George Higgins - A change of gravity

"In the past twenty-five years or so Sanderson's state printing contracts've totalled several million dollars. He holds three today, long-term agreements worth in excess of nine hundred thousand dollars over the next two years."

"Dan Hilliard hasn't been in the House since Nineteen-eighty-four,"

Cohen said, at the same time gripping Merrion's left forearm to prevent him from speaking.

"Sanderson met his pals in the Procurement branch while Hilliard was still in office," Bissell said wearily. "He bought what he needed while the store was open. By the time Hilliard left the legislature, Sanderson was entrenched. Hilliard did such a great job he doesn't need him anymore.

"His company isn't even in the district Hilliard represented. Sanderson never lived in it but he became a heavy Hilliard backer about thirty years ago. His friend Carl Kuiper told him it could be profitable. He introduced them. Kuiper discovered very early there was money to be made by people on good terms with Dan Hilliard. Before he retired and sold his electrical contracting company to GE, it was the largest such company privately owned in western Massachusetts, due in no small part to its robust relationship with the state Department of Procurement and Services.

"Same pattern. Kuiper didn't live in Hilliard's district. His business wasn't in it either. But he jumped on the Hilliard bandwagon right at the beginning, back in Nineteen-sixty-two, when Hilliard was making his big move from Holyoke alderman to state representative. Five thousand a cycle, regular as clockwork, 'til the limits took effect.

Then he went to the nominee-dodge too; his wife and his two kids suddenly developed an interest in state politics they'd never shown before: the new program was two thousand from him; a thousand from his wife; and a thousand more each from each of his kids including his daughter, nurturing her deep interest in the Massachusetts legislature from her home in Santa Barbara.

"Since those five-grand-a-cycle donations began, our figures show Kuiper's company's raked in over nineteen million dollars' worth of state contracts. "And before that?" you ask." He snickered. "Before that Kuiper Electric, in business for almost ten years, had had one state contract: Eleven thousand dollars' worth of repairs to lighting systems in the barns at the Berkshire County Agricultural Society Fairgrounds and racetrack out in Hancock.

"Those're illustrations," Bissell said. "I'm not going to show all the files to you, uncover our whole hand at this point in the game. But I can assure you that we've got a dozen more just like them. If you compare the list of Hilliard's major contributors to the list of individuals and companies that got fat while he was in office, what you see is a virtual template of political corruption; rampant corruption, corruption abounding. If you gave generously to Hilliard's campaigns, your gifts returned to you not a hundred- but a thousand-fold, at a minimum, in the form of fat state contracts. It's a textbook case of political chicanery and larceny. I know Mister Merrion's Dan Hilliard's close friend and associate, and he wont like hearing me say this, but Dan Hilliard is a common crook."

Merrion inhaled audibly, so that his chest visibly expanded, and he gripped the arms of his chair hard, so that his knuckles whitened.

Cohen grabbed Merrion's right forearm with his left hand and said:

"Your Honor, I know you want to move along as rapidly as possible, without a lot of bickering, but could I be heard? This's hard to take in silence."

"Go ahead, Geoff," the judge said.

"In the first place," Cohen said, "I represent Amby Merrion not Dan Hilliard. Bob Pooler represents Dan. So, when I respond to these attacks, I'm at a disadvantage I assume Bob would not be. But I'm sure Bob'd include among the pieces of his far-better argument the reminder that the period of the Seventies and Eighties covered by' he deepened his voice 'this rolling program' he resumed his normal baritone 'were decades of unprecedented prosperity, not just in western Massachusetts but across the entire country. And decades as well of galloping inflation that brought us to the point we're now at, where what was worth a buck when Hilliard first began to run now costs at least three.

"And in the second place, if Dan Hilliard hadn't been attentive to the best interests of the whole region; if instead he'd worked solely within the narrow confines of his own legislative district, he never could've forged the alliances he needed to rise to chairman of Ways and Means, and the influence to channel those state contracts out here.

"The businessmen and manufacturers who supported him all those years weren't acting purely selfishly. Sure, they were in it for themselves, and many of them prospered. But so did their hundreds of employees.

And therefore so did the merchants and builders, and lawyers, and all the other people who serve our communities. Property values increased, and therefore so did tax revenues. We all depend upon a healthy industrial economy as the foundation of our prosperity.

"Today if we don't have that, we're a heck of a lot closer to having it than we were when Dan Hilliard first ran for office. Those contracts Mister Bissell now finds so sinister were important building blocks, vital to this region. Coming from the eastern part of the state Gloucester, did you tell me, we were chatting outside there?"

Bissell nodded. Cohen continued. "Yeah, I thought so; growing up there the coastline as he did, Mister Bissell wouldn't know this, but until that state work began coming inland, out here, what we had was a predominantly agricultural economy. Our industries, the mills and factories, had first declined, then folded up. The economy was in sad shape. We were in the doldrums. Young people were leaving; they had no choice. Either they went into farming, like it or not, assuming they could find farming jobs, or else they moved away.

Those state contracts meant they didn't have to; they could stay. Some who had left came back, renewed family connections, once there was work for them here. Those contracts were tickets of admission to a new world of light-manufacturing and skilled blue-collar work, and the new incomes that came with it. A better life for all of us.

"I sound like a candidate myself now. If that record were mine, I might very well be. By rights I ought to do well. A politician with that history to present, I'd deserve to be re-elected by a landslide.

But that record isn't mine to brag about. It belongs to Danny Hilliard. It's a good one, a wonderful record of accomplishment. Keep in mind that this is coming from the man Dan Hilliard's ex-wife hired to hammer him with everything he could lay his hands on, and we did that. But never once did we attack his fine record in office. No one who knows him ever has. The people who backed his campaigns invested their money wisely and well. Are they and he therefore now to be denounced for what they accomplished, and held up to scorn and disgrace?"

Bissell snorted. Merrion glared at him. Cohen and the judge ignored both of them. "In the third place," Cohen said, 'and perhaps the one that should most concern this court, Dan Hilliard last stood for office in Nineteen-eighty' two We all know why he didn't seek a twelfth term; as I say, I represented his wife: revelations of his untidy personal life turned many of his constituents against him. It was a very messy and unpleasant time for everyone concerned, but that untidy private life, as scandalous as it may've been, was not against federal law.

"The US Attorney now proposes in effect to rewrite history, to impose a new and deeply cynical interpretation on the solid common cause Dan Hilliard made with his constituents, and the people who supported his campaigns. Mister Bissell and his bosses in their wisdom now decree that what we saw as a marvelous alliance bringing great and greatly needed benefits to the Pioneer Valley, we were deluded, just plain wrong. They say it was a corrupt bargain.