Rough justice
No one is going to call Boston's US attorney, Michael Sullivan, soft on anything.
Sullivan's office this month charged members of the Deuce Boyz and Soldiers street gang with terrorizing Lynn with drive-by shootings, home invasions, and witness intimidation. Last month he won a nine-year sentence against a Chelsea woman convicted of running a prostitution ring that supplied girls as young as 13 to customers. Four years ago he secured a death sentence against Gary Lee Sampson, a drifter who confessed to carjacking and killing two men during a week-long run of murders.
Now our tough guy US attorney has imposed a death sentence on a small Boston-based nonprofit environmental organization that over 35 years placed more than 10,000 students and young professionals in internships that led many of them into careers protecting the environment. There had to be a better outcome.
A week ago the Environmental Careers Organization, or ECO as it is known, started telling its small staff in Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco and its 200 current interns that it was shutting down. Those interns, from the South Pacific to Alaska to Washington, started scrambling for what to do next. ECO's bulletin board reflected the panic.
"What the heck is going on here," asked one? "This is crazy!!!" said another. Added a third: "By all accounts things are really as bleak as they appear."
Bleak they are. ECO's board has voted to file for bankruptcy, extinguishing decades of placing young people in environmental internships, largely with government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Bureau of Land Management. People like Ben Packard, Starbucks' director of environmental affairs, Vate Powell, vice president of MTV Networks, and Marty Zeller, who runs a Denver conservation consulting firm, all got their start at ECO. "It was life-changing," says Zeller.
The next generation will have to find another career ladder. The ECO ladder collapsed in the wake of an investigation by Sullivan's office that dragged on for two years. According to a request for documents from the US attorney's office and ECO's founder, Jeff Cook, Sullivan's office is investigating the group's use, or misuse, of government funding for interns. The US attorney's office declined to comment.
Cook, who started ECO straight out of college as a way of marrying his environmental roots growing up on a farm in Williamstown and his entrepreneur's nature, remains very much at risk personally in this probe. But if he is a guilty man, he doesn't act like one. Instead, he acts like someone who has just lost his life's work without ever having had his day in court.
"This is an organization that has been ruined, and they didn't even talk to me," he says.
Cook calls this a contract dispute. ECO believes its contracts with government agencies allowed it to retain surplus funds not spent on interns; the US attorney disagrees. The dispute amounts to $1.8 million accumulated over eight or nine years, Cook says. He says ECO has tried hard to settle the dispute, but the US attorney kept demanding more, including $190,000 to cover a whistleblower's legal bills.
Given time, Cook believes strongly that he and ECO would be exonerated. But time is what they don't have. With an investigation hanging over its head, ECO's bank could not extend its line of credit. Federal agencies were withholding payments. In the end, ECO's board felt it best to pull the plug, and get its interns home.
What's next? "I am going to grieve, and I am going to recover," says Cook, who is 59.
Good justice requires good judgment. Mistakes were surely made, but whatever happened this was not a capital offense that should have snuffed out a nonprofit whose best days should still be ahead of it. This story did not have to end this way.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902. 
