George Higgins - A change of gravity

"Anyway," she said, 'just what've we got on here this afternoon?

Something a bit simpler, perhaps? One of you gentlemen want to tell me what it's about, so I can put my steel-trap mind to work on it?"

"Why don't you kick it off, Arnie?" Cohen said. "We're sort of coming in here in the middle of things. I'm not sure we've got it all straight."

"Sure," Bissell said. "Back in February, the US Attorney directed the Political Corruption Unit to undertake a very broad-gauged investigation of contracts awarded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and its sub-divisions; counties; cities and towns; various and sundry authorities port, turnpike, state reservations, water and so forth.

"What he had in mind was really a massive undertaking. He told us to develop a data base of every contract, bid and no-bid, that's wound up costing the Commonwealth taxpayers more than one hundred thousand dollars, awarded during the past twenty years. Going back to the middle Seventies; covering not only contracts for projects expected to cost more than a hundred thousand, but also contracts originally awarded for lesser amounts which as a result of cost-overruns exceeded the one-hundred-thousand floor."

"Gracious," Cohen said. "That must've been a huge project. Who got the contract for that work? How much did the taxpayers have to pay him7. Must've been 'way over one hundred grand."

"It was done in-house," Bissell said, grimly, biting off his words. "It wasn't contracted out. The capability was already in place. The FBI and the IRS and the GAO have plenty of people and lots of machinery to gather data and crunch numbers, analyze what they come up with, spit out the files that meet stated criteria. The employees were trained and in place. It didn't cost the taxpayers one extra dime to have them doing this work."

"Right," Cohen said. "Instead of some other work. In the spring of the year with Tax Day coming up, when a civilian'd think the IRS'd probably have enough coming in to keep occupied but what do civilians know, huh? To the government it was a free play not just more government waste."

"Your Honor," Bissell said, "I realize this's an informal session and all, but could I ask you to please instruct Attorney Cohen to let me get on the record why we're here? If that's what he wanted me to do, when he requested this session? Because if he's going to sit there baiting me like this and make me spend all my time fending him off, we'll never get anywhere here."

The judge nodded. "Put a lid on it, Geoff, would you please? I do have the afternoon free, which I certainly didn't expect. But I bet if I try I can find one or two other pending matters that'd warrant my attention." Cohen pretended to pout. She chuckled and shook her head. "Go ahead, Arnie," she said. "If he doesn't behave I'll hold him in contempt, along with his client."

Merrion looked at the judge the way a cornered cat measures a large menacing dog, calculating how much damage it can do before the dog mauls it. She saw this and was angered for a moment, but then reconsidered. "Excuse me for a moment, Arnie," she said, putting up her right hand as Bissell started to speak. "Mister Merrion," she said, "I think I might've just made a needlessly provocative remark. If it sounded threatening, I apologize; that was not my intention."

"Thank you, your Honor," Merrion said, surprise in his eyes.

"Certainly," the judge said. "Now, Arnie, if you would."

"We haven't completed the data collection," Bissell said. "It'll probably take another year, at least. But this is a rolling program.

We're not waiting until we've finished collecting all the data before we start our analysis. We're initiating new grand jury proceedings contemporaneously, each time the data profile another cohering and discrete cell of individuals we call 'em hives, or nests isolating them as it were, picking them off one at a time. Our hope is to keep pace as much as possible between the data-profiling and the field investigations that producing the actual evidence corroborating or contradicting, also possible but unlikely what the data tell us to expect. Otherwise we're going to face a terrible backlog down the line. This particular John Doe investigation we've got underway both in Boston and out here started during the first week of August."

Cohen interrupted wearily. "I know I'm not supposed to interrupt, your Honor, but could we ask Arnie to spare us all the disingenuous John Doe make-believe about who's the target here? Dan Hilliard's in the cross-hairs; it's been common knowledge since the day after they chose him, which was the day before the leaks began."

"John Doe's a formality," Bissell said coolly, 'custom and usage. We know rumors and leaks occur. They start the minute we begin serving subpoenas. We know it'll happen, so we don't issue subpoenas until we're pretty sure a given investigation's going to yield a prosecutable case. Usually our expectations turn out to be right; we develop a prosecutable case against the person or persons our subpoenas seemed to point to. Therefore when we complete the investigative phase and enter the formal accusatory phase, the rumors turn out to be true. Post hoc, propter hoc.

"That doesn't mean we start the rumors. We don't. The minute some bank treasurer is subpoenaed as the Keeper of the Records, specifying whose records we want, he knows who we're after. The fat goes in the fire and the gossip's in the wind. We can't stop it, so we've done the next best thing: stopped worrying about it.

"So, everyone knows who we're after? Usually. But experienced criminal lawyers know we never publicly name any target 'til he's been indicted. We can't, we're not allowed to. Constitution states no citizen shall be held to answer for a capital offense or crime of infamy except upon presentment of grand jury. Remember, Geoff?

Black-letter law."

Cohen stared at him thoughtfully, picking at the edge of his lower right front tooth with the nail of his left ring-finger, saying nothing.

"Children, children," the judge said. "Get on with it, Arnie."

"The review of state and state sub-division contracts awarded to private companies and individuals in the Western District showed a striking correlation between people benefiting from them and people who'd been heavy financial supporters of Daniel Hilliard's political career major campaign contributors. Hilliard is the queen bee; his rich pals are his worker bees. Or ants, as you prefer."

"I object to this, your Honor," Cohen said. "There's no need for Mister Bissell's gratuitous and demeaning insults."

"I'm sorry," Bissell said. "You said John Doe offended you. I thought you wanted me to use the same vocabulary here we use among ourselves when we're discussing people like your client here today."

"I don't want any more of trash-talk out of either one of you," the judge said. "Do you want me to make it clearer than that? Get to work."

"We have a number of individuals under investigation for their dealings with Hilliard, your Honor," Bissell said. "I'm going to use Haskell Sanderson, Junior, for an example. He began doing business with the state several years before the opening date wed arbitrarily chosen for our investigation, but when we saw the pattern emerging in those years, we went back to his first state contracts. The pattern was clear from the start. Sanderson began contributing generously to Hilliard. Very soon he got his first state printing contract. He increased his contributions. He got more state printing contracts. Until the state campaign financing law took effect, he contributed between five and ten thousand dollars to the Hilliard Committee every two-year election cycle, equivalent to thirty or forty thousand today.

"When the statute prohibited corporate donations and limited individual contributions to two thousand dollars per individual per cycle, Sanderson complied. He reduced his contributions to the statutory amount. But his wife, when he had one, gave two thousand dollars, and his son, who claims to be a golf pro but spends half the year tending bar, gave two thousand a cycle. Four of Sanderson's employees gave a thousand each. Hilliard's total receipts from Sanderson were unaffected by the new law.