Attorney for hire

Nanny-hunter Tom Reilly and camera-chaser Lois Pines slug it out in the race for AG

Talking Politics by Michael Crowley

You might remember Middlesex County district attorney Tom Reilly from such TV hits as The Nanny and Crazy Eddie. Reilly, you'll recall, was the white-haired, tight-lipped prosecutor who ran the murder trials of child-care provider Louise Woodward and hulking teen simpleton Eddie O'Brien.

Well, now Reilly's back, in his most challenging role to date: candidate for attorney general. He's one of two Democrats headed into a primary battle, and a casual observer might guess that Reilly, whom a sensationalistic media helped turn into one of the state's most recognizable officials, is the man to beat.

But despite the hype and the high profile, Tom Reilly is not the front-runner in what is potentially the year's most interesting statewide race. Reilly is up against one of the state legislature's most seasoned, driven, and well-funded members, Newton senator Lois Pines.

Fans of contrast-heavy campaigns will take heart from a matchup that pits Reilly's prosecutorial, tough-guy, establishment-man yin against Pines's liberal-maverick, consumer-justice yang. There's also a good death-penalty subplot: Reilly supports it; Pines doesn't. The political weekly Beacon Hill called this race a fight between Batman and Ralph Nader. You could also think of it as Clint Eastwood versus Jane Fonda.

Either way, in the battle for the office of top cop -- state watchdog over crooked individuals and corporations alike -- the Pines-Reilly race may go to DefCon 1 faster than any other this year. Each candidate is intensely driven and famously humorless, and the sniping could get fierce.

Right now, everyone agrees that it's Pines's race to lose. She's run statewide before, and has also won important early endorsements. More significant, Reilly has taken a beating in the campaign's early fundraising since the two kicked off their candidacies last October. Pines, who had previously been planning to run for lieutenant governor, started out with $415,000 to Reilly's paltry $38,000, and the gap has only widened. March campaign-finance reports showed Pines with $760,145 on hand; Reilly had $318,120.

But don't count Reilly out. He still has the benefit of his profile, which could soar even higher if some big pending murder cases --including the Jeffrey Curley case, in which two men stand accused of killing and sexually abusing a Cambridge boy -- come to trial before the September 15 primary.

Reilly has another potent, if politically incorrect, ace up his sleeve: he's a man. Yes, even in this Year of the Woman in state politics, political insiders wonder (Janet Reno notwithstanding) whether voters are willing to hand the job of top cop to . . . a girl!

For the record, as of last month there is a Republican in this race as well -- former Weld-Cellucci "drug czar" Brad Bailey. Few put much stock in him at the moment -- one Democrat calls Bailey "arrogant, corrupt, and bizarre" -- but that's a story for another day. Massachusetts hasn't had a Republican AG since 1969, when Elliot Richardson trotted off into the abyss of the Nixon administration.

So for the moment, the brawl is between Pines and Reilly. Expect the typical bickering over records and gaffes and flip-flops. But these two will also be arguing over a more unusual question: Just what does an attorney general do?

Reilly, 56, wants to be a supercop, an ass-kicking lawyer who can stomp out violent crime, manage the office's staff of 200-plus, and destroy courtroom opponents. Conveniently, those are things that Reilly, a long-time prosecutor and former assistant DA, has been doing for much of his career. Reilly's your man if you believe his argument that in electing an attorney general, "you're hiring a professional law office. You're hiring a lawyer to represent you."

Pines, 57, says that talent for locking up psychos is fine for a district attorney, but an attorney general really ought to concentrate on fighting white-collar crime -- defending consumers, the environment, the elderly, and civil rights. The enemy isn't so much ax murderers, drug lords, or even dimwitted nannys, but greedy corporate behemoths: HMOs, utilities, tobacco companies, insurance giants.

Battles such as these are what Pines is all about. As a state legislator since 1973, Pines has sponsored umpteen progressive and pro-consumer measures -- including the "Bottle Bill" recycling law, antidiscrimination protections for gays and lesbians, and a bill protecting the confidentiality of insurance records. She makes a good case that she has, in her words "written so many of the laws the DA enforces." (Indeed, an interview with the hyperlegislative Pines opens with an explanation that she's running late because the Senate had been voting on not one, but two of her bills.)

What all this amounts to, in the words of Reilly campaign manager Mary Breslauer, is "a race between a career prosecutor and a career politician."

That, as Reilly knows, is precisely the model Scott Harshbarger used in his two winning campaigns for the job in 1990 and 1994. (Harshbarger, who used to have Reilly's job before he became AG, is giving up his seat to run for governor this year.) Both times, Harshbarger ran as the prosecutor -- the tough, honest straight shooter -- besting "politician" opponents James Shannon in 1990 and Janis Berry in 1994. In both cases, he characterized his opponents as self-interested chameleons who couldn't be trusted to maintain law and order.

Reilly wants to duplicate the success of that message. And he's already developing some good lines to use along the way. "We're going to make cases, not regulations," he says. "I'm not going to create a bureaucracy."

But Reilly will have to contend with the fact that Harshbarger's best-known accomplishments as AG tend to support Pines's vision of the job rather than his own. Harshbarger negotiated a $300 billion lawsuit settlement with giant tobacco companies. He forged a complex deal with the state's electric utilities that paved the way for the industry's deregulation. He was also a leader in passing a brownfields cleanup bill. And although he hasn't prosecuted a single case of violent crime, people seem to think he's done a pretty good job.

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The good news here is that both of these candidates are highly qualified for the job as they see it. The bad news is that each of them comes with some serious drawbacks.

Pines, for example, is known around the State House as a manic publicity hound who elbows her way into camera shots like Antoine Walker crashing the boards. (Democrats rolled their eyes at the way Pines came early to last month's annual Saint Patrick's Day breakfast in Southie so she could stake out a stage position that would put her on-camera all morning.) Nor does she win any popularity contests. One well-wired Democrat describes her personality as "like nails on a chalkboard."

Part of her problem is that Pines is seen as overly ambitious. She'd already made two losing runs for statewide office by 1983. And her critics note that, though she says she's "spent the past 25 years preparing" for the job of AG, Pines was running for lieutenant governor until Joe Kennedy's exit from the governor's race denied her his political coattails.

A personality gap between Pines and her colleagues may seem like a trifling thing, but her maverick style can be a serious liability in the legislative fray.

Take Pines's role in the state's 1994 welfare-reform debate. With then-governor Bill Weld demanding a draconian overhaul of welfare in Massachusetts, the legislature passed a reform bill that he quickly vetoed as too soft. It looked as though the veto would be overturned, however, creating a stalemate that could have forced Weld to accept the legislature's more humane version.

But in a surprise move that the Boston Globe called "astonishing," Pines and state senator Dianne Wilkerson (D-Roxbury) sided with Republicans and conservative Democrats to uphold Weld's veto.

Pines's and Wilkerson's colleagues, whom they hadn't consulted, were in a rage. "They lied," said Human Services Committee chair Therese Murray (D-Plymouth). "Nothing short of treacherous," said then-Ways and Means chair Tom Birmingham. "I don't know what planet they're on," he said. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Roosevelt hoped that "some interplanetary visitor" would "give some sanity to the two senators."

Pines and Wilkerson responded that they were negotiating with Weld for a welfare bill that would be the least punitive version yet. But having gotten his end of the deal, Weld sold the senators out: he simply resubmitted a virtually unchanged plan, which passed into law in 1995. Today, Democrats agree that the senators' stunt probably led to a harsher final bill than would otherwise have passed. "We were hoodwinked by the governor," Pines later conceded.

The episode seemingly calls into question Pines's ability to execute complicated, high-stakes negotiations with a shrewd adversary. What might happen when Attorney General Pines is dealing with ruthless corporate lawyers -- people who are just as cunning as Bill Weld, and no more trustworthy?

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The ill will Pines has earned because of escapades such as these has not been lost on Tom Reilly. "No one can act alone, polarizing people or stigmatizing people," he says. "I want to get people working together. It's not always black and white."

This I-can-deal-with-people message will help Reilly in the primary. But let's face it: people think Reilly's a mean guy.

He's probably not the bloodless automaton he appeared to be when he called for Louise Woodward to spend her life in jail. And he's done good work -- for instance, running unsexy but effective community-justice and youth-intervention programs.

But sometimes Reilly seems like a caricature of a politically ambitious district attorney -- the villain in some bad movie about an idealistic young cop fighting the corrupt System.

Exhibit A: Reilly's back-and-forth record on the death penalty. He supports capital punishment, though he takes care to say he won't make it a big issue in the campaign. But Reilly wasn't so shy back when capital punishment looked like a useful political tool following the Curley murder last October. Of course, that was before polls showed that as a political issue, the death penalty was a nonstarter. (Notice how Paul Cellucci doesn't talk about it anymore, either.)

That's just a shift in emphasis. But in fact, Reilly has already changed his basic death-penalty philosophy at least once.

In his first run for DA, in 1990, Reilly was an ardent death-penalty opponent: "I, too, have never supported a death penalty in this particular state," he said in a Cambridge debate. And two years before that, Reilly seemed to be on the other side, saying of the defendant in one 1988 murder trial: "The sooner he dies, the better."

Admitting that his position has shifted, Reilly says that new legal safeguards, and measures to prevent racist applications of capital punishment, have allayed his earlier misgivings about the death penalty.

He also notes that an attorney general doesn't handle first-degree murder cases. But that doesn't make his stance irrelevant. The AG's office serves as a bully pulpit on law-enforcement issues. And with a legislature just one vote away from reinstating capital punishment, that's no small thing.

Worse, however, than any of this flip-flopping or opportunism is Reilly's crude rationale for his position: to him, execution is about "pure punishment."

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Pure punishment, actually, rather aptly describes what Tom Reilly has been enduring in this race so far.

Pines continues to extend her huge fundraising lead, which could be critical in a race that's expected to hinge on advertising. And she's stunned Reilly in recent weeks by unexpectedly winning endorsements from three of the state's largest police organizations: the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, the Massachusetts Coalition of Police, and the Massachusetts Police Association.

The endorsements are a sore spot for Reilly, who claims Pines sold out to the cops when she voted last fall for a bill that stripped Boston police commissioner Paul Evans of some powers to deal with the city's police union. Evans and Mayor Menino made a persuasive case that the bill would undermine the department's vastly successful community-policing programs. It was a curious vote indeed for the good government-promoting Pines. She notes that the law passed the Senate overwhelmingly -- but if all her colleagues jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge . . .

So has Pines alienated the mayor, who controls a considerable Democratic political machine? As one City Hall source put it: "The mayor was particularly disappointed that several of the legislators who are running statewide jumped out in front on the union bill without having the courtesy of speaking with him or his administration first about it. He saw this as the anti-good government bill, and saw certain politicians who have a very good record in the past of consumer protection going the wrong way on this issue, and naturally he's disappointed." It's also worth noting that one of Reilly's top aides is John Towle -- a former Menino speechwriter and Hyde Park chum of the mayor's. At the moment, however, Menino is showing little sign of taking an active role in this race.

But several other things may yet go awry for Lois Pines. For starters, even in a year when both GOP gubernatorial candidates are pandering to women by choosing female running mates, it's not clear whether Massachusetts voters are ready to choose a woman for a job with such an authoritarian image as the AG's office.

And although Pines should have the money to carpet-bomb Reilly with TV advertising, he may yet be in for a bonanza of something Pines rarely gets: free advertising.

That's because Reilly's sitting on a couple of high-profile cases that will propel him back into the news as soon as they come to trial. So don't be surprised to see Curley's alleged murderers, or accused wife-killer Edward Donohue, get locked away just as primary day approaches.

And the macabre political truth is that the best thing to happen to Reilly could be yet another stunning crime, à la Louise Woodward, that draws round-the-clock coverage on New England Cable News.

Speaking of Woodward, there's still some unfinished business on that front, too. Last month, Reilly's office argued before the state's Supreme Judicial Court that Woodward should be sent back to jail, possibly for life. The SJC is expected to rule this spring.

But can Reilly really want what he's asking for? Even people who share in the conventional wisdom that Louise should have gotten a couple more years in jail would probably just as soon see her shipped back across the Atlantic and be done with her. In a case as emotional as this one, Reilly might face a real backlash if he's shown grandstanding on TV minutes after footage of Woodward suffering another hysterical breakdown.

They're calling this a race between a prosecutor and politician. But in the end it could be a nanny that people are interested in most.

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.