Massachusetts Politics

As a faithful reader of the State House News Service, I have been noticing for years how often the Press Releases section of the service’s subscriber-only web site contains an account of wrongdoing and/or unsavory behavior in the public sector or in sectors regulated by public agencies/overseers. At the end of last month, I decided to do a post summarizing some of those more recent accounts and   I put a headline on it that said, “This Month in Corruption: Snapshots of the Public Trust Betrayed.” In the back of my mind was that I could turn this into a regular feature.   But, unsure as to whether the bad behavior pipeline was really as full and as fast-flowing as I perceived it to be, I held off on designating “This Month in Corruption” a regular feature. Well, my concerns about supply were exaggerated, to say the least.   Herewith the ill-cultivated fruits of January, as presented by the State House News Service: Postal Worker's Steroid-Import Enterpr...

Nearly half a century has passed since the presidential election of 1968. We’re still learning things about that race that make your stomach turn. On Saturday, December 31, the New York Times published an article by John A. Farrell, author of a forthcoming biography of Richard Nixon.   “Nixon’s Vietnam Treachery” describes how Farrell made a startling discovery while conducting research at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California: notes written by Nixon’s top aide, H.R. Haldeman, confirming that Nixon tried to sabotage Vietnam War peace negotiations in the fall of ’68.   He feared that a peace settlement engineered by Lyndon Johnson before the election would assure his defeat at the hands of Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey.      “Haldeman’s notes return us to the dark side,” Farrell wrote in the Times. “…we must now weigh apparently criminal behavior that, given the human lives at stake and the decade of carnage that followed in Southeast A...

The Massachusetts Gaming Commission has a big fight on its hands with the guys who sold the land for a casino in Everett to Steve Wynn.   If the commission loses, it could be out millions of dollars. FBT Everett Realty filed a civil suit against the commission in Suffolk Superior Court, Boston, on Nov. 15, accusing it of “tortious interference” in FBT’s contract with Wynn Resorts, of Las Vegas, Nevada. [FBT is represented in the case by the Boston law firm of Todd & Weld, which boasts on its web site, "Our clients turn to us for the highest level of trial advocacy because they know that we begin to prepare every case for trial from the day it comes in the door."] Under a binding legal option, FBT had committed in December of 2012 to selling the land to Wynn for $75 million.   But, due to subsequent “interference” by the commission, Wynn cut the agreed-upon price by $40 million, the lawsuit says, and forced FBT to accept the lower figure by threatening legal action against...