Governor Michael Dukakis had to bludgeon the Legislature into agreement, and the chairmanship of the commission was handed to John William Ward, the president of Amherst College. Ward was an odd choice. Born in Dorchester, he was a career academic in history and American studies.

He and his commission worked for nearly three years. The testimony -- by Billy Masiello and scores of others -- was specific and damning. The media ate it up. There were moments that were undeniably comic; Masiello seemed to have stepped out of an Edwin O’Connor novel. But the general impression was utterly dismal. As far as the state’s public buildings were concerned, the best design firms around the country had written Massachusetts off as a total loss, leaving the bidding to hacks who were willing to pay the asking price. Besides the Worcester jail with the cells that didn’t lock, there was the auditorium at Boston State College in which the stage was invisible from a third of the seats and the library at Salem State College in which the walls were not sturdy enough to bear the weight of the books. At the UMass-Boston campus, ground zero of the scandal, school officials were forced to erect barricades to keep passersby from being brained by the bricks that kept falling off the side of the library. Unsurprisingly, a completely corrupt system had produced completely shoddy buildings that the taxpayers, already fleeced once, would have to pay to repair.

“It was not a matter of a few crooks, some bad apples which spoiled the lot,” Ward wrote in his introduction to the commission’s final report, which was released on December 31, 1980. “The pattern is too broad and pervasive for that easy excuse. . . . At those crucial points where money and power come together, the system has been rotten.”

The commission issued four major recommendations, three of which became law. In 1980, Massachusetts expanded its statutes on extortion, bribery, and the filing of false statements with public agencies. It radically revamped the process for design selection on public buildings, and it created the state Office of the Inspector General. The only recommendation that failed was the fourth; significantly, that was the commission’s recommendation for the public financing of state political campaigns. In other words, the framework of campaign donations, through which the previous system had metastasized, was left reasonably intact. Ward was extremely disappointed at what he felt was a dilution of the commission’s work. He spent the next five years drifting from job to job. His marriage broke up. On August 3, 1985, John William Ward took a room at the Harvard Club in New York, got into the bathtub, and opened the veins in his arms.

His work outlived him, however. The commission’s reforms broke up the systemic corruption in Massachusetts politics in a manner from which it never has recovered. “It’s a lot better,” says state Inspector General Gregory Sullivan, who holds the office created on the recommendation of the Ward Commission. “I’m not sure the public confidence in the system is better. The very debilitating effect of the actions of individuals still undermine that confidence.”

“It’s subtler now,” says the FBI’s Foley. “It’s difficult to break into, because for the people involved, they don’t have to speak a word. Some things are just understood.”

Tom Kiley is an old-time Boston law-yer who has seen the system both as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney. Over the next year, he’s going to work as hard as he can to keep Sal DiMasi out of the federal sneezer. He sounds almost rueful when he talks about what he sees as the historical pattern of corruption and the attempts to stamp it out. “What I know is that the reaction to every supposed scandal is a cry for reform, and I know reformers seldom pay attention to work done in that area before, and you get ever more Draconian provisions of the law applied in ever more situations, so that nobody can comply. . . . We are social beings. We don’t want to outlaw friendship.”

This, of course, is an alibi that goes back to Curley and beyond. After all, Kiley’s client is being charged with an influence-peddling scheme of a kind that John William Ward would have recognized instantly. There are not many of us who (allegedly) could steer a $17.5 million payday toward any of our friends. But Kiley’s larger point is well taken. For all the attempts -- ideological, or for the purpose of ginning up your Arbitron share -- to paint a culture of civic corruption in Massachusetts in the past two years, the corruption that has been revealed has been a kind of individual entrepreneurial venality -- which is to say, a demonstration of a distressing weakness for what Martha Coakley called the occasions of sin. If he is indeed guilty, Jim Marzilli didn’t grope women because he was a state senator. He did it for reasons buried far deeper in his psyche. If charges are proved true, Dianne Wilkerson and Chuck Turner acted out of individual greed. The way you know that is because they came so cheaply. Turner is accused of pocketing $1,000, boutonniere money for Billy Masiello, if he’d ever worn one.

What’s left are the myriad loopholes and exceptions and favors, most of them perfectly legal, that politicians will tell you function as the grease that keeps the wheels turning and that much of the public sees as part of what it generally calls “corruption,” often at the top of its lungs. The various institutional remedies for these things seem as distant as they ever were -- a permanently viable two-party system for one, a breaking up of the endless bickering among minor legislative satraps, and sensible campaign finance regulation. “The ethical problem,” Harshbarger explains, “is a range of choices within the bounds of legality . . . [in] that ambiguous area.”

“If men were angels,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “no government would be necessary.” Politicians wouldn’t be necessary, either, but they are. We are stuck with them, in all their maddening human frailty. Some of the players are crooked, but the game is not rigged. Not the way it once was. Not the way it is elsewhere. That may be the best anyone can expect. At least the library walls are sturdy enough to handle the books. At least we can lock the cell doors now.