"Timothy Cahill indicted in corruption case; Ex-treasurer allegedly used funds from lottery to boost campaign" by Frank Phillips | Globe Staff, April 02, 2012
A Suffolk County grand jury indicted former state treasurer Timothy P. Cahill and two top aides Monday on charges that they conspired with his political staff to use more than $1.6 million in state lottery funds to boost his floundering 2010 gubernatorial bid.
Cahill, who becomes the first statewide officeholder in the post-World War II era to be indicted on corruption charges relating to his official duties, was charged with directing the state lottery and its advertising agency, Hill, Holliday, Connors & Cosmopulos, to launch the ad blitz, which was designed to promote the image of a well-managed agency.
He has only himself to blame.
At the time, Cahill’s campaign was cash-strapped and was looking at a number of ways, including using the lottery and the abandoned property division, to bolster his flagging independent campaign for governor.
The indictments say Cahill, who served two full terms as treasurer, violated criminal statutes governing the use of public funds for political purposes, procurement fraud, and conspiracy.
Cahill, 53, who has been working as a consultant on public financing with a Braintree firm, did not respond to a message left on his cellphone seeking comment. His wife, Tina Cahill, wrote a message on Twitter, saying: “A good man is being persecuted for challenging the status quo. It’s not enough to be defeated you need to be destroyed politicly [sic] & personally.’’
Cahill’s criminal lawyer, E. Peter Parker of Boston, said he was surprised to learn of the grand jury indictment and accused Coakley of being an overzealous prosecutor who was “wasting scarce resources’’ in pursuit of his client.
“I have seen no evidence of criminal conduct by anybody, which does not surprise me, because the truth is that nobody did anything wrong,’’ Parker said in a statement.
The grand jury charges mark a disastrous new turn for the former Quincy city councilor, who emerged from relative obscurity in 2002 to win statewide office and become one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party.
But his decision to run as an independent candidate for governor in 2010 turned into a political fiasco. His strong showings in the early polls against Charles D. Baker, a Republican, and Governor Deval Patrick, a Democrat, were quickly eroded by a $2 million advertising blitz by national Republicans, his running mate’s decision to defect to Baker’s team, and the resignation of key members of his campaign team five weeks before the election.
In the end, he received just 8 percent of the vote.
Although Cahill is the first statewide office holder to be charged with corruption in more than a generation, he joins a growing list of Beacon Hill figures tarnished by corruption charges, including former House speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, former state senator Dianne Wilkerson, and probation chief John J. O’Brien.
While Cahill abandoned the Democratic Party to wage his 2010 campaign, the corruption charges could still prove harmful to the state’s dominant party, with Republicans already using it as a way to further highlight problems within the Beacon Hill establishment.
Patrick called the allegations troubling, but said he remains confident that “the overwhelming majority of public workers do their best honorably and ethically to serve the interests of the Commonwealth’s residents.’’
Baker did not return calls for comment.
Coakley’s investigation focused on an October 2010 ad campaign, the largest of its type ever run by the lottery. It was scheduled to air from September through the November election and would have spent more than 75 percent of the agency’s $2 million ad budget less than half-way through the fiscal year.
Coakley said her investigators found that Cahill not only approved his campaign aides’ plans to air the ads but also directed Hill Holliday to abandon the original plans, which were designed to boost individual games, and instead to create image-polishing ads for the lottery agency.
At Coakley’s urging, the ads, which had become the topic of hot debate in the campaign, were halted on Oct. 15, 2010, after $601,501 was spent, according to lottery records. The agency was credited for the remaining $1 million or more that had been booked with the media outlets.
Yesterday, Parker reiterated Cahill’s position that the ads were needed because the Republican Governors Association had spent $2 million attacking the treasurer and his management of the lottery, damaging its revenues. He said Cahill had an obligation to maximize lottery revenues.
“The RGA attack ads had undermined public confidence in the lottery and hurt sales measured year over year,’’ Parker said. “Not running the ads because the RGA or an overzealous attorney general might later question whether the ads might have benefited the treasurer politically would have been the wrong thing to do.’’
Coakley acknowledged the pain of Cahill’s family, but said her office did not “seek these charges lightly.’’
“I am sympathetic to family members who face this, but my job is to look at the evidence and present it to a grand jury,’’ she said.
The jurors also issued indictments against Cahill’s former chief of staff and top political confidant, Scott Campbell, on the same charges. Another close Cahill aide, Alfred J. Grazioso Jr., the lottery’s former chief of staff, was indicted on two counts of obstruction of justice. Coakley alleged he “intimidated and harassed’’ two lottery employees who were being interviewed by her investigators.
Campbell was indicted last September by a Suffolk grand jury on a charge that he illegally conspired to hire the wife of the state’s probation chief officer for a job at the lottery. He was also charged with campaign finance violations stemming from his work on the Cahill gubernatorial campaign.
Coakley’s office began its investigation shortly after internal campaign e-mails emerged in a civil court case in October 2010 indicating that Cahill’s political staff had consulted with him and obtained his approval to use the lottery ads to boost his candidacy.
Cahill’s campaign brought the suit against his former campaign manager and consultant, who had recently quit. Had he not instigated the legal action, it is unlikely the evidence would have emerged that led to the criminal charges against him....
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"Cahill’s misguided defenders" April 07, 2012
THE INDICTMENT this week of former state Treasurer Tim Cahill has raised some existential questions for Massachusetts politicians and voters. Does public corruption begin and end with taking bribes or pocketing money from the public till? Or should an official be held criminally liable for squandering public resources for purely political gain, as Cahill is now accused of doing?
A Suffolk County grand jury accused Cahill of trying to use over $1.5 million in advertising money from the state Lottery, which the treasurer’s office oversees, to boost his own prospects in the 2010 gubernatorial race. In the aftermath, a number of voices, including this page, applauded Attorney General Martha Coakley’s decision to enforce a tough 2009 state ethics law that subjects officials to possible prison time for using public resources for their political benefit.
Related: Coakley right to prosecute Cahill
Yet a number of other voices have worried that Coakley is criminalizing everyday politics - that Cahill is facing prison time for doing something that many other elected officials have done.
Politics is criminal.
Cahill deserves the presumption of innocence. Yet taxpayers should reject the suggestion that he is being arbitrarily prosecuted. State laws against the private use of public resources have been toughened because the Legislature reasonably concluded that civil penalties had failed to deter unethical activity. Moreover, cases like Cahill’s are likely to be unusual: Proving a connection between a public act and a private motivation is normally difficult; it’s only possible now because of an unusual e-mail trail that appears to connect a major shift in Lottery advertising to Cahill’s political needs.
The case should prompt others to re-evaluate behavior that once seemed normal in Massachusetts. Cahill’s successor, Steve Grossman, has already announced that he will take his picture off the unclaimed-property list that the treasurer’s office regularly circulates. This is deeply healthy. Self-promotion on the public dime was regarded as politics as usual only because Massachusetts laws - and Massachusetts voters - put up with it. Now that’s changed, and Cahill should have taken note.
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Sorta sucks when your state treasurer is a self-serving pos.
Also see: Corruption charges cap a sharp decline for Cahill
Cahill faced fine line on government advertising
Cahill vows to fight charges, says he did nothing wrong
Cahill pleads not guilty to charges
The AG’s easy target
Yeah, the hard ones were the banks and she bailed.
And those defenders appear on the opposite page:
"Indictments, then politics as usual" by Tom Keane | April 07, 2012
TWO HIGH-PROFILE prosecutions — one against senior officials in the state’s Probation Department, another aimed at former treasurer Tim Cahill — are after more than mere convictions. They seek instead to change entirely the culture of politics in Massachusetts. More likely, all they’ll do is just drive deeper underground the behaviors they target.
Two weeks ago, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz unveiled indictments against the Probation Department’s former head, John O’Brien, as well as two senior staffers. Ortiz charged that the department routinely ignored civil service rules, “institut[ing] a hiring system that catered to requests of Massachusetts legislators.’’ Ten days later, state Attorney General Martha Coakley dropped her own bombshell, indicting Cahill and two of his aides for using Lottery advertisements to promote Cahill’s image while he was embroiled in a campaign for governor.
In one case, the target is the age-old use of patronage. In the second, it is politicians routinely using their incumbency to burnish their credentials with voters.
The back-to-back indictments have caused much consternation among the political class. Patronage has been a common practice - and often seen as critical to effective governance - since the nation’s inception. Certainly, it’s an easy way to pay back folks for helping politicians in their campaigns. But it also helps make sure winners of an election get control of their offices, giving them the power they need to deliver on what they promised. Then too, particularly in immigrant cities such as Boston, patronage has been a way for those on the outside to make their way inside. When Irish-American politicians won, for example, they often gave jobs to their compatriots, thereby giving a helping hand to a marginalized group.
Good government groups, seemingly populated by folks who don’t need jobs and think politics should be a more elevated endeavor, despise patronage. That’s how we got civil service as well as the Supreme Court’s narrow 5-4 decision in a 1990 case (Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois) that barred “promotion, transfer, recall, and hiring decisions based on party affiliation and support.’’
But, the Supreme Court notwithstanding, patronage still happens, largely because it’s human nature. Politicians want to reward their supporters (and, of course, they also trust them more than the supporters of those they just beat) and so they use any variety of ways - a strong recommendation being the simplest - to signal to those making hiring decisions who they favor and who they do not.
Meanwhile, Coakley’s target — self-promotion — also is commonly practiced. As many have pointed out in the days following Cahill’s indictment, what is now being called criminal is no different from the stuff politicians do every day, from putting their names on signs adorning public works projects to traveling around the state trumpeting community grants. All boost the name of the incumbent using resources paid for by the state.
So are patronage and self-promotion now at an end? Not with these cases.
Ortiz alleges that O’Brien’s circumvention of civil service was extraordinarily heavy-handed, with a system in place that involved a charade of interviews even though the winning applicant was known in advance. Yet so far, Ortiz has not indicted any legislators. If that remains the case, then we have a remarkable curiosity. Those in power who ask for the favors are apparently immune while those who execute those requests are not. One almost feels sorry for the indicted. What were they supposed to do - say no, thereby angering the legislators who are, in effect, their bosses?
And in the case of Cahill there was also a kind of heavy-handedness. According to the attorney general, Cahill’s real mistake was a trail of damning e-mails ostensibly connecting the ads to his campaign strategy. (When, oh when will folks figure out that e-mails, tweets, and postings are not private conversations?) If Cahill had simply kept his intentions to himself, he wouldn’t be facing prosecution today.
Or if he hadn't brought a lawsuit. Why the obfuscation on that point?
The over-the-top nature of the abuses Ortiz and Coakley target suggest that, once things calm down, not much will have changed. The lesson will be: Don’t be obvious. Politicians will still want to build their team and they’ll still want to promote themselves. But in doing so, they’ll need to learn the art of being subtle.
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"Ex-probation chief, 2 aides indicted in hiring scandal" March 24, 2012|By Andrea Estes and Thomas Farragher
US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz announced criminal indictments Friday against former probation commissioner John J. O’Brien and two former top lieutenants on racketeering, conspiracy, and mail fraud charges, contending that the trio ran the troubled 1,800-employee state agency like a vast criminal enterprise....
That's government!
The long-awaited indictments, the first to come from the 16-month investigation of the probation hiring scandal, contend that O’Brien, Tavares, and Burke masterminded a phony hiring system set up to deceive the public while they funneled jobs to friends, relatives, and supporters of politicians, judges, and court officials.
The grand jury did not indict any legislators who benefited from O’Brien’s hiring system....
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