Graft for Enterprise Software in Massachusetts: Two Sad Histories Intersect

It is a 50/50 proposition that a Speaker of the Massachusetts legislature gets indicted. In the last 50 years, the state has had 10 speakers, and at least half have been indicted (Thompson, Flaherty, Finneran and Dimasi) or heavily investigated (a few of the other 6).

On another plane, in the information technology [IT] world, Massachusetts is well-known as a key spawning ground of the IT era, although that's just history now; Western Electric from way back when, the IT work at the universities during World War II (where supposedly Grace Hopper found the first computer bug), Raytheon and Honeywell starting up a venture in the 50s (where Paul Allen worked in the early 70s before he left to start up his own little PC-related company with his high school friend Bill), the minicomputer revolution during the 60s and 70s, the creation of Lotus 1-2-3 and Visicalc, which are credited with moving those left-coast PCs out of hobby status (at least the inventors worked here before they wrote them so I assume the software started here too), the mini-supercomputers during the 90s, which led to a lot of today's virtualization and shared-memory/shared mulitprocessing-based cloud computing.

So given Massachusetts' IT history and political graft history, it was inevitable that the two would intersect. Whereas previous Massachusetts house speakers have been indicted for hiring "nieces" or lying to grand juries and other usual stuff, the latest indictment invovles wiring contracts for Cognos (before it was part of IBM). The Boston Herald reports:

"The indictment alleges the former House Speaker - then one of the most powerful politicians in the state - used his “power and influence” to win Cognos the contracts. In return, DiMasi pocketed thousands of dollars funnelled through a law associate - including a $25,000 check from Cognos, the indictment states.

"DiMasi faces five years in prison and three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine if found guilty of the conspiracy charge. He also faces 20 years in prison and a $25,000 fine for each of the eight counts of mail and wire fraud, if convicted.

But hell, we were going to have the best enterprise-level analytical software any school department ever had!

Comments

[Kris Tuttle:]

I always knew that field sales forces were very expensive ways to do business but I didn't even factor in the graft expenses!

Maybe they were buried in "allowances for doubtful accounts."

Ha!

Jun 03 08:43 AM

[FAFUFNIK:]

massachusetts----this is the home of the mafia---it used to be the Irish-Jewish mafia blaming it all on the Italians---now "they" finally let the Italians in and they have learned their lessons well----so they are fair game. This state stinks----"they" are all in cahoots, allied against all the unafilliated citizens who can be milked for the benefit of the REAL MAFIA--POLS, BIG BUSINESS, AND PUBLIC UNION LEADERS AND ALL THEIR FRIENDS AND RELATIVES---I REPEAT ---THIS STATE STINKS AND THE REVOLUTION IS COMING BUT THEY THINK THEY CAN "HANDLE IT"----THINK CHUTZPAH, HUBRIS, SUPREME NARCISSISM----.

Jun 04 05:44 PM