E-mails offer candid look at key adviser to Menino

Several thousand of Michael J. Kineavy’s e-mails released yesterday by the City of Boston provide the most candid glimpse yet of the internal workings of Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s City Hall. Above all, they show that his top aide, Kineavy, who had deleted the messages in potential violation of state public records law, can be many things to many people, but is almost always someone who gets things done.

The e-mails suggested that Kineavy, who has taken a leave of absence from his position as Menino’s chief policy adviser as the e-mail release continues, intervened on behalf of job candidates at various city agencies and private associations. He involved himself deeply in a dispute at the South Boston Health Center. He heard from a union official trying to get work stringing holiday lights on Boston Common.

“Can you see if we still have a shot at this job - I’m tired of it going non union!’’ wrote Local 103 business manager Michael P. Monahan.

Taken individually, none of the e-mails reviewed by the Globe yesterday was particularly stunning, though some suggested Kineavy used his outsized influence in landing jobs for people outside city government. Taken together, they clarified a portrait of an administration obsessed with even the smallest of neighborhood details, and of a man, Kineavy, who was expert in the machinations of power.

Among the roughly 5,600 e-mails recovered from city backup tapes and released yesterday are several that suggested the aide intervened on behalf of job candidates with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and the Boston Harbor Association, a nonprofit community group.

Several other messages suggest Kineavy got involved in a dispute between the South Boston Health Center and one of its program directors after the center complained the director rarely showed up for meetings, turned in paperwork late, and generally did not meet expectations.

In an e-mail to Kineavy, the director said, “if I get fired, which can happen without cause, we should threaten to take the program out of the Health Center, which would cause their boards lots of headaches/political pain.’’

Some messages were cryptic, such as one from a Boston police detective, who said, “You told me to call you if that thing we talked about didn’t happen as of today.’’

Kineavy declined to comment on that e-mail in an interview yesterday, saying the matter concerned a “private conversation around a personnel issue.’’

He said his intervention with the harbor association was not related to his city position.

And he declined to comment on the threat to the health center, though he said the exchange was part of a plan to get the program moved under the jurisdiction of the city’s health commission.

“I vaguely remember there was a back and forth, but I don’t remember the specifics,’’ he said.

The city released the e-mails late in the afternoon, so only a fraction of the messages, roughly 1,500, could be reviewed before press time. The e-mails were culled from computer backup tapes that save copies of every e-mail sent or received by every city employee, but they are from a limited date range, September and October 2008 and part of April 2009. The city said back-up tapes covering other periods have been erased.

The disclosure marks the third time the Menino administration has released a chunk of Kineavy’s e-mails since Secretary of State William F. Galvin ordered the city last month to seize Kineavy’s computer and hire a forensics firm to try to retrieve deleted e-mails. Galvin acted after the Globe reported that Kineavy routinely deleted e-mails in such a way that they were not saved on back-up servers.

The other two sets of messages came from searches of the two desktop computers Kineavy used and from the e-mail boxes of other city employees.

Before yesterday, 5,823 e-mails or message fragments had been found. Of those, the city refused to release 152, saying they did not have to be disclosed under the public record law because they concerned private personnel or medical matters or are subject to attorney-client privilege.

Yesterday, the city withheld 109 of the 5,700 messages it found on back-up tapes because officials said they are exempt from the law.

A spokesman for Galvin’s office said the secretary of state’s investigation, which is being conducted with help from Attorney General Martha Coakley, is continuing. Last week, the city turned over copies of Kineavy’s hard drives, including one recently discovered in a sixth floor office at City Hall, and copies of all the e-mails recovered so far.

“The material that the city sent over is being reviewed at this point to see if it is responsive to the request made by the public records office,’’ said the spokesman, Brian McNiff.

State law requires cities to save e-mails for at least two years, even if they are of “no informational or evidential value.’’

But Kineavy double-deleted every e-mail he sent and nearly every one he received on a daily basis for the past five years - dragging them to the trash and then emptying the trash - before they were saved on city backup servers, which backs up the entire system daily at midnight.

The backup tapes record every e-mail but were erased and overwritten with new data after 90 days, city officials said. The tapes for September and October were not overwritten because they were saved due to a pending legal case, city officials said.

The city received a subpoena for Kineavy’s e-mails last fall in a federal corruption probe against former state senator Dianne Wilkerson and Councilor Chuck Turner. Menino spokeswoman Dot Joyce said that the hold on the back-up tapes for September and October pertained to a case unrelated to the investigation of Kineavy’s deletions.

While e-mails released previously contained snippets of exchanges in which Kineavy participated, those released yesterday appear to include more candid exchanges. In one from Sept. 2, 2008, a candidate for a job with the City Council wrote Kineavy, “Thank you once again for your assistance in helping me find a job in the city.’’

In another e-mail, titled “Flaherty sighting’’ and dated Sept. 11, 2008, William J. Fenton, the mayor’s son-in-law and Menino campaign organizer for Dorchester, sent Kineavy a message saying, “he was spotted with the head of the firefighters union and Craig Galvin at the Mud House in Neponset.’’

“They were approached by a loyalist,’’ Fenton continues “and stated to the councilor that if he was planning his run for City Council that he was with him 100%.’’

Michael F. Flaherty is instead seeking Menino’s post.

Michael Levenson of the Globe staff contributed to this report.