Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  The union had put out the word to boycott the speech. We were afraid of rows of empty seats showing up on the eleven o’clock news. So we packed the hall with rank-and-file city workers. From their applause you’d think their jobs depended on it.

  I never had any trouble with protesting police but nearly squared off with an angry firefighter. It happened in a Dorchester playground and of all things at a coffee hour for mothers. The guy wagged a finger in my face and told me what I could do with my contract. I was about to forget myself when a mom pushed in between us, put a finger in his face, and lit into him. I treasure the memory: The feisty mom was my daughter Susan.

  The city offered a 13.8 percent pay raise over three years. The union held out for 20 percent. But the real stumbling block was one of the O’Toole recommendations.

  The union fought to preserve a perk singled out by the commission: Because a grateful Commonwealth exempted them from paying state income taxes, injured firefighters on leave were paid more than their regular salaries. Injuries in the BFD were three times higher than in the BPD. A cynic—or an economist—might conclude that firefighters had an incentive to be injured. Boston taxpayers paid twice as much per capita for fire protection as taxpayers in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or Minneapolis. High injury rates were a big reason why.

  I wanted (1) independent medical examiners to assess firefighters’ capacity to return to work, and (2) management to be able to assign light duty to firefighters coming off injuries.

  This demand, along with requirements to hire more women and promote more minorities, seemed fair to me. Not to the city councilors who boycotted my speech. Councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen spoke for them when she told reporters that what the firefighters wanted, they deserved to get.

  They got a raise and the city won some concessions on the O’Toole issues. The terms of the contract were agreed to in the last days of August 2001. Two weeks before 9/11.

  I lucked out on the timing. After 9/11, I couldn’t have denied anything to our firefighters—not with Boston’s firehouses draped in black bunting for their 340 New York colleagues killed at the Twin Towers. And especially in an election year. Davis-Mullen was my opponent. She’d hoped to exploit the union’s anger at me over the contract. Settling the contract settled her fate.

  QUESTION FROM A REPORTER: Is it true, Mayor Menino, that you slammed down the phone on John Kerry Saturday?

  ANSWER: I did not. . . . Not on Saturday.

  I’d had labor trouble with police. I’d had labor trouble with firefighters. But not at the same time. The year 2004 brought a perfect storm: trouble with police and fire. At the worst possible moment: when Boston was hosting the Democratic National Convention (DNC), with a Boston resident, Senator John F. Kerry, as the party’s presidential nominee.

  The police union was threatening to picket the convention site, the FleetCenter, home of the Celtics and Bruins. And delegations from big states like California and Ohio put me on notice: They would not cross a picket line.

  The convention was Boston’s chance to shine in the national spotlight. It was my chance, before an audience of fifteen thousand journalists, to show my stuff as a Governing magazine “Mayor of the Year,” the “urban mechanic” with his wrench on the nuts and bolts of making things work.

  Now, in June, a month before the convention, things weren’t working. I couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing my competence mocked in a Harry and Louise ad, “Cake,” paid for by the police union.

  FEMALE VOICE: It’s only a month away, and it seems this DNC is going to be the mayor’s big party. I sure hope Menino is fixing all the problems.

  MALE VOICE: I don’t know. There’s gonna be the usual protesters, I’m sure, but now it seems that even our city workers will be protesting. With thousands of city workers still without contracts, it doesn’t seem like Menino has things under control at all.

  FEMALE: He says he’s a friend of labor, but what I don’t understand is that he hasn’t signed a contract with our police in close to three years. . . . [I]t seems that he’s not only insulting labor, but threatening our public safety.

  MALE: . . . Why on earth pick a fight with the cops when he’s got every Democrat in the world looking over his shoulder?

  FEMALE: Makes no sense to me, but one thing’s for sure: If Menino doesn’t get his act together, the whole world will know about it.

  MALE: It’s the Democrats’ party, but when it comes to mismanagement, Menino takes the cake.

  I had to keep reminding myself what an achievement it was for Boston, a Democratic city in a blue state, to land the convention. Denver and Orlando, the other finalists, were in swing states.

  So how did we do it? By wowing the DNC. Denver and Orlando wined and dined DNC members, but I got Filene’s Basement to open at seven A.M. so they could hunt bargains in private. Denver and Orlando gave nifty PowerPoint presentations, but Boston installed a small ice-skating rink in a Los Angeles hotel lobby so California Democrats could cut figure eights under the palm trees. Colorado and Florida had influential Democratic politicians making the case for their cities. But Boston had Ted Kennedy asking the DNC to crown decades of service to his party with a convention in his hometown. What Democrat could refuse the last Kennedy brother?

  Ted had two secret weapons. He trotted them out at a key meeting held at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. Picture a long table with party chair Terry McAuliffe at one end and me at the other . . . But people aren’t the point of this scene. Focus instead on the food: the plates of donuts, bagels, and muffins. Suddenly, the doors swing open and Teddy barrels into the room behind Sonny and Splash, his Portuguese water dogs. Splash leaps onto the table, Sonny follows. Watch the muffins disappear, the bagels scatter. Hear the whoops of laughter . . . Denver and Orlando didn’t have a chance.

  That memory warmed me as the July date of the convention approached and the police union refused to submit to state arbitration. “Our raises are paying for Tom’s party,” Tom Nee said. I said: “When I had the money I gave them good contracts. I just can’t spend money we don’t have.” State aid to the city had been sharply cut.

  June began and ended with trouble from the least likely person in the world.

  But first the Secret Service shut down Boston. The Madrid train bombings in March raised fears of terrorism disrupting the first national political convention held since 9/11. The security gods decreed that North Station, a commuter rail hub that shared a building with the FleetCenter, be shut down for a week and ordered forty miles of roads closed, including I-93, the main north-south route through the city, and the tunnels connecting it with Logan Airport. For four days, Boston would be stoppered.

  Commuters and employers were livid. Menino! You promised the convention would bring money to the city, not subtract millions from the local economy! “If Democrats really cared about the people who live and work in Boston, they would do us all a favor and stay home.” That opinion, from a letter to the editor, was the water cooler talk of the city.

  My team was still reeling from the security shutdown when John Kerry dropped his first bombshell: He might not accept the nomination at the convention. Once nominated, he was subject to federal spending limits. President George W. Bush would not be renominated until early September, allowing him five weeks of unlimited spending. Kerry wanted to level the playing field.

  Thousands of people had devoted eighteen months of planning to the convention.

  Sitting together around the big conference table at the Parkman House, Ted Kennedy and I went hoarse raising $50 million from wealthy Boston boosters to pay for convention-related activities. Teddy played the bad cop. “I want a million dollars,” he said to one of the richest men in the world. A few seconds later he hung up the phone. He shook his head. “Do you know what he said? ‘I haven’t any loose change to give you.’ Can you imagine that son of a bitch? I mean, loose change!”

  I’d formed Boston 2004, Inc., a nonprofit agency, to prepare the city for the big event, an
d assigned my deputy chief of staff, Julie Burns, to run it. She’d recruited 13,000 volunteers to squire 35,000 visitors to 1,000 events. And that was just the beginning.

  Julie had cleared away every obstacle to a super convention climaxed by the candidate’s statement “I accept your nomination for president of the United States” and his campaign-opening acceptance speech. Now, Kerry seemed ready to blow all that off. To drain the buzz from his own convention.

  Someone must have seen the smoke rising from Terry McAuliffe’s ears, and Kerry Central had second thoughts about Kerry’s second thoughts. After all, John Kerry was for accepting the nomination at the convention before he was against it.

  I had three weeks to recover before Kerry dropped his second bombshell.

  I was hosting the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. I had invited Kerry to address the mayors. He’d promised to come and deliver a major speech on America’s unfinished urban agenda. Over the last weekend in June, while mayors attending events ran the gauntlet of picketers shouting “Don’t go in!” and I was being greeted everywhere by choruses of “Tom-my, Tom-my, liar, liar!” (because I had a secret pot of money squirreled away), the candidate was having second thoughts about speaking to the mayors on Monday.

  “The Boston event is off. He won’t cross a picket line,” a Kerry spokesman said on Sunday. “No one has informed the mayor that Senator Kerry is not coming,” my spokesman told a puzzled press. Hours later, the same Kerry spokesman had second thoughts, emailing reporters, “We have not made any official or final decisions.”

  “Kerry must start out every morning eating waffles,” Brian McGrory commented in the Globe. “He’d have a tough time distinguishing between heaven and hell. (‘Would it be too cold up there?’)”

  “Everyone makes his own political decisions,” I told reporters. “I think Kerry has to make his decision, and I have to make my decision.”

  Kerry’s decision was to cancel on the mayors to appease the unions. When he told me Sunday night, I hung up on him.

  My decision was to invite a prominent Massachusetts politician to replace Kerry. Not Ted Kennedy; no fool, weeks earlier he’d begged off speaking to the mayors. But the state’s leading Republican.

  Governor Mitt Romney won cheers from America’s mayors when he said: “I wanted to indicate my support of Mayor Menino. He’s a man of courage and integrity. In the executive, you put the people first and not the pickets. . . . Senators don’t have to balance budgets. Senators don’t have to make those kinds of trade-offs. That’s what the mayor has to do, and that’s why I want to be here for him.” And the mayors gave Romney a standing ovation when he called me “a good Democrat.”

  “To be called a good Democrat by a Republican—that’s great. That shows respect,” I said in an interview with the New York Times. “Some of the mayors here are disappointed, frustrated, angered by Kerry not showing up. It’s all about respect for the mayors, and there was no respect for the mayors. . . . John Kerry will have to live by this decision.”

  “Oh my. Forget Bush vs. Kerry,” McGrory wrote. “The battle of Boston [Menino versus Kerry] has proven a far better show.”

  In fairness, Kerry was in a bind. He might have crossed a police union picket line—nationally, the union was Republican-friendly. But firefighters were also picketing over their unsigned contract. And early in his campaign for the nomination, the national firefighters’ union had endorsed Kerry. He played up having America’s heroes on his side, singling out firefighters wearing gold and black KERRY FOR PRESIDENT T-shirts at campaign events. When, days before Kerry was scheduled to address the mayors, the president of the International Association of Fire Fighters asked him not to cross the picket line in Boston, how could he turn them down?

  But it’s not like that picket line was in front of a sweatshop, I argued to Kerry Central. It was an informational picket. Moreover, independent voters might reward the candidate for refusing to bow to a Democratic interest group. Defying the unions could be John Kerry’s “Sister Souljah moment.”

  No one listened, because the campaign and the unions had made a deal, at my expense.

  In early June, the Kerry campaign and the DNC panicked when aggressive picketers prevented tradesmen from entering the FleetCenter. Refitting the arena for the convention all but stopped for three days and only started when I asked a federal court to dispatch U.S. marshals to police the police pickets. The DNC’s nightmare—a convention closed by a labor dispute—seemed all too likely. So Kerry agreed to the unions’ demand to humiliate me before the mayors; and in return, the unions promised not to humiliate him before the world.

  Events eclipsed the deal. The police union finally agreed to arbitration, and twenty-four hours before the convention opened, a state arbitrator awarded the police 14.5 percent and firefighters 10.5 percent raises over four years.

  That was bad news for Boston’s taxpayers. The firefighters celebrated at Dorchester’s Florian Hall. “As the party got underway,” a reporter noted, “firefighters carried stacks of picket signs from the parking lot, to be stored in the office for later use.” The signs would come out again in a few years. The ruling set a precedent: Even in a down economy, the public safety unions could expect healthy raises from a state arbitration panel. Police and fire have no incentive to negotiate voluntarily with the city. Arbitrators will always give them more.

  But the settlement was good news for the Democrats. The convention would go smoothly. And the city looked great, with baskets of flowers hanging from new street lanterns.

  “Beyond the drama, Menino is doing what he does best, the nuts and bolts work of running the town,” McGrory wrote. The urban mechanic was back on the job.

  We’ve Hit a New Low in Depravity

  —a headline about the Mattapan murders of September 2010

  As the years passed, America’s cities suffered the unintended consequences of the Politician Preservation Act of 1994, better known as the crime bill. Its $23 billion built a lot of prisons. Its mandatory minimum sentences filled the prisons with a lot of drug felons. They served eight or ten years, then, starting in 2005–6, began leaving. They may not have been violent criminals when they went in, but many turned violent after they came out. Police noticed their presence in the streets right away. Mini–crime waves could be traced to the release of particular inmates. In prison young men survived by “fronting”—that is, violently confronting any inmate who disrespected them. To let anything pass showed weakness. Weakness invited rape. That was the brutal world created by the crime bill. And the young men brought it home with them.

  The Mattapan murderers were such young men. The headline about their crime did not exaggerate. I was in New York when Boston hit this new low in depravity. I caught the first flight out and went directly from Logan Airport to Mattapan.

  I walked up Sutton Street and began knocking on doors. People needed to see I cared, the city cared, and to hear from me how they could secure their streets. A new program run out of community health centers, Violence Intervention and Prevention, mobilized citizens to fight crime. I told them they weren’t helpless. Together, they were strong.

  The people I met were in shock, and not from finding the mayor on the doorstep. I clasped hands, squeezed shoulders, and listened. They had seen awful things, and wanted me to understand.

  Just after one A.M. on September 28 they were awakened by gunfire. “Dad, is it the Fourth of July?” a six-year-old asked his father, who ran outside to investigate. “After what I saw, I plan on moving and going somewhere else,” he said. In a vacant lot beside a house on Woolson Street were the bodies of two men, both naked. Police found a third man, barely alive, in bushes nearby. The neighbors were trying to cleanse their eyes of that horror when the bodies of a young mother and her son were carried past them on stretchers. The boy made a small bundle under the blanket. Amani Smith was two years old.

  I turned the corner onto Woolson. In front of the house of death was a little shrine made o
f pink roses, a red balloon, and two teddy bears.

  Later, speaking at police headquarters, I addressed the killers, still at large: “To those who have no respect for life and would commit this brutal act, I say this: Our streets are not your battleground. Our kids cannot be your collateral damage. We will not allow you to poison our city.”

  My emotions were still raw from an atrocity three weeks earlier: the murder of a pizza delivery man making a late-night stop. Richel Nova’s death touched me personally. It happened in Hyde Park, my old neighborhood. Two teenagers and a twenty-year-old broke into a vacant house on Hyde Park Avenue, my street. One of them, an eighteen-year-old Hyde Park High student, called Domino’s Pizza for a delivery. She called again a few minutes later, impatient.

  A security camera on the garage across the street shows Nova’s Subaru pulling up in front of the house at 11:30. The camera records the girl walking down the driveway to meet him. According to police, she told him she’d left her wallet inside and to follow her to the back door to be paid. On the garage video they disappear. Seconds later the girl and her two accomplices are seen hurrying down the driveway. They get into the Subaru and drive away.

  A police officer who viewed the tape said it was “like watching a horror movie where you want to shout out, ‘Don’t follow her!’” The two men were waiting for Nova inside the back door. They stabbed him and robbed him of $100. And took the pizza. Coming down the driveway the second time, the girl is holding the box.

  A symbol of the New Bostonians renewing the city, Richel Nova was a fifty-eight-year-old Dominican immigrant who worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, putting twin daughters through college. Michelle and Marlene were summer interns at City Hall during the four years they attended Boston Latin, the city’s premier high school. I knew them well. “They loved their father so much,” I told reporters.