No-longer-cooperating witness Ron Wilburn tells the Boston Globe’s Adrian Walker: “Dianne is a thief. Chuck isn’t. Dianne knew better. Chuck is a victim of circumstance.” Which is kind of the way this has looked from the beginning.
Tag: Adrian Walker
Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker unleashes a high, hard one today destroying any pretense that Boston city councilor Chuck Turner and former state senator Dianne Wilkerson were set up by racists at the FBI.
Walker has a page-one interview with Ron Wilburn, better known as “Cooperating Witness,” the guy who lured Wilkerson and Turner into posing for those can’t-get-enough photos of them taking cash, allegedly in return for their help in getting Wilburn a liquor license for a bar he was trying to open.
Wilburn is not a racist FBI agent. Nor is he in trouble himself. Rather, he is a well-known, 69-year-old African-American businessman and longtime Wilkerson supporter who tells Walker that he’d had enough, and that he expects more city officials will be arrested before this is over.
I’d say he’d be in a position to know, wouldn’t you? After all, he knows who smiled for the camera. This excerpt from Walker’s piece is priceless:
“People do things,” Wilburn said. “There are decisions, there are choices, and there are consequences.” Asked if he was surprised that public officials would allegedly take money to help push a liquor license, he responded quickly. “Hell, no,” and let out a hearty laugh….
“You’re dealing with favoritism, cronyism, classism, and if you don’t have the right connections it’s very difficult to make things happen,” Wilburn said. “The average person that works hard and has a plan to get a license, it’s very hard for them to move through that system. And you find out if you have the right people pushing the buttons, things can happen fast.”
So much for Turner’s media-bashing performance yesterday outside City Hall.
Wilburn does say that the FBI remains its usual bumbling self. For one thing, he says he never told the FBI that he was tired of being shaken down by Wilkerson, as the FBI claims in its affidavit (PDF). For another, he’s upset that the FBI gave him so little cover that his identity quickly became known.
But, he adds, “I was not forced or coerced.”
And now Wilburn finds himself at the center of the biggest corruption scandal Massachusetts has seen in several decades.
File photo of Turner (cc) by stand4security and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Some years back, the Boston Herald’s Joe Sciacca and I were standing on the arena floor at the Democratic State Convention, which was to be held the next day. It was a Friday night, a little after 9 p.m. I think it was in 1994*, and I can’t remember whether it was in Lowell, Worcester or Springfield.
As we were talking, state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, D-Roxbury, sauntered by. Sciacca and I looked at each other. At the time, Wilkerson was under partial home detention for not paying her taxes or some damn thing, and — if I’m recalling the details correctly — she had a 9 p.m. curfew.
Sciacca went tearing off to the press area. As it turned out, there was no news — he found out that Wilkerson’s punishment had just come to an end, and so there was no curfew for her to violate.
No more than a funny little anecdote on a day when Wilkerson’s political career has come to a final, sickening end.
Her arrest comes during a week when the Phoenix’s David Bernstein is reporting still more wrongdoing on her part. And at Universal Hub, Adam Gaffin explains how Wilkerson unwittingly drew the Boston City Council and Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker into her orbit.
Wilkerson’s once-bright promise flamed out many years ago. It’s amazing she lasted as long as she did.
*Update: After reading the Wednesday coverage, I now think it was 1998.
Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen responds to John Gonzalez’s Boston Magazine piece, making up for any perceived bile shortage in rather spectacular fashion. And Boston Magazine blogger Amy Derjue responds to Cullen’s response with applause, urging Cullen’s metro-columnist stablemates, Yvonne Abraham and Adrian Walker, to get similarly worked up.
A note to the Globe’s Web folks: If Cullen thought Gonzalez’s critique was worth expending 660 words, don’t you think you should have linked to it?
Boston Magazine’s John Gonzalez writes that the Boston Globe’s three metro columnists — Adrian Walker, Kevin Cullen and Yvonne Abraham — seem more intent on writing inoffensive feature stories than in drawing blood.
Personally, I’d like to see more outrage. But I suppose the last thing the Globe needs right now is for pissed-off readers to call up and cancel their subscriptions.
Just recently I was thinking about how I’d like to see the metro columnists redeployed, and I came up with an old-fashioned idea that I think might work. (Keep in mind even having metro columnists is pretty old-fashioned.)
I’d station one at the Statehouse, one at City Hall and one at Boston Police headquarters, and instruct all three to write reported pieces with opinion, attitude and, yes, an occasional sense of outrage. Not to be too narrow — they’d be allowed to stray from their beats, but not often.
If you’re thinking that’s not the way to draw in a new generation of twentysomething readers, well, I guess I’d have to agree. But it would certainly make me happy.
Globe columnist Adrian Walker faces some serious trouble following his arrest Sunday on drunken-driving charges. The Herald runs with a fairly detailed story in which Walker’s lawyer, Michael Doolan, emphasizes Walker’s not-guilty plea and says that “we hope and expect he will be acquitted.” The Globe carries a brief item.
Walker is one of the good guys in local media. A respected Statehouse reporter, he landed a columnist’s spot following the Patricia Smith/Mike Barnicle meltdown of 1998. As a columnist, Walker has emphasized substance over flash. There are no verbal pyrotechnics in his pieces, but you generally learn something new.