The Boston Phoenix
February 19 - 26, 1998

[Don't Quote Me]

Fire, ready, aim

The Boston Police Department's attack against the Globe claims a casualty: its own credibility. Plus, notes from the Monica underground.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

It's April 14. Word has just come out of New York that the Boston Globe has won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing corruption in the city's police force. And Police Commissioner Paul Evans calls an impromptu news conference. "I congratulate the Globe," Evans says. "Thanks to its reporting, we've been able to accelerate the process of reform that began when I took this job four years ago."

At least that's the way it might have played out had the police department not blundered its way into a public-relations disaster that leaves Evans looking like part of the problem -- or, worse, out of the loop.

First, on February 6, Detective Sergeant Margot Hill, the department's director of media relations, sent what has been described as an eight-page, single-spaced letter and an inch-thick stack of supporting documents to each of the 19 members of the Pulitzer board. In the letter, Hill argued that the Globe's Spotlight Team unfairly played down the department's own anticorruption crusade.

Next, after members of the Pulitzer board told Globe editor Matt Storin about Hill's letter, the paper asked Hill how she knew about the Pulitzer submission. According to last Saturday's Globe, Hill responded that she had somehow obtained a copy of the paper's Pulitzer entry -- a confidential internal document.

Now, Hill is refusing to discuss the matter, and her boss, Evans, is out of town and unavailable for comment. "I can't talk about this," Hill said in a brief interview on Monday. She declined to provide a copy of her letter. She even refused to confirm on-the-record comments she made to the Globe, in which she said Evans knew she'd obtained the Pulitzer entry and had given her permission to write to the board.

In two years of digging into corruption within the Boston Police Department, the Globe Spotlight Team has reported on allegations that cops stole cash during drug raids, and on the practice known as "testilying," in which some police officers lie to obtain convictions. As a result of the Globe's reporting, two officers have been indicted, a new trial has been ordered for a man who'd been convicted of attempted murder, and more than $3000 was returned to a retired postal worker six years after it was seized in a raid.

But despite the drip-drip-drip, Evans's stature has only grown. Indeed, the Globe itself has weighed in with several favorable profiles of the commissioner, focusing on the dramatic drop in Boston's crime rate and on Evans's good reputation among his peers nationally. Now, as a result of Hill's actions, Evans's image could take a beating.

"Paul Evans has a reputation, and I think for the most part well-deserved, of being an ethical leader," says Northeastern University criminologist Jack Levin. "This information is antithetical to that image. It's really kind of shocking."

Certainly Hill had a right to complain to the Pulitzer board. Indeed, Seymour Topping, administrator of the Pulitzers, confirms that "that sort of thing has happened in the past." What puts Hill's actions in a special category is her use of documents that had apparently been stolen from the Globe, and which she told the Globe came to her anonymously and unsolicited.

Yet it's possible that Hill never laid eyes on a copy of the actual Pulitzer entry. Recently, the Globe ordered up a reprint of the series to be mailed to editors around the country for promotional purposes; the printing job was reportedly botched, and the mailing was never sent out. Ben Bradlee, the Globe's deputy managing editor for projects, who supervises the Spotlight Team, says Hill's written complaint quotes from a letter that Storin wrote to accompany the reprint, which differed in some minor respects from the letter he wrote for the Pulitzer entry. That suggests that the document she saw was the reprint package, which is more widely available and considerably less confidential than the Pulitzer submission. But Bradlee says that when Globe reporter Dan Golden interviewed Hill, "she insisted that she had actually seen the Pulitzer Prize entry." (In the Globe article, Hill said she saw both the prize entry and the reprint.)

With neither Hill nor the Globe willing to release a copy of Hill's letter, it's impossible to judge the validity of her complaints. Bradlee describes her brief against the Globe as "one of shading and tenor," and claims she alleges no errors of fact. Other sources say her complaint dwells more on Storin's letter than it does on the Globe's actual reporting.

Bradlee and Storin concede that Hill is correct about one criticism she apparently made: that the Globe failed to include in its Pulitzer package critical letters to the editor, as required under Pulitzer guidelines. (Bradlee says he was under the impression that that was a new requirement, but a Pulitzer spokeswoman says it was adopted about five years ago.) Still, even a letter from Evans that was published on December 17 does not allege any factual errors, criticizing the paper instead for its failure to acknowledge the department's anticorruption efforts.

More than a few observers have taken note of Evans's failure to come to Hill's defense. Mayor Tom Menino is said to be less than thrilled by her stunt, too. But until now, Hill's career has been impressive. In 1991, she was one of three recipients of a "Detective of the Year" award for her work in arresting a violent rapist. From 1994 until 1996, when she was promoted to her present job, she ran the police department's Crime Stoppers program, an anonymous phone-tip line. Boston Police Patrolmen's Association president Thomas Nee praises Hill for writing to the Pulitzer board. "I tip my hat to Margot for doing that," he says.

Meanwhile, at 135 Morrissey Boulevard, some are wondering whether any attempt will be made to root out the mole who presumably gave the Pulitzer entry to the police. "Frankly, I hope we do find out. I think it's a pretty scurrilous act," says Mitchell Zuckoff, who wrote or cowrote many of the police stories.

But Storin, reached on vacation, sounds as though he's willing to let it pass. "I'm sitting here in Maine," he said when asked whether he's taking steps to find the guilty party. "We're not going to have an inquisition over this."

What gives this whole affair particular resonance is the issue of power -- who has it, who wields it, and to what end.

From Storin's perspective, the power lies with the police, who abused it by making use of private Globe documents to advance their agenda.

Yet to Tommy Nee, it's the media that hold the real power. "There's a great feeling of anxiety and frustration at some of these broad-based stories," he says. "You guys are very, very powerful people, and a lot of people are intimidated by that."

That doesn't excuse Hill's actions. But perhaps it provides some insight into why she felt it was necessary to fight back.


With the front pages and TV newscasts running out of fresh material to keep the Monica Lewinsky story moving forward, supporters of Bill Clinton might suppose that the media feeding frenzy has just about run its course.

Yet beneath the flash and the headlines, the editorial pages -- those dense columns of type -- have been assembling a solid case for why investigators should keep pushing.

To be sure, such card-carrying members of the right-wing conspiracy as the Wall Street Journal and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times have been having a field day with Fornigate. The Journal's editorial page published a full-page chart on Clinton scandals real and imagined, from Lewinsky to cocaine and murder, and the Times speculated on whether Clinton masturbated while Lewinsky talked dirty to him over the phone. But the Clintonistas can readily dismiss such fulminations.

Not so easily dismissed, though, are the New York Times, whose editorial-page editor, Howell Raines, has long questioned Clinton's ethics, and the Washington Post, whose news pages broke the Lewinsky story on January 21.

"It is not the legality of anyone's sexual behavior that is at issue here," the Times thundered on January 22. "The legal questions before Mr. Starr are obstruction of justice, perjury, and suborning of perjury." Since then, the Times has repeatedly demanded that Clinton provide a full accounting of his relationship with Lewinsky, and urged the media to stop their "unwarranted self-flagellation" and get back to investigating the scandal.

The Post's most important contribution came on February 2, with an examination of Starr that criticizes him for his political entanglements but concludes that the real problem is "the Clintons' own behavior."

Closer to home, the conservative Boston Herald, predictably, has pounded away at Clinton day after day. Characteristic is this judgment, rendered on January 27: "The president can explain anything he wants to, whenever he wants to. He just doesn't want to."

More curious has been the liberal Boston Globe, whose Lewinsky editorials have been few and exceedingly delicate, but which have ultimately taken the position that, yes, the president must come clean. The paper put it this way on February 6: "In most cases, questions about politicians' sex lives deserve a `no comment; that's none of your business' -- an answer that should be given more often. But the Lewinsky story, with its allegations of a misuse of power, is a legitimate public concern."


The most ludicrous result of the White House's propaganda blitz against leaks has to be Ann Scales's piece in this past Sunday's Globe, reporting (we are shocked!) that Globe columnist John Ellis was a beneficiary of leaks from Ken Starr's office.

Let's take this one right from the beginning.

On February 9, at a forum at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Ellis repeated a claim he'd made in his column: that three White House aides were cooperating with the independent counsel. When Marvin Kalb, head of the Kennedy School's Joan Shorenstein Center, asked where he got his information, Ellis replied, sheepishly, "I was told by a person in the special prosecutor's office." Snickers all around.

The Globe didn't even report on the forum. But the New York Daily News picked up on it. And that, in turn, led to Scales's piece, in which she rehashed the News' item and wrote, "The White House yesterday seized on Ellis's statement as proof that Starr's office may have broken the law against leaking testimony from grand jury proceedings."

Please. What's astounding isn't that Starr is leaking, but rather that the White House has succeeded in getting the media to focus on it. As civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate pointed out in these pages several weeks ago ("Starr Chamber," News, February 6), that's a cruel irony given Clinton's own lack of regard for defendants' rights.


Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy


Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com


Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here