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	Caution, Ambition Mix in Coakley’s Methodical Journey By Jonathan Saltzman Boston Globe November 17, 2009 http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2009/11/17/caution_ambition_mingle_in_mass_attorney_generals_political_journey/?page=full It was a cold day in Dorchester when Martha Coakley’s ambition slammed head-on into political reality. She was running in a special election for state representative, an entry-level job in the world of elective office, with an eye toward eventually becoming Suffolk district attorney. She had outdebated her four male opponents. She certainly proved she knew more about fighting crime. But on that March day in 1997, Coakley, a single, 43-year-old career prosecutor without children and a Dorchester resident of 14 years, could not overcome the stigma of being an unusual outsider in the close-knit district of working-class families. She came in fourth out of five candidates. Some extraordinary things have happened on the way to this US Senate race. There was Louise Woodward, the British nanny Coakley helped convict in a case that catapulted her to the Middlesex district attorney’s job. There was the Big Dig ceiling collapse, which Coakley, as attorney general, used to help wrest more than half a billion dollars in givebacks from the project’s contractors. There was the foreclosure crisis, during which she won multimillion-dollar settlements against huge financial companies, creating a template that advocates said other states should follow. This Senate campaign, her longtime friends and close family members say, is in many ways her destiny. She was born with a desire and ability to achieve great things in the public realm, and she has spent a career - indeed, a lifetime - seeking something more. “When she ran for DA, it was kind of, ‘Wow, this is a really big deal,’ ’’ said Mary Coakley-Welch of Winchester, her younger sister. “But now it doesn’t feel surprising or unexpected, because I think I always envisioned she’d work in some kind of public service leadership role. It’s really been a natural for her.’’ But one person’s ambition is another’s opportunism, and amid her many triumphs, she has been dogged by criticism that she pushed prosecutions too hard or not hard enough, sometimes for reasons of expedience. In the highly publicized Woodward trial, a judge reduced the jury’s murder verdict to involuntary manslaughter in a slap at prosecutors. In the Big Dig settlements, the only company she criminally charged was one of the smallest. Coakley is the apparent front-runner in the Democratic primary campaign for Senate, and caution has been her hallmark. That has created a disconnect between the guarded persona she presents on the stump and the one that family, friends, and colleagues say they have observed for years. In interviews, admirers of Coakley invariably mention her knowledge of Broadway musicals, her skills as a downhill skier, and her penchant for reciting witty poems she pens for departing employees at going-away parties, a custom she picked up from her late father, an insurance salesman in North Adams. But Coakley seems to take pains on the campaign to hide that side of herself, preferring to studiously make a case about why she is the most qualified candidate. In the only televised debate with her three Democratic rivals to date, she seemed almost intentionally bland. In public remarks, she often appears to be fastidiously scripted. In what are supposed to be spontaneous situations, she looks stiff. She didn’t even want to show a Boston Herald reporter what kind of candy she was giving out on Halloween night. It wasn’t until last week that she made one of her first gambles, when she said she opposes the landmark health care bill passed by the House because it would restrict federal funding for abortion. Coakley, who at 56 wants to become the first woman elected senator in Massachusetts, is unapologetic for her ambition and her style. “If you want to call me ambitious for this seat, I guess that’s accurate, isn’t it?’’ she said in a recent interview at her campaign headquarters in Charlestown. “Anybody in this race is ambitious for the seat. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten into it.’’ As for her generally controlled mien, she said, “Sometimes people think this race for Senate is like, well, we’re running to replace Jay Leno. This is a very serious job.’’ And Martha Coakley seems determined to prove that she’s the most serious one in the field. Big Dig litigationCoakley was but a candidate for attorney general on July 10, 2006, when a massive piece of concrete ceiling crashed down on a car in a downtown tunnel, crushing to death Milena Del Valle, a 38-year-old Jamaica Plain mother, and infuriating a state that had already had enough of the Big Dig. In many ways, the catastrophe, and Coakley’s reaction to it, has defined her three-year stint in statewide office. With its mammoth cost overruns and tunnel leaks, the $15 billion highway construction project was a millstone for Coakley’s predecessor as attorney general, Thomas F. Reilly. As a gubernatorial candidate in 2006, he was dogged by accusations that he failed to win a high-profile criminal or civil case against Big Dig contractors or achieve lucrative enough financial settlements. When the roof tumbled down, Reilly convened a grand jury to investigate what he called a crime, but he left office before charges could be brought. Stepping in, Coakley immediately had something Reilly never did in dealing with the contractors, big and small: leverage. She did several things admirers say were shrewd. Even before she took office in January 2007, she publicly said it would be difficult to charge any individual with manslaughter because the legal standard of proof was so high. That dampened expectations raised by Reilly that those responsible for the disaster might end up in jail. After taking office, Coakley and US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan deputized each other’s assistants, allowing the two offices to share evidence and press harder for financial settlements from the companies. In the end, their collaboration led to about $610 million for the government, including about $407 million from the consortium Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff. Sullivan, a Republican who was at odds with Reilly, called Coakley a “tremendous team player.’’ “Let’s face it, people in this business have pretty good-sized egos,’’ he said. “Martha and I were on the same page.’’ Coakley also appointed Paul F. Ware Jr., chairman of one of the nation’s largest private litigation teams, as a special prosecutor. He obtained an indictment of Powers Fasteners Inc., a family-run epoxy vendor in New York, for manslaughter. Powers allegedly failed to adequately warn construction contractors of the potentially deadly consequences of using a fast-drying glue to secure ceiling bolts. But it was here Coakley drew accusations of political expedience for obtaining an indictment of the smallest company in the lot and for letting bigger ones resolve the matter civilly, through sizable settlements. “The only reason that our company has been indicted is that, unlike others implicated in this tragedy, we don’t have enough money to buy our way out,’’ Powers president Jeffrey Powers said immediately after charges were filed. Powers ultimately agreed to pay $16 million in exchange for Coakley dropping the charge. If the company had been convicted, the maximum criminal penalty would have been a $1,000 fine, although it could have also risked being barred from getting government contracts. Coakley has pursued other matters that have made smaller headlines. In the first settlement of its kind in the country, she reached a $60 million agreement this year with Goldman Sachs Group to reduce the size of subprime loans for some 700 Massachusetts homeowners. She also got Fremont Investment & Loan Co., one of the state’s largest subprime mortgage lenders, to pay $10 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged that Fremont offered predatory loans in poor neighborhoods. Coakley also filed the first federal suit by any state challenging the constitutionality of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the union of a man and woman. Coakley’s two immediate predecessors as attorney general both ran for governor and lost, creating the aura that the job is a political graveyard. But for Coakley, timing might be everything. “The key to running for higher office is to run before the end of your first term’’ as attorney general, said former attorney general Scott Harshbarger, a Coakley fan. “Because if you do your job and call them based on the facts and the law, you’re not always going to please everybody.’’ Aiming high Martha Coakley was 45 when she first won elected office, as district attorney, but she seemed to be preparing for it since childhood. The third of five children, she was reared in North Adams by parents who encouraged their children to aim high, according to Mary Coakley-Welch, a neuropsychologist. Young Martha needed little pushing. She was elected governor of Massachusetts Girls State, a civics program. She excelled on the debate team, spending part of a summer at a debating institute at Georgetown University. Donald J. Pecor, who taught Coakley’s honors US history class at Drury High School, calls her one of his best students ever. (He also taught former acting governor Jane Swift.) “She was one of those students who talked in paragraphs,’’ said Pecor. “Oftentimes, students can give very short answers, but she was one who could explicate what she was talking about.’’ Coakley attended Williams College and then Boston University Law School, where she was class speaker at graduation. She joined the Middlesex district attorney’s office in 1986, working first for Harshbarger and then Reilly. Coakley eventually oversaw child abuse prosecutions. At the same time, she was dealing with considerable personal stress, including the deaths of her parents and suicide of her brother, Edward. A talented pianist, he suffered from bipolar disorder but refused to take medication, and hanged himself shortly after being discharged from a hospital. “It had a huge impact on me personally and professionally, as well as my entire family,’’ Coakley said. After she lost the 1997 legislative race in Dorchester, she took on the criminal case that made her famous. Louise Woodward was a 19-year-old au pair accused of shaking 8-month-old Matthew Eappen of Newton to death. Coakley and lead prosecutor Gerard T. Leone Jr. persuaded the jury to convict Woodward of second-degree murder, which carried a life sentence. But the judge reduced the charge to manslaughter and freed her, prompting critics to accuse prosecutors of overreaching. Coakley’s lucid presentation of complex medical testimony made her one of the nation’s most recognized criminal lawyers. But the infant’s father, Dr. Sunil Eappen, said he saw another side of her when she prepared him behind closed doors for his testimony. As Eappen, an anesthesiologist, recounted the agonizing decision to withdraw life support for his mortally injured son, he broke down. When he looked up at Coakley, he was startled. “She was crying,’’ Eappen recalled. “In court, she is so professional, you just don’t appreciate how much she feels and cares about the issues she’s taking care of.’’ Bolstered by high name recognition from the trial, Coakley ran for district attorney in 1998. During the campaign, she said, she befriended Thomas F. O’Connor Jr., a laconic deputy superintendent for the Cambridge police who had visited her headquarters to contribute $100. Two years later, they married. “She’s easy on the eyes and easy on the ears,’’ O’Connor, 61, said, echoing an assessment by radio talk-show host Margery Eagan. Coakley and O’Connor, now a security consultant, live in Medford and have two Labrador retrievers. They have no children, but Coakley says she has no regrets about having focused on her career. “Frankly, until I met my husband, marriage wasn’t a huge priority for me,’’ said Coakley. As district attorney for eight years, Coakley oversaw high-profile prosecutions of Thomas Junta, the Reading father who fatally beat another father at their sons’ hockey practice, and Paul R. Shanley, a defrocked priest accused of sexual abuse. Shanley has challenged his conviction to the state’s highest court, arguing that an alleged abuse victim’s “repressed memory’’ was junk science. She drew charges of overzealousness when she fought to keep former Malden day-care worker Gerard Amirault behind bars for sexually assaulting children. Coakley was not involved in the prosecution of Amirault, his sister, and mother in the 1980s. But she strenuously opposed the Parole Board’s 2001 recommendation that his sentence be commuted despite doubts about investigators’ tactics. “Martha Coakley was a very, very good soldier who showed she would do anything to preserve this horrendous assault on justice,’’ said Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Wall Street Journal columnist who championed the Amiraults’ innocence. Coakley conceded that some prosecutions of the era were mishandled because of suggestive questioning of children but said the evidence against the Amiraults was formidable. “I am as convinced [as I am of] anything that those children were abused at that day-care center by the three defendants, and if I weren’t, I would be the first to acknowledge that,’’ she said. A day in others’ shoes Inside a drab federally subsidized 16-story apartment building in Roxbury, Martha Coakley is playing an unfamiliar role. Here, she’s not the sure-footed prosecutor boring into a witness. She’s not running an office of dozens of lawyers; she’s dutifully lending a hand to a resident in a wheelchair as reporters watch her every move. And she is not in her element. Coakley is taking part in the “Walk a Day in My Shoes’’ program sponsored by the Service Employees International Union, which has endorsed her. As such, she’s helping a personal-care attendant tend to a resident with multiple sclerosis. Coakley waters plants. The cameras roll. She helps the resident, Maureen Cancemi, pay bills. The cameras record the stroke of the pen. All the while, she studiously recites her positions on issues, as if it’s a debate. She tells Cancemi and a visiting neighbor - Dennis Heaphy, a quadriplegic - that she supports stem cell research that holds promise for people with disabilities. “We’re called the Commonwealth; no one knows when he or she is going to need help,’’ she says. This was the sole opportunity Coakley gave a Globe photographer and videographer to film her for an extended period. Her campaign is unusually guarded in granting access to the candidate. She has dragged her feet in terms of agreeing to more televised debates. When her husband finally consented to an interview, it was at campaign headquarters with his wife sitting across the table from him, and he was visibly nervous. Although campaigning may not come naturally to Coakley, she and her supporters believe the job of US senator will. “Many people know me as a district attorney or as an attorney general, where most often they may see me announcing an indictment, or announcing a conviction, or announcing a settlement,’’ she says. “What I’m trying to convey in this campaign is that all of that is part of my background. But I’m much more than that.’’
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