Tom Finneran

Not a fan, felonious Tom Finneran? Well pardon me!

Are you talkin’ to me, Felon Finneran?

I quote now from the letter that four bust-out ex-governors of Massachusetts have written to President Bush, begging them to pardon former House speaker Tommy Taxes Finneran, a man so crooked he needs a corkscrew to get into his pants in the morning.

“He has suffered daily taunts and ridicule of those who believe that every elected official is the equivalent of a common thief.”

That’s me they’re talking about. When it comes to Felon Finneran, I’m in charge of daily taunts and ridicule. But despite what the Four Stooges wrote, I don’t believe every elected official is a thief. Finneran, on the other hand, was the House speaker – a job title that lately has a higher recidivism rate than godfather of the Gambino Crime Family.

As for Tommy Taxes being a “common thief” – I would never say that. Common thieves who do the crime do the time. Finneran committed multiple counts of perjury in the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals, but was convicted of one count of obstruction of justice, and didn’t do an hour, let alone a day, in durance vile.

And he still refuses to take responsibility for his sordid life of crime. So far, he’s Alibi Ike.

First excuse: he lied under oath because he was in a hurry to drive his wife to Mass General.

Second excuse: he’d been “gulping” Advil. No joke – Tommy Taxes claimed he was “Advil-addled.”

New excuse: I’ve ruined everything for him. Yeah, and tonight I’m going to make it snow.

The Four Stooges said Felon Finneran has been “severely punished.” Really? He’s still making big money for his wretched radio show, which we call “Sweet Sixteen,” because that’s generally about where it finishes in the ratings. The Felon usually runs neck and neck with “The River,” and sometimes he even edges the Manchester N.H. soft-rock station. Sometimes. His show is so compelling it now goes off the air at 9 instead of 10, and they’re trying to prop him up with a co-host.

Finneran should be breakin’ rocks in the hot sun. He fought the law and the law won. Although I still remember the day he was “sentenced,” and how Judge Rick Stearns was almost apologizing for having to ask him the questions every convicted felon has to answer.

Are you on drugs this morning, wiseguy? You do know you can’t own a firearm anymore, maggot. But no, it was all “Mistah Speakah” this and “I know this is a silly question but . . .” I was there in the courtroom hoping to make a victim-impact statement. See, I was at the courthouse the day Felon Finneran told his string of incredible whoppers about his racist gerrymandering scheme in the city of Boston.

I was shocked, shocked, I tell you. I tried not to let it destroy my faith in the integrity of the Massachusetts Legislature. But I can’t get over it. Then last year, the Felon speculated to Gov. Patrick that I should be taken for a one-way ride in the trunk of the governor’s Coupe Deval.

You can take the felon out of the State House, but you can’t take the State House out of the felon. President Bush, don’t enough people hate you already? You don’t need your own Marc Rich.

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1144332

Tom Finneran Felon Finneran

Former House speaker Thomas M. Finneran, arriving at his Mattapan home Monday. (Globe Staff Photo / Justine Hunt)
The Boston Globe

Finneran’s gathering storm

Ex-speaker’s strongest traits may have hastened his fall

By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff | June 9, 2005

It was a spring night in 2001, and the hottest question on Beacon Hill was whether the state budget proposal about to be released by the House Ways and Means Committee would contain adequate funds for the Clean Elections Law.

The law to provide public financing of campaigns had been overwhelmingly approved by voters several years earlier, but House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran had made no secret of his hostility to it, and that had spelled doom for many a measure in the State House over the years.

That made Finneran’s response all the more surprising when a reporter asked how much money would be in the Ways and Means budget for Clean Elections. ”I literally have no idea,” Finneran said. He went on to explain that he had been so busy with other legislative matters that he had left it in the hands of Ways and Means chairman John Rogers.

The notion of a hands-off approach on something Finneran cared about so deeply ran counter to everything that was known about the controlling, detail-oriented man who ran the House. But for the eight years Finneran presided as a speaker of unchallenged power, he seldom felt the need to agonize over his words or his image. Indeed, he was every inch the happy warrior, a sharp-tongued figure who freely expressed his opinions.

Yet in the aftermath of his indictment Monday on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, some wonder whether the very traits that propelled Finneran’s rise to power — a self-confidence bordering on the cocksure, a reflexive refusal to yield on points large or small, an eager appetite for political combat — may have worked together to hasten his fall.

”Hubris,” said Pamela Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause of Massachusetts, speculating on why Finneran denied any involvement in the redistricting process. ”There would have been no consequences to him had he told the truth: ‘Yes, I met with lawmakers and talked about this; yes, I met with the chairman of the committee.’ There would have been no repercussions. People would have said, ‘Look, there’s Finneran controlling the process again, but that would been, ‘Yawn, yawn, what’s new?’ ”

Finneran has vigorously maintained his innocence. Moreover, he has done so with the unambiguous force that characterized his eight years as House speaker, issuing a statement saying, ”My response to the charges brought against me today is NOT GUILTY,” and telling reporters: ”I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”

If that is true, that would mean Finneran is less bothered by the indictment than are some of his admirers. Former House speaker David Bartley contended that the indictment is ”just outrageous,” and that Finneran is called arrogant simply for exerting strong leadership and for being unyielding in his beliefs.

Such support is a testament to the charisma and brainpower Finneran brought to the post of House speaker, along with an iron-fisted approach that made dissidents an endangered species. Critics say Finneran’s belief that he was smarter than most — an opinion honed and to an extent affirmed in the State House — contributed to his current legal predicament. In this view, the commanding — critics called it arrogant — demeanor that defined his leadership in the House simply boomeranged on the witness stand.

”He was just daring the attorneys to challenge him, to doubt him,” remarked Representative James J. Marzilli, a Democrat from Arlington who was often at loggerheads with Finneran during the decade-plus they served together in the House. ”You carry that outside this chamber, this institution, and people are a lot less willing to live by the rules he’s trying to force upon them.”

His will was so fierce, his talents so outsized, that Finneran grew used to getting his way on Beacon Hill. Often, his word literally was law. Now a jury will decide whether he broke the law with a few words of emphatic denial when he was asked, under oath, whether he knew the contents of a legislative redistricting plan before it was made public.

Lou DiNatale, director of the Center for Economic and Civic Opinion at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, said it was clear from the former speaker’s testimony that he found it ”outrageous he had to testify before a federal jury over something that speakers have done over time immemorial in every state in the country . . . to protect his party members, Democrats, and his leadership. He made a mistake. He assumed this wasn’t going to be as explosive a public issue as it became.”

Whatever the outcome, the indictment has refocused the spotlight on a figure as compelling as he is contradictory. Finneran is a student of history who loves Edward Gibbon’s ”The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and Winston Churchill’s ”The Gathering Storm,” but he didn’t seem to see the storm gathering around him or to apprehend that his own pride and power might lead to a fall. In interviews with admirers and detractors of the former speaker, it was striking how often the twin themes of ambition and tragedy were sounded.

”Tom Finneran thought he was going to be either mayor of Boston or a United States senator,” said John McDonough, a former legislator and now executive director of Health Care for All, a consumer advocacy group. ”He clearly saw the speakership not as a terminal position but as a launching pad for something bigger. Given his ambitions, there’s a note of tragedy in it, that someone so gifted and talented was not able to capitalize on his position to achieve that bigger goal.”

Barbara Anderson, head of Citizens for Limited Taxation, considered Finneran to have ”a very thin skin stretched over a very big ego” from the day in 1991 when he ignored her outstretched hand and stalked away from her after the two did battle over Proposition 2 1/2, the tax-limiting measure that was her brainchild. Nonetheless, Anderson said, she now views Finneran as ”a tragic figure who had tremendous potential for leadership but instead he got lost in his own hubris.”

Over time, Finneran became known for what he said as much as for what he did. In the middle of the 1998 debate over how much public financing should be given to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft to build a new stadium, Finneran at a dinner in Peabody dismissed the idea of a tax break for the project with a vulgarity.

In 1998, at a post-primary unity breakfast after Scott Harshbarger had won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, the facade of unity crumbled in a hurry when Finneran floated the notion that Harshbarger might drift toward ”the loony left,” a blow to a nominee who hoped and needed to appeal to moderate voters.

But for all of his swagger, the depictions of Finneran as a cartoon tyrant miss the mark, insist many who served with him, including some who lined up against him on issues or on leadership style. Most describe a man who was unfailingly cordial, who invariably recalled the names of members’ spouses and children, and who would blink back tears while discussing the challenges facing the mentally retarded.

Representative Michael Festa, a Melrose Democrat who emerged as one of Finneran’s leading critics, said, ”It’s a rare member of the House that would say they didn’t like Tom Finneran.”

Even though Festa often spoke out against Finneran’s tight control of the House, the two enjoyed a friendly relationship based on a shared love of gardening, and Festa had Finneran and his wife as a guest at his house several times. ”The man is sufficiently complex for everyone to understand he’s not that one-dimensional as a person,” Festa said.

Yet the image that came through to the outside world sometimes lacked those other dimensions. Having entered the Legislature in his late 20s, Finneran perhaps inevitably leaned on the instincts and style of a State House insider. But that very style may have worked against him on the witness stand, in the view of DiNatale, who believes that the indictment is unfair.

”Finneran got popped for the wink and the nod,” DiNatale contended. ”Because the culture of the [State House] building is ‘I know and you don’t know what’s really going on,’ the wink and the nod is the dominant form of being in the know. . . . You can play these winking games with the press, you can even play them with the Legislature. You can’t play them under oath.”

Rick Klein and Jonathan Saltzman of the Globe staff contributed to this report.