"Delahunt capitalizes on the private sector" by Stephanie Ebbert | Globe Staff March 23, 2014
Most recently, the 72-year-old former prosecutor positioned himself squarely in the golden gateway to a lucrative but increasingly controversial new industry in Massachusetts, medical marijuana sales.
Many former congressmen turn to lobbying after retiring, but their connections often keep them focused on work within the Beltway. William D. Delahunt’s transformation from silver-haired statesman to savvy dealmaker has occurred right before his constituents’ eyes.
“To me, it just doesn’t feel right,” said Quincy resident Ron Pepe, who asked why the city would hire a consultant to represent its interests rather than rely on his successor in Congress.
Then maybe you shouldn't smoke it.
But Delahunt characterizes his new work as a continuation of the advocacy on issues that motivated him during his years in politics.
“It’s not about the money — not at my age,” Delahunt said in a brief interview. “It’s about staying engaged in policies that I had been involved in when I was in Congress and as district attorney.”
“I feel very good about the things that I’m doing, because I believe in the causes,” he added.
Delahunt’s second act exploded into controversy last month after details emerged about the unusually lucrative deals he had won for managing medical marijuana dispensaries. His team was approved for 3 of the 20 provisional licenses the state Department of Public Health announced in January, leading to questions about whether Delahunt’s political influence had driven the decisions. The DPH commissioner had, in the past, held fund-raisers for Delahunt; she recused herself from decisionmaking at the 11th hour.
Delahunt argued that he found success in the dispensary sweepstakes because his local team carried credibility in Massachusetts.
“I dare say that the reason that we scored as high as we did is because we had those people who had the confidence of the local communities,” Delahunt said. “They have reputations.”
One of the unsuccessful bidders who have filed lawsuits on the selection process highlighted the terms of the Delahunt team’s agreement. Delahunt was due to earn $250,000 as chief executive of the medical marijuana venture, and was a manager in a separate management company that would claim 50 percent of revenues – more than $24 million during the first three years, based on the company’s projections.
After the controversy erupted, the management company filed corporate documents showing Delahunt had resigned from the board. He also now says that he is no longer an investor and he is declining a salary as chief executive for the first two years of operation.
Delahunt denied that the deal ever would have been as lucrative as his agreement suggested, saying that the revenue would have been eaten up by costs for facilities and drug education.
“It’s being grossly distorted,” he said, “because some people have an agenda to distort it.”
I think i know who they are!
Medical marijuana was only the latest venture in which the longtime pol is now playing middleman between government agencies and private businesses, sometimes becoming involved in projects for which he helped secure federal funding while in Congress.
Just two months after he left office in January 2011, Delahunt registered as a lobbyist and hired his former chief of staff, Mark Forest, and former campaign manager P.J. O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan had formed his own public relations and lobbying firm, O’Sullivan and Associates, while Delahunt was still in Congress. At the time, he shared an office with Delahunt's campaign committee in Quincy’s Marina Bay.
The first big lobbying client Delahunt announced was the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, which aims to build a casino in Taunton. The Mashpee have since paid The Delahunt Group nearly $500,000, according to state lobbying records, in their effort to get the federal government to take the proposed Taunton site into trust on the tribe’s behalf — a required step before they can build a casino. However, a 2009 Supreme Court ruling has entangled the process and the tribe’s chances currently appear slim.
See: Saturday Night at the Slots
“I was aware of their history and how they had really been an oppressed minority, and that this was an opportunity,” Delahunt said. “I’m not being paid that much money.”
Federal law prohibits members of Congress from lobbying their former colleagues and their staff for one year after leaving office. State law bars former state employees from ever being paid to handle work they once handled for the state.
But nothing in state or federal law prohibits someone from leaving Congress and immediately lobbying hard within their former district.
“Fair game,” said Dave Levinthal, senior political reporter for the Center for Public Integrity. “You can take that experience, take those connections, and put them to work on behalf of your bank account as a former member of Congress who goes into the lobbying or political influence game. That doesn’t need to be in Washington D.C.”
Quincy’s two-year contract, since renewed, paid The Delahunt Group $180,000 for planning, permitting, and working with state and federal agencies on the $1.6 billion downtown redevelopment he had once pushed. Chris Walker, a Quincy city spokesman, stressed that the contract was not for lobbying.
Related:
$1.6b Quincy downtown makeover faces longer delay
Quincy Center’s developer gets ultimatum
Street-Works to drop out of Quincy redevelopment
Talks to restart Monday on stalled Quincy project
However, another South Shore town canceled a contract with The Delahunt Group after facing criticism for the former congressman’s involvement. Delahunt had won a $90,000 six-month consulting contract to find a company interested in testing wind turbines off the coast of Hull. The deal blew up after news broke that Delahunt’s payment would come from federal earmarks he alone sponsored during his last two years in office — an arrangement that one government watchdog called a “self-made golden parachute.”
Delahunt quieted the controversy by announcing that he would work for Hull for free.
But that wasn’t the end of his congressional team’s involvement.
Months later, Delahunt’s former regional director in Congress, Chris Adams, was hired as a consultant by Hull to manage the grant that his old boss had secured.
Adams has been paid $57,293 since February 2012, documents show. Adams noted that he had experience with wind energy as regional director for Delahunt during review of the offshore Cape Wind project, which the congressman opposed.
In an interview, Adams said he had “never worked for The Delahunt Group,” but that he likely would have had the original project gone through as expected.
“I ended up being offered the job from the town directly rather than working for the Delahunt Group,” Adams said.
However, during that same period, Adams represented The Delahunt Group at meetings of the Cape Cod Metropolitan Planning Organization and the Cape Cod Joint Transportation Committee, minutes of those meetings show.
Adams acknowledged that he signed in to those meetings on behalf of the Delahunt Group to help his friend, Forest, who couldn’t make it.
“This was completely voluntary on my part,” he said in an e-mail. “I was not paid by anyone, including The Delahunt Group, for this.”
Another former Delahunt aide is also working on a project his former boss helped usher in. Delahunt helped pave the way for the redevelopment of the former South Weymouth Naval Air Station into a new community called SouthField. Last summer, SouthField repaid the favor, paving a road and dedicating it as the Bill Delahunt Parkway.
O’Sullivan, Delahunt’s onetime campaign manager, has been working as a consultant to the public body overseeing the project, South Shore Tri-Town Development Co., since Delahunt was in Congress, documents show. O’Sullivan and Associates has been paid $10,000 a month for most of that time.
Now O’Sullivan is also president of The Delahunt Group, and O’Sullivan and Associates shares Delahunt’s office space. On a visit to the joint office, Aidan Leary, an employee of both firms, confirmed that O’Sullivan and Associates operates there, although there’s no sign outside the suite to indicate its existence. O’Sullivan did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked what distinguishes the two firms and whether his group is profiting from O’Sullivan’s contract, Delahunt responded by e-mail, “They are completely DIFFERENT entities with DIFFERENT clients. The Delahunt Group receives NO money from any Tri Town contract.”
Careful with the CAPITALS, Bill.
He also said he did not encourage the town of Hull or the Tri-Town group to hire his onetime aides.
Good-government watchdogs are particularly concerned about officials getting involved in private-sector work on projects in which they were involved while in elective office.
“The real danger is what are they doing while they’re in office? Do they have an eye on what they’re going to be doing and how they’re going to cash in when they get out?” said John Dunbar, managing editor for politics at the Center for Public Integrity.
Delahunt, who calmly fielded questions about his new career, grew angry when asked whether he had paved the way for his future while in Congress.
“That’s totally false. I’ll tell you the question is insulting,” Delahunt said, questioning the motives of those who raised the notion.
But political observers note that during his political career, Delahunt often appeared unworried about public perception.
Even as he launched his first campaign for Congress in 1995, Delahunt, then Norfolk district attorney, drove flashy cars repossessed from drug dealers by his prosecutors, the Boston Herald reported at the time.
That year, a Republican opponent accused Delahunt of carrying on a “lavish lifestyle” that included billing his campaign for $100,000 in meals and vacationing at a Jamaican “sex resort.”
The Globe and other media outlets reported that Delahunt had charged his campaign for a phone call from his visit to “Hedonism II,” an adults-only resort in Jamaica.
All the Congre$$ $cum is compromised, aren't they?
And as outgoing Norfolk district attorney, he pushed for legislation that let prosecutors retire at age 55 with full pay, the Globe reported in 1997. At 55, he became the first to take advantage of the new benefit — on the same day he entered Congress.
In 2010, Delahunt began draining his campaign account and put his former wife, daughter, and son-in-law on his campaign payroll before announcing that he would not run again.
He also bought a new campaign office in Quincy using a family trust.
Today, that campaign office houses The Delahunt Group, O’Sullivan and Associates, and Campaign for Change, the political action committee that Delahunt formed while still in Congress.
A political action committee lets a current or former elected official make campaign contributions and continue to support political causes. It also allows for nearly unchecked personal spending.
Last year, Delahunt’s PAC contributed $57,300 to other political committees, while spending nearly $250,000 on expenses including restaurant tabs, hotel bills, and airplane flights. Treasurer Tom Kiley said all those expenses were related to committee work, not to the lobbying business.
The PAC also paid Delahunt’s former wife, Katharina Hermani, payments totaling $18,869 last year, campaign finance records show. Kiley said the payments were for her recordkeeping work, and that she is the PAC’s only employee and principal point of contact — although Kiley, not she, answered questions for the Globe.
Each month, the PAC also pays $3,500 month in rent for the joint Quincy office suite where The Delahunt Group operates.
Kiley said the rent only supports the PAC’s portion of the office. “They are separate entitites,” Delahunt reiterated.
But in a twist of political and personal interests, the rent is paid back to Delahunt’s family trust, which benefits his daughters and former wife. Delahunt bought the property through Triplet Irrevocable Trust, which gets the rent no matter who pays.
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I'm no fan of Delahunt, but the Globe is really doing it to him over this MEDICAL marijuana i$$ue.
"Complaints raised on marijuana dispensary investors" by Kay Lazar and Shelley Murphy | Globe staff March 21, 2014
Massachusetts regulators granted a preliminary license to run a medical marijuana dispensary earlier this year to a group that includes two New York investors, even after receiving pleas from two women who said the investors had defrauded them of thousands of dollars in an earlier deal.
Don't you wish the propaganda pre$$ and banker's mouthpieces had been on the beam before the mortgage-backed securities scandal destroyed the economy and public pensions while requiring trillions to keep banks phat in profits?
The two women say they put their life savings into two marijuana dispensaries in Arizona, but ran short of cash when implementation of that state’s medical marijuana law stalled. In a complaint they filed in September with Arizona regulators, they allege that the New York investors they turned to for help took control of the company without their knowledge.
“I was so mad for so long, when we finally realized we had been totally duped,” said Linda Shaughnessy, 66. “I lost $400,000.”
Arizona officials have made no finding of wrong-doing, but when the women learned that the New York investors were bidding for three marijuana licenses in Massachusetts, they fired off letters to Massachusetts regulators in September, and again in January, detailing their complaints.
Nonetheless, in January, the New York investors, who had formed a new company called Patriot Care Corp. with another partner, won preliminary approval from the state of Massachusetts for a medical marijuana dispensary license in Lowell. They were invited to reapply for two more licenses.
Patriot Care spokesman Dennis Kunian said allegations by Shaughnessy and her business partner, Jean Matherly, that they were tricked out of their Arizona dispensaries are not true.
“Complete due process was followed in every single instance,” he said. “The bad guys are doing anything they possibly can to defame us.”
Nicholas Vita, a director of Patriot Care Corp., is also named in a related lawsuit filed last month in Arizona that asserts one of the dispensaries Vita acquired from Shaughnessy has failed to pay a consultant for introducing Vita to Shaughnessy in early 2013 and for subsequently helping Vita with other consulting services....
4Front, which has been a consultant for four of the 20 applicants that won preliminary approval Massachusetts dispensaries, says in its Arizona suit that Vita and his partners owe a $50,000 fee and 5 percent of a Prescott, Ariz., dispensary’s gross revenues.
The lawsuit allegations are not true, said Kunian, the Patriot Care spokesman. “The lawsuit is bogus, and we are asking that it be dismissed,” he said.
Kunian said Vita and Patriot Care are following the rules in Arizona and in Massachusetts.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced finalists for the state’s first 20 provisional marijuana dispensary licenses in January, and almost immediately questions were raised about the state’s selection process....
At this point I'm putting out the joint.
--more--"
Related: Medical marijuana applicant sues state
It's enough to make you want to scrap the whole venture and leave it all illegal.
HERe's an issue upOn whIch the Newspaper, strangely, is not so preemptive and the government not so proactive:
"The battle to free Taunton from heroin’s deadly grip; As overdoses soar, a struggling city looks for answers" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe staff March 19, 2014
Like WHERE is the stuff coming from, right?!
TAUNTON — The drumbeat of overdoses, day after day, week after week, is exacting a psychic and physical toll on this old mill city of 56,000 people, where high-tech businesses seek to replace the past prosperity of silversmithing, iron works, and textile manufacturing....
Now the “heroin capital” of the state.
Heroin overdoses have become a public-health crisis from Cape Cod to the Berkshires.
The White House drug czar appeared here one day last month with Senator Edward J. Markey. City officials are fielding questions from local and national news organizations. A public meeting on the topic drew dozens of concerned residents....
Maybe he will fire off a letter.
Like much of the state, Taunton is a market for heroin that is cheap and accessible when compared with prescription opiates such as Percocet, which remain relatively expensive and have been made harder for addicts to crush and snort. Police and health workers grimly acknowledge that market forces now favor heroin, but the recent spike in opiate-related fatalities has startled them.
The culprit is believed to be fentanyl, a dangerous narcotic that Jennifer Bastille, a program adviser for the city’s Safe Neighborhood Initiative, and others said is being mixed with heroin to give addicts a much more powerful high. Fentanyl-laced deaths have been confirmed in other Northeastern states, including Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, and many Massachusetts officials believe that the drug has migrated to the Bay State.
Perversely, part of its appeal is its deadly potential, users and others said.
“When you’re a heroin addict, you want the best high you can get; you’ve already crossed the line of caring about your safety,” Melissa Welch, a 22-year-old from Taunton who has been off heroin for less than a month, said. Many addicts, she continued, will think “this dope is obviously so good that it killed somebody. You want to go out and get it.”
*******************
Drug transactions, in which several hits of heroin can be bought for as little as $25 to $30, often occur quickly and clandestinely in busy outdoor areas, Bastille said. “You can stand in any parking lot and be in and out,” she added. “We’re so easily accessible.”
However furtive the sales might be, their consequences frequently become public. On Sunday afternoon, in another overdose, a man survived after being found in a bathroom near the food court at the Galleria Mall.
Welch said the reports of overdoses in Taunton, one or more nearly every day this year, has become the new normal....
What has become a flood of overdoses this year first appeared as a trickle....
For the family of Jeff Welch, Melissa’s father, the heroin surge has been devastating....
Susan Malloch Taylor is convinced that talking publicly about the opiate crisis is critical to combatting the problem....
Taylor is adamant that police work alone is not going to curb the spread of heroin....
Taylor argued [that] much of the work must be shouldered by parents, friends, and neighbors who are not afraid to fight....
Fight what from where?
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My questions are never answered or asked! It's all reactive!
"Vt. woman arrested in Holyoke with 1,400 heroin packets" by Jeremy C. Fox | Globe Correspondent March 22, 2014
A Vermont woman was arrested in Holyoke for allegedly attempting to transport a large quantity of heroin back to the Green Mountain State, Massachusetts State Police said Saturday.
A state trooper pulled over Nicole Farone, 41, of South Wallingford, Vt., on Route 91 North at about 10 p.m. Wednesday and, after talking with her and a passenger, found about 1,400 packets of heroin, according to a statement from State Police.
Farone was charged with heroin trafficking, conspiracy to violate drug laws, knowingly being present where heroin is being kept, and a marked lanes violation, State Police said. She was held on $5,000 bail.
The passenger, Kasey Cota, 23, of Rutland, Vt., received a summons to appear in court for charges of drug possession and conspiracy, State Police said.
More than $2 million in heroin and other opiates are trafficked into Vermont each week, Governor Peter Shumlin told state lawmakers in a State of the State address on Jan. 8 that focused almost exclusively on the issue.
Wednesday’s arrest was one of several recent drug seizures during traffic stops across the region that appear connected to Vermont’s heroin trade.
Just after 4 p.m. Thursday, Mohamed Mohamed, 23, of Burlington, Vt., Micheal J. Mayse, 27, of Irvington, N.J., and Shayna Baldwin, 22, of Newark, were stopped while driving north on Interstate 87 in Queensbury, N.Y., according to a statement from New York State Police.
A state trooper pulled the trio’s 2011 Honda over for speeding and recovered 500 bags of heroin, a semiautomatic pistol, and a small amount of marijuana, New York State Police said.
Mayse and Baldwin face drug charges, and Mohamed was charged with criminal possession of a weapon.
Then, just before 1 a.m. Friday, Vermont State Police arrested a Hartford, Conn., man with about 30 grams of heroin and cocaine concealed in “numerous baggies . . . inside an orifice,” according to a State Police statement.
Roberto Pabon, 33, was a passenger in a vehicle pulled over for a traffic violation in Rutland, Vt., leading to the execution of several search warrants, Vermont State Police said.
In the past two years, Vermont State Police have seen a nearly five-fold increase in heroin investigations and an almost 250 percent increase in seized heroin, Colonel Thomas L’Esperance, director of the State Police, told the US Senate Judiciary Committee last week, according to prepared remarks.
“Although it can be more difficult to find solutions in a rural state such as Vermont, the fundamentals of illegal drug markets are the same everywhere,” L’Esperance said. “Where there is a demand, there will always be a supply.”
Oh, the resignation of it all reeks!
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Related:
Heroin Bust in Hatfield
Not Interested
Also see: Holder on Drugs
Now I'm not so sure. Are these evil clowns pushing this poison considered nonviolent offenders?
Related:
Heroin Bust in Hatfield
Not Interested
Also see: Holder on Drugs
Now I'm not so sure. Are these evil clowns pushing this poison considered nonviolent offenders?
