Sunday, September 8, 2013

Putting this Post on Probation

“We need to regain the public’s trust.”

That didn't do it.

"Ex-worker testifies against former probation chief John O’Brien" by Wesley Lowery  |  Globe Staff, April 06, 2013

The first of two state Probation Department employees slated to testify against their former boss took the stand Friday and said he set up a political fund-raiser in 2005 with the understanding that it would secure a new job for his boss’s wife.

Edward Ryan, who was granted immunity by prosecutors, said he organized a well-attended political fund-raiser for then-state treasurer Timothy P. Cahill in order to help get a job for the wife of John. J. O’Brien, who was then the head of the department.

He recanted sworn testimony he gave in 2010 that the fund-raiser and Laurie O’Brien’s attempts to secure a job with the state lottery, which was overseen by Cahill, were not related.

“I said there was no connection before,” Ryan said, referring to his 2010 testimony to Paul Ware, an independent counsel probing the department. “There was a connection.”

The testimony came on the second day of the corruption trial of O’Brien, who faces five charges of bribery and corruption stemming from his 12 years as head of the department. O’Brien remained impassive as Ryan testified against him.

The two days of testimony have proceeded like a chess match, with both legal teams walking witnesses through complicated series of detailed questions about conversations almost a decade in the past while frequently objecting to those posed by the other side.

By midafternoon Friday, Judge Judith Fabricant began rolling her eyes at each objection and request for side bench conversation. The attorneys asked for nearly a dozen conferences during less than five hours of testimony.

Ryan testified that he was never told to set up the fund-raiser in exchange for a job for Laurie O’Brien, but that he understood it was a tit-for-tat situation.

“I never had that conversation with anyone,” Ryan said. “It was an understanding.”

The June 23, 2005 fund-raiser at Pat Flanagan’s Pub in Quincy netted more than $11,000 for Cahill’s campaign fund and was attended by 50 Probation Department employees, according to prosecutors.

Within days of the fund-raiser, treasury officials had tentatively offered Laurie O’Brien a difficult-to-fill night shift computer operator position, but two weeks later they offered her a more desirable customer service job.

Each of the five charges against O’Brien could bring one to five years in prison and represent a fall from grace for a once-powerful bureaucrat who held near-total control over the Probation Department and who, according to state investigators, would direct subordinates whom to hire or promote on yellow Post-it notes.

Attorneys for both the attorney general’s office, which is prosecuting the case, and O’Brien’s defense team spent most of Friday morning questioning Ryan about his involvement in both the fund-raiser and Laurie O’Brien’s job hunt.

A second former probation department employee, Francis Wall, is also expected to testify against O’Brien in exchange for immunity. Defense lawyers have accused both men of testifying against O’Brien only to avoid charges themselves.

After Ryan concluded his testimony, prosecutors questioned the Massachusetts State Lottery Commission’s former director of human resources, Michael Coughlin, about the hiring process of Laurie O’Brien for the lottery commission position, which she still holds.

Coughlin, who conducted her initial interview, insisted that he was never told to give O’Brien’s wife any preferential treatment and that the political fund-raiser for Cahill was never mentioned.

“I was not pressured to hire her,” Coughlin said. “I am saying, unequivocally, that I was not pressured to hire her.”

Laurie O’Brien sat quietly with other relatives through the proceedings as attorneys ran through each detail of her 2005 hiring.

Lead defense attorney Paul Flavin has said that much of his case will center on the testimony of Coughlin and the other lottery employee who interviewed Laurie O’Brien.

Both of them, he said in his opening argument Thursday, will testify that she was hired on merit alone.

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"17 bribery counts for ex-head of probation O’Brien" by Andrea Estes and Scott Allen |  Globe Staff, April 25, 2013

A new federal indictment charges embattled former probation commissioner John J. O’Brien with 17 counts of bribing state legislators by giving jobs to their supporters, friends, and relatives, crimes that carry up to 10 years in prison for each count.

The indictment, handed up Wednesday, alleged that O’Brien bribed Senate President Therese Murray at least three times by giving jobs to people she recommended. O’Brien allegedly bribed House Speaker Robert A DeLeo at least 10 times, according to the indictment, in part to help him as he began his successful campaign to become House speaker in 2009.

But despite months of speculation that prosecutors would target politicians, the legislators themselves were not charged in the indictment.

O’Brien and two top deputies, the indictment said, did “conspire, confederate, and agree to give jobs and salaries” to candidates promoted by state legislators “in order to influ ence those members of the Legislature” to boost the Probation Department’s budget and achieve other political goals.

O’Brien, who resigned in 2010 amid a patronage scandal that engulfed the agency, already faces federal racketeering charges along with the two top deputies, Elizabeth V. Tavares and William H. Burke III, in allegedly running a phony hiring system that gave jobs to people with political connections. However, he was recently acquitted of state bribery charges.

Attorneys for O’Brien did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Senate President Murray, a Plymouth Democrat, declined to comment, but DeLeo issued a statement insisting that he has done nothing wrong.

“It is clear that I am not a party to the indictment, but I want to state emphatically: I only recommended job applicants who were qualified,” said DeLeo, a Winthrop Democrat. “I never gave or received any benefits from those recommendations, and I never traded jobs for votes.”

In addition to Murray and DeLeo, who are mentioned in the indictment only by title, there are at least 21 legislators who allegedly received bribes from O’Brien in the form of probation jobs, the indictment says. Lieutenant Governor Timothy P. Murray also sponsored a successful job applicant, the indictment says.

The 56-page indictment expands the racketeering charges originally brought against O’Brien, Tavares, and Burke in March of last year. The original charges accused the three of overseeing a hiring system that conducted thousands of sham job interviews to conceal the fact that the positions were reserved for friends, relatives, and supporters of politicians and court officials whether they were qualified or not.

The grand jury investigating the probation scandal has heard witnesses for more than two years after a Boston Globe Spotlight report on the rampant favoritism. It was unclear Wednesday whether the new charges are the final charges to be brought in the case.

The new indictment describes many additional instances of bribes in the form of jobs that O’Brien allegedly gave to candidates recommended by lawmakers, but the hirings took place so long ago they could not be charged separately.

Prosecutors detail how O’Brien gave state lawmakers the opportunity to place their supporters and friends in the Probation Department, especially jobs at the agency’s electronic monitoring center in Clinton, once part of the largest state program to track people with electronic ankle bracelets in the nation. 

 See: Globe Nipping At Your Ankles

When the center was opened in 2007 to expand the state’s monitoring of sex offenders, O’Brien was allowed to hire temporary employees and circumvent requirements that the jobs be posted and made available to the public.

During 2007 and 2008, he hired 20 electronic monitoring workers by soliciting names of candidates from lawmakers, includ ing DeLeo, who was then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

DeLeo and his staff contacted approximately 10 members of the House, who provided names, the indictment said. These individuals were hired “without any vetting process and without any interview,” the indictment said.

O’Brien doled out the jobs, prosecutors allege, in part “to assist the chairman in an upcoming contest for the post of speaker of the House of Representatives.”

Lawyers for O’Brien’s co defendants downplayed the significance of the new accusations, saying prosecutors are repackaging the same charges.

“It’s patronage hiring, and they’re calling it a different name,” said John Amabile, Burke’s lawyer. “It doesn’t change the landscape, and it doesn’t change our position. My client, a 72-year old retired grandfather who worked as a probation officer for 37 years, categorically denies that he committed any criminal offense.”

Brad Bailey, Tavares’s lawyer, said the bribery charges, like the racketeering charges, are wholly inappropriate, noting that Tavares had a distinguished career. “My client proclaimed her innocence loudly when she was indicted last spring and will do so even louder when she is arraigned on these new charges,” he said.

The three defendants will face all of the charges in a single trial; no date has been set.

Again and again, the new indict ment detailed how well-connected candidates used their connections and ended up being hired. In one instance, Murray’s office opened a case file for a candidate referred to as “PL,” a reference to a politically connected job candidate named Patrick Lawton.

About two weeks later, his father, Judge Mark Lawton, sent an e-mail to the Office of the Senate President stating, “I know that Jack O’Brien takes very seriously calls from your office where there is a strong interest on the part of the Senate president.”

After a call to probation from one of Murray’s aides, the indictment said, Lawton was hired as a probation officer in Plymouth County even though he was ranked ninth out of 10 candidates for the position.

The indictments also described how a state senator intervened with probation to get a job for his girlfriend as probation officer at the Bristol County Probate and Family Court.

The indictments also described how Speaker DeLeo’s godson, Brian Mirasolo, rose from the ranks of assistant court services coordinator in 2004 to acting chief probation officer in 2009, when he became the state’s youngest chief probation officer.

According to the indictment, DeLeo wrote at least one letter in support of Mirasolo as he rose through the ranks starting in 2004, a period in which DeLeo was the chief budget-writing official in the House. In 2007, the indictment said, O’Brien contacted Mirasolo and offered him the job of acting probation officer in charge in Suffolk County “without application or interview.”

In spring 2009, O’Brien promoted Mirasolo to acting chief probation officer, an $87,000-a-year job he continues to hold.

Federal prosecutors launched their investigation in November 2010 after release of a scathing report by independent counsel Paul F. Ware Jr., who had been appointed by the state Supreme Judicial Court in response to articles by the Globe Spotlight Team about patronage at the agency.

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"Legal fees costing House Speaker Robert DeLeo $300,000" Associated Press, July 23, 2013

Massachusetts House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo has reported spending $300,000 on legal fees during the first half of the year as investigators ramped up their probe of the Massachusetts Probation Department.

In a filing Monday, DeLeo reported spending $300,000 on the law firm of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky, and Popeo.

A campaign spokesman would only say that Robert Popeo has represented DeLeo for years and that the $300,000 relates to that representation.

A federal indictment alleges that former probation commissioner John O’Brien bribed lawmakers by giving jobs to supporters in exchange for increases to his department’s budget.

No lawmakers have been charged in the case.

DeLeo has said he only recommended qualified job applicants for jobs in the Probation Department.

O’Brien was acquitted earlier this year of state corruption charges.

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Also see:


A Hatfield man who was suspended in 2011 from his job as a state probation official was convicted Friday of intimidating a witness during the FBI investigation of alleged corrupt hiring practices at the state agency and faces sentencing in October. Christopher Hoffman, 41, is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 18 in federal court in Worcester, according to his case docket. A jury in the same court convicted him Friday after about three hours of deliberations, records show. A previous jury failed to reach a verdict."

"New leaders try to fix Mass. Probation Department" by Scott Allen |  Globe Staff, April 04, 2013

Almost three years after the Massachusetts Probation Department patronage scandal swept longtime Commissioner John J. O’Brien and most of his deputies out of their jobs, the agency is being run by people who bucked his unfair hiring system.

Ellen J. Slaney, now the acting commissioner, spent years in internal exile after she opposed her former boss’s recommendation to hire an admitted felon whose father was a state senator. Her top aide, Edward Dalton, still has the voicemail threatening him with the loss of his job if he didn’t go along with O’Brien’s hiring wishes.

But change does not come easily or quickly, and these new leaders are still trying to erase the legacy of cronyism, secrecy, and ineptitude from 12 years under O’Brien, who is facing opening arguments Thursday in the first of two criminal trials.

The new probation leaders have received praise for dismantling patronage programs, retraining officers, and — most significantly — overhauling the hiring process to give people without connections a chance, making the workforce more diverse in the process. None of the 29 chief probation officers hired in the last two years had a politician’s endorsement on file, a striking contrast to O’Brien’s tenure....

Yet, some employees are discouraged by the pace of change this spring. The department is still haunted by problems that festered under O’Brien:

Though the hiring process is more open than under O’Brien, employees can point to what they say are examples of politically connected candidates still getting the job ahead of seemingly more qualified candidates. For instance, Margaret Oglesby, a decorated Army veteran who commanded a unit of 154 military police in Afghanistan, was passed over twice for promotions last year, records show, once in favor of a sheriff’s son and the second time for a political ally of state Representative Tom Petrolati, who had far less probation experience.

“People with connections are still getting the jobs over the people who don’t have connections,” said one employee who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. Several colleagues echoed that sentiment in interviews with the Globe.

Way of the world.

Part of the disappointment may reflect the soaring expectations after a Globe Spotlight report in May 2010 detailed the way O’Brien catered to legislators’ wishes....

Much remains to be done, including convincing employees that politics is not creeping back into the process....

As usual in Massachusetts, despite the Globe spotlight and all the political gyrations on Beacon Hill.

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"Murray decries story on US bribery case indictment" by Jim O’Sullivan |  Globe Staff, April 26, 2013

Senate President Therese Murray’s office pushed back Thursday against a Globe article about a federal indictment charging the state’s former probation commissioner with 17 counts of bribing state legislators.

Murray’s spokesman, David Falcone, called the article “misleading and irresponsible,” pointing out that no lawmakers have been charged in the case against John J. O’Brien, the former probation chief. The article stated in its third paragraph that legislators had not been charged....

The indictment strikes at the anger many on Beacon Hill have voiced privately throughout the life of the investigation, that federal prosecutors are essentially attempting to define as felonious the everyday patronage common at every level of government....

I think the feds are on to something there because it is a criminal government at all levels in AmeriKa.

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