Part Six of the "Fall Guys" Mike Smith gets to wear a wire

In March of l991 a young FBI agent named T. J. Roberts came out from Boston and started probing into the bank failure. The bank was on its last legs and he threw himself in subpoenaing everything relevant from the bank. During the 1991 and 1992 period, there was a lot of apprehension that some of Northampton’s leading lights would go to jail from being involved in this mess. The FBI came to Northampton in force, spending many hours following the paper trails out from the County Registry of Deeds into the offices of the leading players in the Northampton area. Lawyers, doctors, politicians, developers, leading members of the friends of Mike Smith club. The FBI and FDIC investigators were armed with information from the 1989 FDIC audit and an internal investigation done by the bank in 1988, the so-called Hoar report, that found hundreds of violations of State and federal laws and banking regulations. In l989, the FDIC threatened to fine Covell for his violation of insider trading practices. A lot of people were scared, and it was thought that up to twenty people might be indicted. Read about Mike Smith's dinner date at the Putney Inn and the missing FBI tape recorder.

Goodbye

The sun is blazing outside, high tide is about one pm, and I am sitting here in our winter quarters near San Diego wondering what to do about kirbyontheloose. My higher power tells me that I have had a good run over the last three years, reporting on Northampton issues that no one else wants to cover, spotlighting failures in city government, and whatnot. I am not getting any younger, and stories like the last one, about Opal Development, take their toll. And my other writing seems to sit around and go nowhere because I am out chasing some local story. I guess it is time to retire. Just before we left town, I happened to go into the Gazette office on an unrelated matter. I looked around at the great expanse of desks, mostly empty. The daily deadline had come and gone, and another paper was out on the stands.
I didn't like where the Opal story had lead me, and I wondered, why me? Why are all these people who are paid to report the news not doing it, and why is this old guy taking it upon himself to step into this particular meat-grinder? It's not doing my blood pressure any good. And yes, I am getting a mite bad-tempered in my old age. So, I am calling it a day. And yes, I have done this work up til now because I enjoy it and I think it is useful. Kirbyontheloose will stay up on the web, and will get reorganized a bit, so that older stories are easier to access, and I may post new chapters of my book about the fall of Heritage Bank.
Local journalism has changed profoundly over the last century, and it is only once in a blue moon that we get stories in the Gazette that go beyond what is in the press releases. I guess I am old fashioned. I believe that community newspapers should be a watchdog, they should bark once in a while, and their reporters should not be rewriting press releases and anointing development groups like Opal Development with their good housekeeping seal of approval. How far we have fallen can be seen by the Picknelly family choosing who they did to head up a major real estate venture in Northampton. They must have assumed that no one at the Republican or the Gazette would ask questions and look into his background. I hope Clarke School will change its mind, rebid its acreage, and pick a group with a proven track record.

No to occupation

Over the last months I have been pushed gently by a number of my friends to become involved in the Occupy Northampton movement, but my response was tepid. I was out there in front of Thornes Market the first day, dutifully shouted out various slogans when prompted, and attended an organizational meeting of Occupy sympathizers at a private home. Most of us there were old and creaky and comfortably housed, and there was no one there from the movement itself. The first plan that was floated at that meeting was moving the protest from the park and the street to the senior center, which various people deemed "half-empty, overbuilt and underused." While I am all in favor of an option that would get the protesters off the cold streets, and also generally in favor of anything that would upset the existing order, when it came time for me to talk, I landed on the idea. Occupy Northampton marching down to the elderly center and throwing down sleeping bags would be a public relations disaster. Better to occupy Memorial Hall, which is downtown and half-empty. As time goes by the movement nationwide has dwindled. Carefully calculated non-violent repression has scattered the young people, and we have gone back to business as usual as our noble cruise ship SS. United States drifts onto the rocks.

For awhile the Occupy movement barked at us, we beeped our horns in support, but it had no bite, no long term strategy for change, and not much leadership here in Northampton except this one guy who is a poet and a monk. I have heard his poetry and it is bad; I have met the young woman who follows him about faithfully and does his laundry, and found this much submission detestable. When he asked me for help with his fight with Jon Hite who he says disrespects and discriminates against him, he told me that the only time he could talk to me was six in the morning. An acolyte I am not, and I sent him a note that I never left the house before 9:00. I am retired.

I rarely agree with the head of the Housing Authority, but when I heard that Jon Hite had lost his temper with him one day and intimated that he should go to work and free up a unit at MacDonald House I said "Here, here" like the Brits in the lower chamber do. It is a sin for a person with his talents and energy taking up an apartment in MacDonald House that a truly needy couple needs. The Occupy movement contrasts vividly with the vigorous talk and the action of a small group of Green Party people who I met at this party several months ago. They were doing conventionally reformist things, they had been out of the streets of Holyoke and Northampton talking to people, running for office and looking for delegates. A third party with a vigorous platform addressing the needs of the 99% is what we need to buck the existing order.

A managing director with a past: a 1999 arrest, a foreclosure and involvement in a Bermuda land scheme raises questions about Opal Development.

Due diligence, according to Wikipedia, is a term used for a number of concepts involving either an investigation of a business or person prior to signing a contract, or to depict an act done with a certain standard of care. It can be legally mandated, but more commonly applies to voluntary investigations where someone buying or selling a property evaluates the credentials and history of the other party. A relatively new development company owned by Peter Picknelly has made an offer to purchase the remaining acreage and buildings of the Clarke School. About two weeks ago I went to the meeting up on Round Hill that Robert Jonas hosted for the principals of Opal Development. An opportunity to meet the neighborhood. The Gazette came and took pictures, I sat there and took notes and observed the vibes. Some of us went with some apprehension, since the tone of the email that neighbor Lewis Popper had received from Opal’s managing director was pretty frosty.
” Read the full article by clicking here.

Why King Street languishes, why the Fire Station is where it is, when Roy Martin got almost 30% of the vote for mayor, and other mysteries solved

At a forum before last month’s election, a woman asked the candidates for councilor at large, "Why all the empty lots on King Street?"
None of the candidates seemed to have a take on what was wrong. Just some of the usual bromides. It’s clear, however, that the people that are building and expanding businesses are locating elsewhere. Look to our north, where new businesses are springing up all along along Routes 5 and 10 in Hatfield, just north of the town line.. Look at where the Valley Medical program money is going: Easthampton and Greenfield. Look at all the earth-moving equipment working in Easthampton. Easthampton Savings Bank is building a three-story building barely 100 yards from our town line. Look at all the construction along Rte. 9 in Hadley. Modern office space, modern industrial buildings. There are no new commercial or industrial buildings going up on Hospital Hill. Why?
And then look at King Street, bracketed on the south by that huge empty parking lot that once held Lia Honda, and then the empty Kollmorgen buildings that Pat Goggins called "useless" this year. And behind the railroad, you will find increasing numbers of vacancies at the Industrial Park. It had zero vacancies in 1999, now there are four or five buildings vacant. The other day I saw signs outside Tiger Press telling us they are moving to East Longmeadow. Read the full story here.

WHMP promises " a more robust response" from the station in future emergencies.

"You want a story that no one else is going to do?" said the executive secretary for a local mayor. "WHMP, that's your story. Here, we've always been taught to keep extra batteries in our radio. Why bother, if there's nothing on except garden shows? If someone had given me the key to the station I would have gone there and opened up the phone lines and listened to people and tell them what I knew."

It was Thursday morning and many people in her town were still without power. A woman had just left her office after complaining about everything she had been through since Saturday's storm. And there was nothing that city hall could do except lend a sympathetic ear and tell people to call the electric company and to keep calling them. A whole group of people had evidently come to her office earlier, really angry.

"At least," she sighed, "This woman was polite."

The first twenty-four hours after the lights went out was hard on almost everyone. In our house, we were totally out of the communications loop with no TV, no cable, no land phone, no cell phone, no internet, no nothing. My wife had a small battery-powered radio and tuned in WHMP and all there was a garden show about wisteria and dahlias and news that Christmas day wasn't too late to plant your bulbs. People have told me that other area stations were also "on automatic" with canned coverage. She finally found some real storm news on WTIC in Hartford, and bulletins on such subjects as to keep food in refrigerators and freezers from spoiling and the extreme hazards of using charcoal or propane heaters to stay warm.

We talked to the new general manager at WHMP and "The River," David Musante. He's the son of the former mayor, and has only been on the job for a couple of weeks. He said I wasn't the first call he had gotten complaining about the station's' storm coverage. He said that much of the staff at the station were newly hired, and the storm caught the station off guard. They had just hired new local people like Bob Flaherty and Denise Vozella just so they could beef up their local programming. He said that when the power came back on, they went on with their regular programming, but cut fresh news breaks and updated them hourly and on Sunday afternoon they played a message from acting mayor Narkewicz.

"Rest assured," he said, "in the event of another public emergency our response and coverage will be more robust and in line with the gravity of the situation." In the near future he plans to meet with elected officials and fire and police officials to hash out an emergency protocol that would give local governments the ability to get emergency information on the air right away.

TOP SECRET

Part Two

The Head Correspondent for KOTL caught Northampton Fire Chief Brian Duggan in his office Monday morning, October 24. The chief sat on the opposite side of the reception room at the main fire station; I sat in the chair next to his secretary. This was my opportunity to ask him some questions about his work as an outside consultant for Municipal Resources Inc. (MRI) of Meredith, New Hampshire. Considering everything that had transpired in the blogosphere, the chief was relaxed and amiable. He did, however, shoot me a few barbs and there was some counter-fire from the other side of the room. He broadly hinted that his work for MRI was over, saying, “This was past tense.” He said that he did the work on his personal time, and further stated that he would not reveal his earnings from MRI for the last few years nor make public any information on his billable hours to MRI unless he was ordered to do so by the mayor.

Chief Duggan had just returned from a two-week federal training program run by the Naval Postgraduate Center for Homeland Defense and Security in West Virginia. He told me that being in the program was important for Northampton and for his country, and this would take him out of the city and perhaps, out of the country. Evidently with Mayor Higgins’s approval, he applied for, and was accepted to, a master’s degree program at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. The program is described here: Its objectives include "strategies, plans and programs to prevent terrorist attacks"

I got the sense from talking to Acting Mayor Narkewicz last week that he knew very little about the postgraduate program which had sent Chief Duggan out of the city, and he was essentially playing "catch-up," just like me, talking to the assistant chief, Duane Nichols, and waiting for Duggan to return. The website states that the graduate program "involves a significant commitment on the part of the participants and the agencies to which they are assigned." The 18-month program requires participants to spend two weeks every quarter in its "Eastern Management Development Center" in Shepherdstown, West Virginia and other sites, and calls for 15 hours a week in web-based course work. An academic quarter is three months, and that means the chief will be out of the area a total of 12 weeks over the next year and a half. To me, that time commitment represents a significant burden on his subordinates, as well as on the city of Northampton, which will continue to pay the second highest salary in the city to a part-time fire chief.

As for me, I kind of doubt that we are going to have any terrorist activity in Northampton in the near future that will require a chief who is so highly trained in homeland security strategy. We're just a little Podunk town, and what we really need is a chief who isn't traveling all over the place and working up a resume so he can eventually jump to a much better paying job in Boston or Baghdad. With my final two questions, I verified what I already knew to be true: The department had not initiated any fire drills at Meadowbrook following the big fire in 2009. Yes, they had done some kind of post-fire meeting, the chief said, but it hadn't worked out. When I mentioned the highly carbonized truss-work under the roofs of Meadowbrook, I got a blank look. Ditto for their plans to hold other meetings in neighborhoods outside the water protection district. He had sent everyone outside that district a letter by registered mail, and warned them to get a sprinkler system. It seemed to him that this letter was enough. My concerns seemed trivial.

Reigning in the Northampton Fire Department

Part One

Full-time pay for a part-time chief?

Our public safety administrators are the two top paid people in the city. Former Mayor Mary Clare Higgins commented in Northampton Media, “Police and fire are the only departments in the city that have to cover 24 hours a day seven days a week... “Everybody’s working hard [and] working extremely long hours.”

Not Chief Brian Duggan. Police Chief Sienkowicz may be at his desk at 8:30 AM, but not Duggan. Our second-highest paid official is a double-dipper: drawing a full time salary of $139,095 while drawing a salary as a project manager and consultant for Municipal Resources Inc. of Meredith, New Hampshire.

At most other city offices I know of, the administrators are always there at 8:30 am, facing whatever needs to be done, answering the phone calls and dealing with the latest. They are civic servants. The Chief of Police will be there. I know every weekday about 8:20 am George Zimmerman, our treasurer, will be coming across the Round House parking lot and heading for his office with a big briefcase of papers he probably spent reading the night before. I know that at 8:30 am our building inspector will be sitting at his secretary’s desk making a note to someone and giving me the evil eye as I stand there at the counter with a question.

But the Fire Chief is never at his desk at 8:30 am. Read the story here