Problems happened later, says Dukakis

Governor Michael S. Dukakis, whose administration hired Big Dig manager Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, yesterday attributed problems on the huge construction project to later administrations.

Dukakis, the last Democrat to hold the Massachusetts governor's office, told a television interviewer last night that he had urged Governor William F. Weld, a Republican, to ask Frederick P. Salvucci, transportation secretary under Dukakis, ``to stay on and run that project for you."

``Well, he didn't do that," Dukakis said of Weld on WGBH's ``Greater Boston."

``So we've had a series of people over there who aren't bad people," Dukakis said, ``but they didn't have anywhere near the kind of skill and the qualifications -- I mean Salvucci's got two degrees from MIT. He's got political skills coming out of his ears. He's done incredible work. I mean if Fred Salvucci had run that job . . . it would have been done in half the time and at half the cost."

Salvucci was transportation secretary from 1983 to 1991.

Dukakis also had harsh words for the current Republican governor, Mitt Romney. He called the Legislature's decision to hand him authority over the tunnel inspections absurd, saying that highways and bridges around the state have been crumbling during his administration.

``You know Matt is not responsible for Route 9," Dukakis said of Matthew J. Amorello, the Turnpike Authority chairman. ``He's not responsible for this fiasco at the Esplanade where that tunnel, which could have been repaired 10 years ago for a few million bucks, is now going to cost us $100 million and stop traffic on Storrow. This is Romney's responsibility."

Romney has been battling to remove Amorello, saying he has mismanaged the project.

Responding to Dukakis's comment that the Legislature should not have handed oversight responsibility to the governor, Romney's spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, said: ``This is an authority granted to the governor by the Legislature because they lost confidence in Matt Amorello's leadership."

Meantime, the well-known criminal defense firm of Good & Cormier told the Globe yesterday that Amorello has hired the criminal defense firm of Good & Cormier in an effort to fight Romney's efforts to remove him as head of the quasi-independent transportation agency. The lawyer will be paid by the authority.

Philip G. Cormier said yesterday that the Turnpike Authority's general counsel, Michael D. Powers, had called shortly after Romney said last Tuesday that he would take legal steps to remove Amorello as board chairman and chief executive officer.

The Turnpike Authority spokeswoman, Mariellen Burns, confirmed that the authority would pay the firm to represent Amorello. The firm represented him last year, when Romney asked the state Supreme Judicial Court whether he had the power to remove him from his chairmanship.

In a brief, another lawyer in the firm, Andrew Good, argued that the governor does not have legal authority to force him out. The Turnpike Authority paid Good & Cormier at least $92,000 to write the brief, according to records.

Romney dropped the effort after the Supreme Judicial Court concluded that Romney had not shown that Amorello's removal was an urgent necessity.

The firm's partners and its counsel, Harvey Silverglate, have a history of handling high-profile cases. Good and Silverglate defended Louise Woodward, the British nanny convicted of killing Matthew Eappen of Newton. Though Woodward was convicted of second-degree murder, a superior court judge reduced the conviction to involuntary manslaughter.

Jonathan Saltzman of the Globe staff contributed to this report.