.gif "BILL WELD Could Decker College be his undoing?")
Bill Weld has hit rocky shoals in his attempt to become the first person since Sam Houston to get elected governor of two states. Five months after he announced his candidacy, a statewide poll finds that more New Yorkers hold unfavorable views of him than favorable ones — and that three-quarters don’t even know enough to have an opinion. Where once the Republican field was considered cleared for Weld, serious challengers have emerged to vie for his party’s nomination — and even if he gets it, he would still face New York’s hugely popular Democratic Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, who’s making a gubernatorial run from the other side of the aisle.
But much of Weld’s problem, improbably enough, lies in the collapse of an obscure vocational school in Louisville, Kentucky. Decker College’s implosion last year amid allegations of fraud has become fodder for the New York media and Weld’s opponents — because Weld was on Decker’s board of directors and, when the wheels came off, its CEO.
Thus far, Weld has fought gamely through the controversy, signaling through campaign-staff hires and fundraising that he has no intention of quitting the race.
But Decker may yet prove much more than an electoral hindrance for Massachusetts’s former governor. The many lawsuits and investigations under way include an inquiry within the US Attorney’s office for Western Kentucky, which could very easily end in criminal charges against Decker officials — possibly including Weld.
Although a Weld attorney in Kentucky has claimed that Big Red is not a target of the investigation, the prosecutor heading the investigation says that nothing — and nobody — has been ruled out. “Nobody in this office advised Mr. Weld’s attorney that he is not a target,” says Marisa Ford, chief of the criminal division for the US Attorney’s office, in Louisville. “Anybody that was in a management position at the company is considered a subject.”
Ford would not provide details of how her office is working the case, but if there is anyone who could make an educated guess, it would be Weld himself. He honed many of the most creative prosecutorial practices here in Boston, when he was US Attorney going after similar prey.
Past as prologue
Weld became US Attorney in November 1981, and inherited two ongoing and related investigations involving long-time Boston mayor Kevin H. White. That May, a canceled birthday party for the mayor’s wife, Kathryn White — involving a spate of suspiciously generous birthday checks — had led to charges of illegal campaign fundraising and money laundering, spurring the Massachusetts Ethics Commission and US Attorney Edward Harrington to action. Then in October, a sting operation had nabbed Boston Redevelopment Authority official George Collatos for accepting a bribe.
Throughout his nearly five years in office, Weld pursued corruption within the White administration aggressively. He obtained convictions of a number of City Hall workers and political insiders for lying to investigators, and then attempted to turn them against higher figures, hoping eventually to get to the top of the pyramid, the mayor himself.
Weld did convict a substantial number of lower-echelon administration members as he “climbed the ladder,” by turning city employees against higher-ups. But the top prize, the mayor himself, ultimately eluded prosecution. The highest figure indicted, Theodore Anzalone, was slated by Weld’s team to testify against White after being convicted. But Anzalone beat his charges and the plan was abandoned. (Harvey Silverglate was co-counsel for Anzalone during those trials.) White retired from politics rather than run for re-election in 1983, a decision many credit to Weld’s investigation.
A more creative and successful effort was Weld’s prosecution of the Bank of New England for violating money-laundering laws. His office won the case in 1986, showing that some individual bank tellers were not reporting customers who broke up large transfers into increments of less than $10,000 — the Treasury Department’s cutoff point to trigger a bank’s mandatory reporting of cash transactions.
The conviction was startling to many, given that none of the bank’s governing executives had been shown to have any idea that violations were occurring at the local-branch operational level, or had any intention of violating the law. Weld thus engineered a “stretch” of the then-current state of the law, expanding the reach of criminal liability to the corporation.
That precedent could now be used against Decker as a corporation, regardless of executive knowledge, if federal prosecutors choose to act as zealously as Weld did back then. Fortunately for Weld, it is not equally true that the chief executive officer can be tagged with the knowledge or actions of those lower down on the pecking order — unless, of course, prosecutors exert sufficiently coercive pressure on the lower-echelon folks — in the phrase made famous by Alan Dershowitz, to teach them not only to sing but also to compose. In other words, will the prosecutors looking into Weld’s role be as aggressive in pursuing him as he was in pursuing targets in his days as a prosecutor?
