Steeled as prosecutor, Reilly faces a tough trial in politics

Second in a series on the three Democrats in the Sept. 19 gubernatorial primary.

Hours after Janet Downing was found dead on July 23, 1995, Thomas F. Reilly walked into her Somerville dining room to see the body. He walked out a changed man.

By all accounts, Reilly, who was Middlesex district attorney at the time, was profoundly disturbed by the brutal stabbing death of the 42-year-old mother of four. The case became a personal crusade.

``It was like one of his own family had died," recalled Downing's brother, Stephen Solimene. ``I will never forget the way he fought for us."

Reilly pushed to keep the suspect -- Edward S. O'Brien, Downing's 15-year-old neighbor -- locked up before trial, despite disbelief in Somerville that O'Brien was the killer. He fought to try O'Brien as an adult and got state law changed so juveniles age 14 and older who are charged with murder would automatically be prosecuted as adults. He tried the high-profile and emotional case himself, winning a conviction that sent O'Brien to prison for life.

But if Reilly was smack in his element as a steely, sure-footed prosecutor, his transformation to attorney general and, now, to candidate for governor, forced him far outside his comfort zone.

Prosecutors, by and large, react to crimes. The best ones go hard at the perpetrators and make streets safer by sending criminals to jail.

The jobs of attorney general -- and even more so, governor -- are far more political and require a command of many issues. Reilly faced a big learning curve when he became attorney general, in 1999, and his education in both politics and policy continues today as he seeks the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

As a candidate, Reilly has tried, with some difficulty, to persuade primary voters he's the best one to lead the Commonwealth for the next four years. His scrappy performance at last week's debate prompted new questions about his political judgment.

Supporters, and even Reilly himself, acknowledge that he's often lacked the political touch to effectively communicate his record -- particularly in a campaign under near-constant scrutiny by the media and the public.

``It's been hard," Reilly, 64, said in a recent interview. ``I am a private person."

Many surrogates have stepped forward to help, including family members of victims, well-connected politicians, and current and former associates from his office in One Ashburton Place. Though Massachusetts attorneys general have had trouble reaching the governor's office in the past, Reilly is hoping his everyman background, experience as a top lawyer, and record as a public servant can break the streak.

On the campaign trail, Reilly employs a two-part pitch.

Unlike his wealthy primary opponents, Reilly says, he can relate to the kind of middle-class voters who live on his street in Watertown, where he and his wife have rented an apartment for nearly four decades. At a rally and fund-raiser in Haverhill last month, Reilly promised the 200 people he would ``turn the governor's office over to people like you and me."

That message has worked for some voters.

``People want to see that he's like other people -- like us," said Anna Grande, a 59-year-old from Methuen who came to the rally.

The second part of Reilly's stump strategy is to talk up his long record in government.

He said in Haverhill, ``I finished the job as district attorney, finished the job as attorney general. I'll finish the job as your governor."

But while Reilly frequently details the work he did as attorney general, he talks less about his crime-fighting days in Middlesex County, which put him at the center of some of the highest-profile criminal cases in Greater Boston in recent decades.

Three months after he became district attorney, in 1991, a 15-year-old freshman at Lowell High School named To Ky was shot to death by gang rivals, setting off panic that violence among Asian gangs would consume the city.

Reilly devised what former colleagues say was a novel strategy. He brought together, for the first time, officials from the Lowell schools, the police, the courts, and state agencies for regular meetings to determine which teens should be prosecuted, and which teens needed only to be shown an alternative to gang life.

One outlet for teens that stemmed from the effort was a basketball league. Lowell High headmaster Bill Samaras recalled one night when Reilly came to a game in a rough neighborhood and returned to his car to find the tires slashed.

``He was back there the next night," said Samaras, who was in his first year at the school at the time. ``I couldn't get over that."

Reilly's experience in Lowell, which he drew on to start similar programs in other cities, underscores his longtime focus on children, both as district attorney and attorney general. To this day, Reilly calls protecting children his top priority.

In the 1997 case of British au pair Louise Woodward, charged with killing 8-month-old Matthew Eappen of Newton, Reilly was accused of pushing too hard for murder charges instead of manslaughter. A judge later agreed with the critics and sentenced Woodward to time served, and she walked free.

To victims' families, Reilly was precisely the pugnacious advocate they needed.

``He's very strong in his sense of justice, and he's not afraid of taking on something big," Matthew's mother, Debbie Eappen, said in an interview.

Reilly said he derives empathy in such cases from his childhood in Springfield. Two brothers died young in terrible accidents, his father died of a heart attack when he was 16, and he barely made it through high school.

He managed to graduate, but was bound for nowhere until he got one shot to make it, at American International College in Springfield. He did. He went on to earn a law degree from Boston College.

``Unless you go through it, people, I'm not sure, know what it's like," Reilly said in the interview. ``And when people care about you and try to help you, you never forget that."

``His fights have been our fights," the narrator says reassuringly in one of Reilly's first TV spots, ticking off Reilly's accomplishments as attorney general. The ad highlights, for example, how he went after the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston following the clergy-abuse scandal in 2002.

But Reilly's transition from hard-charging district attorney to cautious attorney general -- a powerful regulatory position with sweeping powers in many and disparate arenas -- was not easy. The fights Reilly picked, and those he avoided, have won him both plaudits and criticism.

Reilly's first assistant, Stephanie Lovell, believes no Massachusetts attorney general has contended with as many big cases over an eight-year period. She named as examples the myriad legal battles over same-sex marriage, the massive embezzlement case in the state Treasury office that emerged in 1999, and the many problems with the Big Dig.

Lovell said Reilly has taken on issues not normally the province of the attorney general -- areas, she said, ``where somebody's got to stand up and be the grown-up and do what may not be the political thing to do but is the appropriate thing to do given the circumstances."

In early 2000, for example, Reilly helped guide HMO Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which had been hemorrhaging money, into state receivership. Charles D. Baker, Harvard Pilgrim's CEO, credits Reilly's calm, deliberate manner for keeping a potential crisis from spinning out of control.

``This is a place where not being all that exciting or excitable was a really good thing, because you didn't have the kind of hysteria that you can find in a lot of these big, messy public issues," said Baker, a Republican who flirted with running for governor this year.

Not long after the Harvard Pilgrim crisis, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center faced a similar situation, and Reilly was aggressive in forcing the hospital to reorganize, said Dean Richlin, Reilly's former first assistant.

``He said, `Look, this is unacceptable, and six months from now you make a change or I do,' " Richlin said.

One fight Reilly got heat for was with top law firms who had worked on Massachusetts' $8.3 billion settlement with the tobacco industry in 1998. The firms were seeking more than $1 billion in additional fees, but Reilly, in a move that divided the legal community, fought the request all the way to trial, where a jury in 2003 awarded them a far lower amount.

Supporters note that Reilly made waves by going after other powerful institutions, including the Red Sox, from which he wrested more money for charities when the team was sold in 2002.

``We've gotten real results for people," Reilly said in the interview.

Told he sounded like rival Christopher F. Gabrieli, who's made ``results" his campaign's buzzword, Reilly said, ``Except mine's not an ad. Mine's real."

Not everyone agrees that Reilly has been an effective attorney general.

At a campaign event earlier this year, Reilly boasted of standing up to the Catholic Church after the clergy abuse scandal broke in 2002. ``You are looking at someone who did, and changed things forever," said Reilly, raised as a devout Catholic.

Reilly was one of the first high-ranking officials to criticize how Cardinal Bernard F. Law , then archbishop of Boston, handled the crisis. He eventually convened a grand jury but, citing gaps in state law, concluded he couldn't indict church leaders for facilitating the abuse. He issued a scathing report instead.

``I can tell you with some certainty that if Tom could have indicted Cardinal Law, he would have," said Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley, who served under Reilly and is now running for attorney general.

Some Boston-area victims were upset Law was not indicted, but it is the victims in Reilly's hometown of Springfield who have the harshest words for the attorney general.

Tom Martin, 45, who said he was molested by a priest for years at St. Mary's in East Springfield, said he and other victims got no response after asking Reilly in 2003 to investigate the Springfield Diocese.

``We really didn't even get the time of day from him," Martin said, adding, ``He's Irish Catholic, knows a lot of people out here, [and] wouldn't want to rock the boat too much."

``He was nowhere to be found," added another Springfield victim, Stephen Block, 46.

But Gary Bergeron, 44, who was abused as a boy in Lowell, credits Reilly's work in the Boston area with ending the culture of silence around abuse by clergy.

``This is a guy who stood by survivors," he said.

One of the attorney general's principal responsibilities is to be a consumer watchdog. Edgar Dworsky, a Massachusetts consumer advocate for three decades, said that though he initially gave Reilly the benefit of the doubt, it became clear he wasn't going to be a real champion.

``He just unfortunately has done very little to protect consumers in this state on pocketbook issues," said Dworsky, who worked for the prior attorney general, Scott Harshbarger, and now runs the website consumerworld.org.

Dworsky said Reilly caved to retailers who pushed for fewer requirements on putting price tags on individual items, and he said Reilly's office has several times failed to act on what Dworsky considers clear evidence of illegal advertising.

Some in the legal community also question whether Reilly has been aggressive enough on public corruption.

Reilly dismantled Harshbarger's public integrity division when he came into office, folding its responsibilities into another unit. But Richlin, Reilly's former top deputy, said what matters is successful cases, not the structure of an office. And Reilly's office has pursued some high-profile cases, including the Treasury embezzlement scandal and a civil suit last year against state Senator Dianne Wilkerson for alleged campaign finance law violations.

``I believe the office today is much better today than it was eight years ago," Richlin said.

Reilly has been criticized, too, for not doing enough on the Big Dig. Despite the cost overruns and many problems on the $14.6 billion project, he has yet to win a major settlement or criminal or civil case against its major players. (The Globe reported last month that Reilly was convening a grand jury to investigate the July 10 death of 38-year-old Milena Del Valle, killed by falling ceiling panels in an Interstate 90 connector tunnel.)

From Governor Mitt Romney's election in 2002, Reilly established himself as the Democratic front-runner for governor by raising large sums of money. But challenges from two strong opponents, Gabrieli and Deval L. Patrick, and his missteps on the campaign trail now have him fighting for his political life.

Early this year, Reilly had trouble explaining why he had become involved in a drunken-driving case that killed the teenage daughters of a friend. Weeks later, he tapped state Representative Marie St. Fleur as his running mate, only to have her drop out the next day when The Boston Globe reported she was delinquent on taxes.

Reilly has also fended off questions about changes in position on big issues: He once opposed the death penalty but now supports it; he once opposed bringing casinos to Massachusetts but now backs the idea; he was against a bill to eliminate the statute of limitations in crimes against children before advocating for it; and he was against both gay marriage and the income tax rollback before supporting them.

When St. Fleur dropped out of the race, Reilly conceded that ``politics are not my strong suit." State Representative David P. Linsky, a supporter who worked for Reilly in the district attorney's office, said, ``It really isn't. But serving the public is his strong suit."

Still, Linsky, like Reilly, acknowledges that Reilly-the-candidate could have done a better job communicating to voters what Reilly-the-public-servant has achieved.

``I think the public has a vague understanding of that," Linsky said.

Reilly is a decidedly better campaigner now than he was at the beginning of the year, when he sometimes spoke so softly his voice barely registered on reporters' recorders. But he has only a few days left to make the sale. On Sept. 19, voters will reflect on Reilly's 16-year record as an elected official and decide whether they agree that his fights have indeed been theirs.

``For me it's just making a case -- making my case where people realize I'm real," Reilly said in the interview. ``It's not about `I'll promise you this' and `I'll promise you that.' Anyone can do that. I've done it. I'm proud of that."

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.