Three mini-columns today:
John Fish, the billionaire owner of Suffolk Construction, wildly overplayed his hand trying to jam through that $900-million Turnpike Plaza-gate rip-off. But now he claims that like King Lear, he is a man more sinned against than sinning.
Fish’s mouthpieces have issued a seven-page affidavit in which he affirms his innocence, but not before tooting his own horn about his extraordinary charity work both as “chair” of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and as “chairman” of the board of Boston College.
Trying to explain his incontinent sucking-up to the hack lifer Scott Bosworth, Fish tries to alibi for at least some of his incontinent missives.
In a seven-page affidavit, here are some of his alibis:
Eight different times Fish admits texting Bosworth, but then adds the following sentence: “This exchange had nothing to do with the Service Plazas procurement.”
Two other times Fish admits texting Bosworth, but then adds the following sentence: “We did not discuss the Service Plazas procurement.”
Fish also acknowledges adding slobbering emojis to his bum-kissing texts: “Two thumbs up emojis… thumbs up emojis… two thumbs-up emojis and a strong-arm emoji.”
There’s an old saying: The fish rots from the head. This is all very fishy, the way he’s proclaiming his innocence. Methinks he doth protest too much.
Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of a character very much like John Fish: “The louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
The late Edward Kennedy
Sen. Edward Kennedy of Lowell, who died this week at age 74, rates a footnote in local political lore as the most successful “straw” candidate ever in Massachusetts.
A straw is a candidate who is put into a fight to drain votes away from a stronger candidate and throw the race to the candidate who put the “straw” into the fight.
In 1988 U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy was running for reelection. His nephew Joe Kennedy was seeking reelection to the US House.
In Middlesex County, the courthouse gang that had long dominated the county hackerama was desperate to retain control of the three-member county commission. But it looked like the “reformers” might prevail and take power.
The late Paul Sullivan of Tewksbury, who later became a WBZ radio talk show host, was the hacks’ candidate for county commissioner. But to drain votes from the suburban reform candidate (whose name I can’t even recall), hack County Commissioner Mike McLaughlin had a brainstorm.
McLaughlin said, let’s put a straw candidate in the Democrat primary from Lowell named… Edward Kennedy. It’ll fool all the dumb liberals in Cambridge and Newton.
What could possibly go wrong?
Kennedy, an ex-city councilor, was the perfect straw candidate. He didn’t campaign, he raised no money. He sent out no mailings. He had no endorsements. He did what was expected of him — absolutely nothing.
On primary election night, he swept to an easy victory. McLaughlin had a young hack working for him by the name of Marty Meehan, a neighbor of Ed Kennedy’s in Lowell. Meehan was told to go over to Kennedy’s house and tell him he’d won.
According to Lowell lore, Meehan went to Kennedy’s house and knocked on the door. Kennedy had been cutting his lawn, had come back inside, had a couple of beers and then dozed off on his living couch in a tee shirt. That was how Meehan found him.
It was such a funny story that it even was written up in The New York Times. One of the defeated, real candidates explained what happened with Edward Kennedy:
“People think he’s Teddy Jr. When our people were calling town halls for results, they all thought he was some nephew or something.”
That was 1988. All these years later, Middlesex County has long since been dissolved. Sullivan and Kennedy are dead, McLaughlin is an ex-con after a federal conviction for corruption, and Meehan, the coffee boy, is making $755,121 a year as president of UMass.
As for the power of the Kennedy name in Massachusetts, well, in 2020, the last of the Kennedys in office, Joe Kennedy III, was defeated in the Democrat primary for the Senate by Ed Markey, who shamelessly modeled himself after the “First Family” that he has always been known as a “K Mart Kennedy.”
And by the way, did you ever see Ed Markey and Ed Kennedy in the same room?
MassGOP Kultists pick new knight errant
Grifters are always scouting out their next mark, and the Kool Aid Kult of the Massachusetts GOP seems to think they’ve found their next big score.
His name is Michael Minogue, he’s a billionaire, and he just announced his candidacy for governor last week.
The Kult’s leader, former GOP chairman Jim “Jones” Lyons, gushed all over Minogue on social media, and all I can say to Minogue is — call the bunco squad before it’s too late!
The Kool Aid Kult has more angles than a Nigerian prince.
Lyons and his crackpot minions were ousted from the trough in 2023, after going approximately 0–48 in contested state races from 2019 to 2022. They also almost bankrupted the state GOP, spending the party’s meager funds on, say, private eyes to stalk GOP state committee members as well as squandering hundreds of thousands of dollars on pathetic losers like DoorDash Diehl.
Now, the Kult looks at Minogue and sees their next Rick Green — the dim-bulb entrepreneur who provided “jobs” for so many of them.
Minogue’s net worth dwarfs Green’s. He has even more dough than that crazy old guy in Milton the Kult tapped who claims he talks to the Virgin Mary every afternoon.
Minogue’s campaign could mean even more dough for them than those COVID welfare programs some of them cashed in for up to $80,000 for their, uh, businesses.
And there’s no jeopardy in picking Minogue’s pockets. I mean, COVID was easy money, but look what happened to one of the Kult’s top guys, ex-Sen. Dean Tran.
He’s now doing federal time at Devens FMC, near his old Senate district.
Mr. Minogue, the Kult is gonna tell you they’re the only true Trumpers in the Mass GOP. Yeah, right. Just ask Jim Jones Lyons which candidate he was with in 2016. Ask Rick Green the same question.
More importantly, ask them how many elections they won when they were running the Mass GOP. (To repeat, the answer is zero.)
Caveat emptor, Minogue, because grifters gotta grift.
Order Howie’s new book, “Mass Corruption: Vol. 1 The Cops,” at howiecarrshow.com/store.
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