“They were on a mission,’’ said White’s son, Mark, of Weld and Mark Wolf, the first assistant in charge of political corruption cases, who is now a federal judge. “After all that money, all that time, they came up with nothing. It was a sad way to end a career.’’
Micho Spring, who served as deputy mayor during the White years, insists that Weld didn’t drive her boss from office. The mayor simply knew that it was time go. Even so, Spring said, her biggest regret is “the enormous time we wasted with the Bill Weld investigations, responding to inquiries that were so unnecessary and produced nothing, when we could have been doing other things for the city.’’
Only after White left office did Weld publicly say that the mayor was not a “target’’ of his probe. At that point, Weld had his political launch pad. It coincided with the end of the political road for White.
As governor, Weld sang St. Patrick’s Day ditties about James “Whitey’’ Bulger, an alleged serial murderer, whose brother, Bill Bulger, was the powerful Senate president and a Weld ally. A portrait of James Michael Curley, a legendary rogue mayor who went to jail, hung on the wall behind Weld’s State House desk.
But prosecutors must always pick a quarry and White was Weld’s. His investigations didn’t come up entirely empty, but they never uncovered systemic, top-level corruption.
Weld obtained convictions of White’s budget director, his deputy, and a small circle of relatively low-level political operatives.
He also prosecuted White’s chief political fundraiser Ted Anzalone, under a money laundering theory, for raising $50,000 from 64 donors to pay for a birthday party and a gift for the mayor’s wife. The identity of the donors was kept hidden, and when the party was cancelled, the individual contributions were returned to the givers by reversing the method; donors remained anonymous. A jury acquitted Anzalone on this charge.
