I mean, they do such good work.
"An agency where patronage is job one; The state Probation Department once set the standard for the nation in rehabilitating criminals. But nine years ago the Legislature freed it from meaningful oversight, and the results were predictable: budgets soared, and the welcome mat was out for hundreds of job seekers with political juice" by Globe Staff | May 23, 2010
.... After 12 years in charge, Jack O’Brien has transformed the Probation Department from a national pioneer of better ways to rehabilitate criminals into an organization that functions more like a private employment agency for the well connected, the Spotlight Team has found.
O’Brien’s agency now employs at least 250 friends, relatives, and financial backers of politicians and top court officials, the Spotlight review found, including children of US Representative William D. Delahunt, former mayor Raymond L. Flynn of Boston, and former Senate president William M. Bulger. The agency has also hired House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo’s godson, who, at 28, is now the youngest chief probation officer in Massachusetts.
O’Brien has taken care of friends, too, finding jobs for the children of his Boston College football teammate, for a friend who ran a fur shop, for a former plasterer friendly with Cahill, and promoting two probation officers who moonlight as bartenders at a Northampton pizza joint frequented by one of his top deputies. Along the way, O’Brien’s family has also benefited....
No legislator has reaped greater benefit from the pattern of hiring than state Representative Thomas M. Petrolati, the third-ranking House member who is regarded by many members of the Western Massachusetts legislative delegation as the “king of patronage’’ in courthouses west of Worcester. Under O’Brien, the Probation Department has provided jobs for Petrolati’s wife, a former staffer, the husband of his legislative aide, and literally dozens of Springfield-area residents who have donated money to Petrolati.
Since 2002, Petrolati has collected twice as much in campaign contributions from probation employees as any other legislator, according to campaign finance records. And O’Brien’s former deputy commissioner, William H. Burke III, planned to help Petrolati raise even more last week as master of ceremonies at his annual fund-raiser....
"O’Brien rise and reign defined by tenacity" by Thomas Farragher, Globe Staff | May 24, 2010
The contempt-of-court dust-up offers a window into the insular, sharp-elbowed world of the state’s probation commissioner, the man who, as the Globe’s Spotlight Team reported yesterday, presides over an agency whose payroll is thick with patronage hires, whose sloppy financial controls make it vulnerable to employee theft, and where political contributions by employees often appear tied to career advancement.
Probation Commissioner Jack O’Brien does not want to talk about much of this. He declined the Globe’s request to discuss his career, his management philosophy, and a growing chorus of criticism about his department.
If he is by choice mostly silent, others are willing to fill out the picture. O’Brien is, by all accounts, a man of force and ambition and not inconsiderable achievement, a man who takes things personally and knows how to keep score.
Oh, great, just what we need around here.
This year, when Governor Deval Patrick sought to take control of O’Brien’s empire, proposing to move the probation agency from the judiciary into the executive branch, O’Brien let it be known that he considered the initiative a wounding personal affront....
“O’Brien is one of these guys [for whom] everything is personal,’’ said Robert F. Kumor Jr., the recently retired first justice of the Springfield District Court. “It’s like his own power fight.’’
*******
An insurgent Thomas M. Finneran, who had watched the O’Briens grow up from his home in St. Gregory’s Parish in Dorchester, was elected speaker in 1996, outflanking then-majority leader Richard A. Voke by collecting the support of every House Republican. When longtime Probation Commissioner Donald Cochran retired a year later, O’Brien was tapped to succeed him, a much lower-profile but equally surprising turn of events.
The consensus insiders’ choice was Ronald P. Corbett Jr., a longtime and respected probation professional with sterling credentials. He was a deputy probation commissioner and a Harvard graduate. He held a doctorate in education and was a former president of the National Association of Probation Executives. The year the commissioner’s job opened up, the national association named Corbett its probation executive of the year.
But O’Brien had something more important: John J. Irwin Jr.'s unwavering support and Finneran’s friendship.
“Everyone was scratching their head because Ron Corbett was eminently qualified,’’ recalled R. Peter Anderson, a retired district court judge.....
That's why it's called Massachushitts here.
Finneran acknowledged that in 2001 when the Legislature stripped judges of the authority to hire probation officers and gave it to O’Brien, a seminal moment in his tenure as commissioner, Finneran helped shepherd that legislation, which consolidated O’Brien’s power.
Finneran said he was motivated to make the change in part after watching the trial court squander millions of dollars on a new computer system that he described as a debacle for which no one could be held accountable. He wanted someone in charge.
“He’ll stand up and take responsibility,’’ Finneran said, explaining his move to dramatically strengthen O’Brien’s hand. “I do think he was probably more politically attentive than a judge would have been.’’
Indeed, many judicial critics of the Probation Department’s hiring and promotion system under O’Brien say he is politically attentive in the extreme. As the Globe reported yesterday, O’Brien’s agency has hired or promoted at least 250 friends, relatives, and financial backers of politicians and top court officials.
After Kumor, the former Springfield chief justice, joined with another jurist to ask the Supreme Judicial Court to return control over probation hiring to judges, he bumped into O’Brien at a sporting event at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Kumor recalled that the commissioner made it clear that he took the judge’s legal challenge personally. He was not interested in the underlying legal niceties about separation of powers, Kumor said....
Isn't that GREAT, Massachusetts?
A PROBATION COMMISSIONER who DOESN'T GIVE a DAMN about the LAW!
If the challenge from Kumor irked O’Brien, his contempt-of-court showdown in Judge R. Peter Anderson’s Brighton courtroom in the spring of 2002 infuriated him.
And in the boiling back-and-forth that ensued, O’Brien made clear that he would brook no challenge to his control of his department....
“I have never in my 11 years as a judge ever had any other court official respond in the manner in which the commissioner has responded,’’ Anderson said, according to the transcript. “It is a shocking and very sad state of affairs.’’
Six days later in Brighton District Court, it was clear the two sides could not find common ground. Anderson said he had issued a lawful order O’Brien must obey. O’Brien, represented by James Arguin, an assistant attorney general, said he would run the Probation Department, not Anderson.
Arguin conceded that if he wished, O’Brien could comply with the court order and have the drug testing done, as the judge had ordered, by the Office of Community Corrections.
“He does not believe your honor has the lawful authority to tell him how to allocate his resources,’’ Arguin said.
Anderson had had enough.
“Today, when I put to him directly this opportunity to comply, he has refused again,’’ the judge said, before motioning to a court officer. “And pursuant to all the evidence before me, I find that he is in contempt of this court. Mr. Crowley, I ask you to put the commissioner into custody.’’
In an interview, Anderson said he took no pleasure in ordering the probation commissioner into the courtroom’s dock. “But I had never seen anything of this level of mendacity,’’ he said.
A lawsuit O’Brien later brought against Anderson was dismissed. But the commissioner sued the trial court, too.
The state’s chief administrative judge, Robert A. Mulligan, rebuffed O’Brien’s demand for a $300,000 settlement, but the probation chief did receive $20,000 to settle the case, a payment that continues to mystify Anderson, who wonders about the trial court’s motive.
“He had no law on his side,’’ Anderson said. “I never got any sense of why they made that decision.’’
O’Brien isn’t talking.
He declined the Globe’s request for an in-person interview for this report. He would not be photographed or tape-recorded.
When asked why he would not answer personal questions, his spokeswoman intercepted the question for her boss.
“He’s not interested in profiles,’’ she said.
O’Brien began his 13th year as probation commissioner in January, the same month the governor proposed to take control of his department. To say the Legislature, where O’Brien’s network thrives, has greeted the proposed change dismissively is an understatement.
O’Brien did not even bother to show up for a hearing on the proposal before the Judiciary Committee, at which not a single legislator asked a question.
Now that is ARROGANCE!
The day before, when the Joint Ways and Means Committee examined the measure at an otherwise sleepy hearing in Sturbridge, the lawmaker chairing the session seemed to go out of his way to make sure that the governor was not mounting a personal attack on O’Brien....
--more--""Calls to overhaul probation agency; Patrick, Baker press for AG investigation" by Thomas Farragher, Globe Staff | May 24, 2010
Governor Deval Patrick and his Republican challenger, Charles D. Baker, called yesterday for a sweeping overhaul in the management of the state’s Probation Department and asked the attorney general’s office to open an investigation into an agency awash in patronage jobs and hamstrung by poor financial oversight.
There were indications that Probation Commissioner John J. O’Brien might have exhausted the patience of his judicial branch bosses.
Baker said O’Brien should be fired and called on Attorney General Martha Coakley to look into the connection of political donations to hiring and promotion decisions at the Probation Department.
“Enough is enough,’’ Baker said. “This has to end.’’
Patrick called for an independent review by Coakley after a Globe Spotlight Team report yesterday detailed O’Brien’s leadership of a department in which political connections and contributions can be keys to advancement and where poor financial supervision has left the agency that handles $70 million in cash a year vulnerable to theft....
Baker called on his rivals in the governor’s race to join him in calling for O’Brien’s dismissal.
State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill, who is running as an independent, instead blasted Baker’s campaign for trying “to politicize issues for their own benefit without having a full understanding of the matters at hand.’’
Cahill has received substantial contributions from Probation Department employees. O’Brien’s wife and one of his daughters work for Cahill.
“Rather than villainizing one individual without having a full understanding of the situation, perhaps we should try to fix the root case,’’ Cahill said in a statement.
What a scummy embarrassment for a treasurer.
See: The Collapse of the Cahill Campaign
A spokesman for Patrick would not say flatly that the governor wants O’Brien to be fired. But he said the plan the governor issued in January to remove the Probation Department from the judicial branch of government and place it under the Executive Office of Public Safety would allow him to make that decision.
“The way we run our probation department has to change, and it has to change now,’’ the governor said in a statement he issued to the Globe last week. “This is an area of state government that has been untouched for far too long, and we can’t wait any longer to fix it.’’
Patrick’s proposal has been ignored, so far, by the Legislature, and never made it out of committee in the House. Senate budget deliberations are ongoing.
Patrick and Baker found rare common ground on the need to restructure the probation agency. But politics intervened there, too....
Baker said he was particularly troubled by the Spotlight Team’s description of a “pay to play’’ mentality in the probation agency in which ambitious employees, qualified or not, make campaign contributions to key politicians in hopes of advancing their career.
“We’re talking about the supervision and monitoring and oversight of people convicted of crimes,’’ Baker said in a telephone interview. “This is heavy-duty stuff. It needs to operate without a whiff of all this back-scratching and deal-making....’’
Baker said he supports a proposal advanced by his running mate, Senate minority leader Richard R. Tisei, to return control of Probation Department hiring to judges in the trial court, a system that had been in place before the Legislature gave O’Brien that power in 2001.
Cahill said he would support that, too....
Will someone kick that lying SoB off the bandwagon?
Probation Commissioner John J. O’Brien was stripped of his duties yesterday as the state’s highest court appointed a special counsel to conduct a “prompt and thorough’’ investigation into the state agency.
The Supreme Judicial Court named Paul F. Ware Jr., a senior Boston trial counsel with broad experience investigating alleged public corruption, as independent counsel, granted him subpoena power, and asked him to finish his probe of the Probation Department within 90 days. Ware, who will have the power to collect testimony under oath, declined to say whether crimes may have been committed....
O’Brien’s suspension, with pay, was announced a day after the Globe Spotlight Team detailed his tenure at a probation agency that is pervaded with patronage jobs, in which political contributions are often associated with advancement, and where lax financial oversight has left the department vulnerable to theft.
“We are deeply concerned with not only the proper administration of the Probation Department, but with how such reports may affect the public’s perception of the integrity of all aspects of the judicial branch,’’ Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall and Judge Robert A. Mulligan, the trial court’s chief justice for administration and management, said in a joint statement.
“The reporting by the Globe Spotlight Team requires a full, prompt, and independent inquiry,’’ the judges said.
Mulligan said he met with O’Brien in the judge’s office opposite Government Center early yesterday to deliver the news.
“I met with him and told him what I was doing,’’ Mulligan said.
O’Brien told the Associated Press yesterday that he was disappointed with the court’s decision. He said every one of his appointments has to be approved by Mulligan, who also has to approve that the hiring process had been followed correctly.
“They talk about a rogue agency,’’ O’Brien said. “I answer to the chief justice [Mulligan]. I don’t know what anybody means by rogue agency.’’
O’Brien will receive his $130,000 annual salary while under investigation, because the allegations are unproven....
The news of O’Brien’s suspension ricocheted across the judicial landscape yesterday, lighting up phone lines in courthouses across the state....
--more--"
“The problems within the Probation Department run far and run deep, and it shouldn’t have taken a news story for Beacon Hill to wake up to the well-chronicled crisis there,’’ Baker said in a statement. “The leaders on Beacon Hill must immediately come together to reform the system by placing the department’s purview under the courts,’’ as proposed in a budget amendment by Baker’s running mate, Senate minority leader Richard R. Tisei....
Cahill, the state treasurer, said he knows O’Brien, a fellow Quincy resident, but said politics played no role in his decision to hire O’Brien’s wife and daughter. He said he was unaware that several dozen probation employees donated to his campaign in the summer of 2005, weeks before O’Brien’s wife was hired by the Massachusetts State Lottery, which Cahill oversees....
Isn't it SO NICE that your STATE TREASURER is a BRAZEN LIAR, Massachusetts?
Cahill also said patronage is to some extent a part of politics....
And THAT is why we HATE POLITICS NOW!
When government officials in Massachusetts need an outside lawyer to clean up a mess, many speed-dial the phone number of Paul F. Ware Jr.
In the past nine years, the senior partner at the Boston law firm of Goodwin Procter has been tapped to investigate alleged misconduct by Superior Court Judge Maria I. Lopez and to prosecute companies responsible for the ceiling collapse in a Big Dig tunnel that killed a Jamaica Plain woman.
In the early 1990s, Lawrence E. Walsh, independent counsel in the Iran-Contra investigation, picked Ware to prosecute Duane Clarridge, a former CIA official accused of perjury in connection with a secret shipment of missiles to Iran....
Far down the AmeriKan memory hole, folks.
--more--"
"Senators propose probation regulations; Judge would get limited controls" by Michael Levenson, Globe Staff | May 26, 2010
The proposal, unveiled yesterday by Cynthia Stone Creem, a Newton Democrat who cochairs the Judiciary Committee, is the first legislative response to a Globe Spotlight Team report, published Sunday, that outlined a pattern of patronage hiring and lax spending controls at the Probation Department. It currently is not subject to oversight by the governor and operates with minimal oversight by the judiciary....
The plan would create a task force to study whether long-term control of the Probation Department should be returned to the judiciary, as favored by the state’s judges, or to the executive branch, as favored by Governor Deval Patrick. The task force would be chaired by Attorney General Martha Coakley and would be charged with issuing its findings by Oct. 1....
More WHEEL-SPINNING!
The plan does not have the support of House leaders....
Then it i$ going nowhere and we all know why.
Representative Eugene L. O’Flaherty, House chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the House frowns on making major policy changes through budget amendments.
Since when?
O’Flaherty, echoing statements made Monday by House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo, also said the House does not want to make any changes to the Probation Department until a special counsel, Paul F. Ware Jr., completes his 90-day review of the department. Ware was appointed Monday to conduct the review.
O’Flaherty, a Chelsea Democrat, also questioned whether the paid suspension of O’Brien, which was also announced Monday, is legal.
“I’m curious, as a lawyer, how, based on a news story based on allegations that political people, quote-unquote, were given jobs, warrants the removal of the commissioner,’’ he said.
“If this legislation and the various provisions are filed because of what was in the Spotlight series, I would say to you I don’t think that is a good idea,’’ he said. “I think we should wait and find out what, if any, recommendations there are, before we start rushing around and bumping into each other looking for legislative solutions. I think it’s sort of putting the cart before the horse.’’
So how much campaign loot is the Probation Department kicking back to you, Gene?
***********
The chief justice for administration and management, Robert A. Mulligan, said “It’s essential that probation remain in the judicial branch, where it has been for 130 years, to maintain the vital relationship between the judge and probation officer, as they make important decisions about which defendants require incarceration and which defendants are appropriate for supervision within the community.’’
O’Flaherty, however, said the Legislature should retain a prominent role in overseeing the department. “The Legislature is accountable via the electoral process, and the judiciary is not, so when it comes to issues of fiscal accountability and being responsible for the people’s dollar, the Legislature is closest to the people,’’ O’Flaherty said.
Then WHY are you WASTING SO MUCH of it and STUFFING YOUR POCKETS with it?
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See The Massachusetts State Budget and related links within to see where the money is coming from and going, dear readers.
