LOCAL INVESTIGATIVE SPECIALIZED REPORTING
For a series of articles exposing the widespread municipal corruption in Somerville, Mass.
In an investigation that lasted more than three months, the four-member Globe Spotlight team interviewed 120 persons and examined some 6,000 records to document municipal malfeasance over a IO-year period in Somerville, Massachusetts, one of Boston’s largest abutting cities.
The results of this investigation, a six-part “Spotlight on Somerville” series, published in The Globe in February 1971, disclosed, among other things:
- $4.3 million in no-bid Somerville business was channeled to five favored contractors between 1960 and 1970.
- A three-term “reform” mayor was in partnership with one of his administration’s best-treated contractors.
- Somerville’s highly political tax assessing board operated within a system mired in confusion, favoritism, and conflict of interest.
The immediate reaction to The Globe Spotlight series included official requests for a full-scale investigation, and a dramatic, foot-stomping, standing-room-only hearing called by the incumbent mayor.
In August, a Middlesex County Grand Jury returned 119 conspiracy indictments against:
- Three former mayors of Somerville.
- A Somerville city auditor.
- A former Somerville public works commissioner, a highway superintendent, a deputy commissioner of public works, and a building department commissioner.
- 11 favored contractors.
It was the first of four major inquiries in 1971, all of which led to major legislative action or municipal election upsets.
-From a nominating letter by editor Thomas Winship, January 1972