But it is more than that.
John Barranco’s story is also about an East Boston boy who loved to box and grew into a young man remembered for smarts and moxie and sometimes intimidating toughness. About a schoolteacher whom many admired, one with an ambition for greater things. About a man with a gift for building political alliances, particularly among an endangered species in Massachusetts - GOP powerbrokers.
And about love.
For Barranco didn’t build his empire alone. He left his wife for one of his employees in 1997, moving in with a woman nearly 20 years younger than himself for what he later called, in a court filing, “a mutual adult relationship of trust, confidence, and love.’’
For a decade, Mary A. Clisbee was Barranco’s right hand on the job and hostess at home, rising quickly from social worker through a series of promotions until Barranco had her named as his successor as executive director of the Merrimack Special Education Collaborative, an agency that provides academic instruction and job training for about 500 special needs children and 200 adults a year.
During their affair, Barranco and Clisbee collected ever-higher salaries and ultimately, in 2006, engineered the transfer of more than $11.5 million from the Collaborative to the Merrimack Education Center, a related, private nonprofit that Barranco was running as his personal fiefdom, according to findings released in June by state Inspector General Gregory W. Sullivan. Indeed, from 2003 through 2006, Barranco and Clisbee together took in more than $2.5 million in salaries and bonuses from the two organizations.
And then it all went sour, starting with their relationship. When Clisbee broke up with him in 2007, Barranco didn’t hesitate to strike back. He forced her out of her $300,000 a year job, Clisbee said in an affidavit, and sued her for $100,000, claiming she owed him the money for work on her Groveland home. That legal battle would bring into view an intimate account of their personal and professional lives - an account that would ultimately prove useful to law enforcement.
