Gintautas Dumcius – Media Nation

When we lived in Medford in the early 1980s, the city and neighboring Somerville were both down at the heels. When we returned in 2014, Somerville was vibrant and growing, with Medford not too far behind. So I was fascinated to read Gin Dumcius’ story in CommonWealth Beacon about a politically connected Somerville lawyer’s attempt to bribe Medford’s police chief to help him establish a marijuana business. As Dumcius writes, it was a last hurrah for the old Medford and Somerville.

Unfortunately for the lawyer, Sean O’Donovan, Medford Police Chief Jack Buckley is an honest cop. Buckley’s brother Mike, whom O’Donovan tried to use as the go-between with Chief Buckley, agreed to wear an FBI wire, and O’Donovan was busted after he delivered $2,000 in cash, intended as a down payment on a $25,000 bribe. Medford Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn, Dumcius adds, handled the license for the weed shop in a properly arm’s-length manner.

Times had changed, even if O’Donovan didn’t realize it. He faces sentencing on Feb. 7.

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Gov. Deval Patrick. Photo (cc) 2008 by Alison Klein of WEBN News and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

This story may take another day or two to ripen. But Gov. Deval Patrick’s firing of two members of the Sex Offender Registry Board has all the ingredients of a major donnybrook between The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.

Globe reporter Michael Levenson writes that Patrick fired the two officials in part because of their insistence that his brother-in-law register as a sex offender. The brother-in-law, Bernard Sigh, was convicted of raping his wife (Patrick’s sister) in 1993 and served a short prison sentence. The couple later reconciled, but the Herald made it an issue during Patrick’s first run for governor in 2006. Levenson writes:

Blaming the Herald and the Republican Party for the revelation, Patrick said the disclosure that his brother-in-law had been convicted of raping his wife, Patrick’s sister, more than a decade earlier in California “nearly destroyed their lives.”

In the Herald, Erin Smith and Matt Stout offer a similar account, including Patrick’s lambasting of their paper. A Herald editorial criticizes Patrick mainly for the week-long delay in explaining the reason for the two officials’ firing: “Eight years and multiple bureaucratic scandals in, how has this administration not figured out that honesty — from the outset — is the best policy?”

Finally, if you’d like to read a thorough account by a neutral reporter, I recommend Gin Dumcius of State House News Service. [Update: I don’t mean to imply that the Globe and Herald accounts today are not neutral; they both seem pretty straight. I simply mean that the two papers are rivals, and the Herald’s 2006 reporting may become an issue.]

So will this spark another chapter in the Hundred Years’ War between the Globe and the Herald? I think it mainly comes down to how vigorously Herald editors want to defend their paper’s 2006 reporting. As they say, stay tuned.

By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Tag: Gintautas Dumcius

An old tale of local corruption — with a modern twist

Will Globe and Herald go to war over sex registry story?