"The long rise and hard fall of John Barranco; He found big money in an unlikely place — a regional agency serving disabled children. And then investigators closed in" by Michael Rezendes, Globe Staff / September 18, 2011
John Barranco’s story is also about an East Boston boy who loved to box and grew into a young man remembered for smarts and moxie and sometimes intimidating toughness. About a schoolteacher whom many admired, one with an ambition for greater things. About a man with a gift for building political alliances, particularly among an endangered species in Massachusetts - GOP powerbrokers.
And about love.
For Barranco didn’t build his empire alone. He left his wife for one of his employees in 1997, moving in with a woman nearly 20 years younger than himself for what he later called, in a court filing, “a mutual adult relationship of trust, confidence, and love.’’
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And then it all went sour, starting with their relationship. When Mary A. Clisbee broke up with him in 2007, Barranco didn’t hesitate to strike back. He forced her out of her $300,000 a year job, Clisbee said in an affidavit, and sued her for $100,000, claiming she owed him the money for work on her Groveland home. That legal battle would bring into view an intimate account of their personal and professional lives - an account that would ultimately prove useful to law enforcement....
Others, however, are not so surprised, recalling Barranco as a man who could quickly turn into a “mad bull snorting and pawing at the turf’’ when he was crossed, as one former education official put it.
But all agree that he is a man worth seeing in full.
The 69-year-old Barranco would not comment for this story, but interviews with more than a dozen people who know him and documents reviewed by the Globe illuminate how he was able to gain control of an obscure public agency and, investigators say, repeatedly dip into its assets for personal gain over more than a decade - largely out of view and without anyone raising objections....
By the time Barranco and Clisbee began living together in the late 1990s, Barranco was already using the nonprofit Center to generate revenue by providing high-technology services to local school districts - and throwing sharp elbows at anyone who got in his way.
Through an arm of the Center called MECnet, he had already capitalized on the growing importance of the World Wide Web by selling Internet services to 200 public school districts.
So when a newly created state-funded agency decided it could offer schools a less expensive connection through a different vendor, Barranco fought back, publicly denouncing the decision as a “scam’’ and a “bag job.’’
Then he caught up with Greg Nadeau, the chief technology officer for the old state Department of Education, and, Nadeau said, offered some pointed criticism.
“He physically threatened me in the halls of the State House, yelling at me and saying he was going to shove something down my [expletive] throat,’’ Nadeau recalled. “John Barranco was an extraordinarily aggressive, ruthless bully.’’
At the time, another official, Ray Campbell, was working as the executive director of the Massachusetts Corporation for Educational Telecommunications, the state-funded agency established to provide schools with a variety of high technology teaching tools.
When the agency decided to move into the area of connecting schools to the Internet, and cut MECnet out of the process, Campbell, too, felt Barranco’s wrath.
“I’ve never encountered anyone so crass, so boorish, so incapable of sitting down and working something out,’’ Campbell recalled. “He was like a mad bull snorting and pawing at the turf.’’
In the long run, Barranco prevailed....
For some reason, assholes usually do.
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"Auditor seeking expanded powers; Wants authority to track spending of any public funds" September 01, 2011|By Michael Rezendes, Globe Staff
State Auditor Suzanne M. Bump yesterday called for new legislation that would broaden her authority to investigate the private organizations that provide an increasing share of the state’s public services with taxpayer money.
Bump said a pattern of excessive salaries, pension abuse, and other improprieties at the special education collaboratives that serve children with disabilities shows that the state’s fiscal watchdogs need more authority to monitor the spending of taxpayer money.
The legislation, which Bump referred to as the “follow-the-money-bill,’’ would authorize her to audit the use of state funds by any organization, whether it is a government agency, a nonprofit group, a for-profit vendor, or a private subcontractor.
“It would allow me to go wherever the public money is,’’ Bump said at a news conference at which she also introduced a series of recommendations to increase oversight of the state’s 30 educational collaboratives.
Bump said the need for the bill, initially proposed by her predecessor, Joseph DeNucci, was underscored by her frustrations in trying to audit spending at two of the collaboratives. In both cases, officials at related nonprofit groups refused to relinquish records because their organizations are not public agencies....
Bump said she is especially concerned about $2.3 billion in state funds awarded annually to private vendors to provide a broad array of human services, including treatment for adults with disabilities....
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Also see: Skipping School Series: Special Ed Class
Bump said the need for the bill, initially proposed by her predecessor, Joseph DeNucci, was underscored by her frustrations in trying to audit spending at two of the collaboratives. In both cases, officials at related nonprofit groups refused to relinquish records because their organizations are not public agencies....
Bump said she is especially concerned about $2.3 billion in state funds awarded annually to private vendors to provide a broad array of human services, including treatment for adults with disabilities....
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Also see: Skipping School Series: Special Ed Class
