4

Mahoney called Maggie Dolan, who was still toiling away in his district office, and told her not to let the interns leave. He said he was coming back and wanted a briefing on all the things they’d learned. He also told Maggie to call the Globe and the TV stations and tell them that he’d be making a speech at ten a.m. tomorrow—in time for it to be on the twelve o’clock news—down there on Delaney Street, right outside Elinore’s building, with Elinore by his side.

And that’s what he did.

John Mahoney had always had the ability to give a rousing speech and he usually did it off the cuff because he was too lazy to prepare a speech and practice it. And the next morning he stood next to Elinore and ripped Sean Callahan a new asshole. He said people like Elinore had rights, and developers like Callahan couldn’t be allowed to violate those rights just so they could get richer. He described Callahan’s harassment campaign against Elinore, cutting off her power and water, trying to force her to move. He said he’d be talking to city officials, like the mayor, to find out why he was allowing Callahan to treat people this way. And the speech worked—at least in the sense that Mahoney came across as a man who cared about the plight of all those like Elinore Dobbs.

The following day, a spokesman for Callahan read a statement to the media saying that Mahoney was grossly exaggerating Elinore’s situation, and Mr. Callahan deeply resented the implication that he’d done anything illegal. If any vandalism had occurred in Elinore’s building, it had been perpetrated by the criminal element who currently lived in the neighborhood—the sort of people who would migrate elsewhere when Mr. Callahan’s project was complete.

The spokesman said that, sure, there’d been a few maintenance problems in Elinore’s building. It was an old building, and since most of the tenants had moved out, there was less rent money coming in to pay for maintenance. But there wasn’t any sort of ongoing harassment campaign against an old woman. That was ludicrous. Things just break and it takes time to fix them.

The spokesman also said that Mr. Callahan had done everything humanly possible to relocate Elinore and her fellow tenants. He’d made very generous offers to buy out their leases and relocate them to apartments much nicer than the ones on Delaney Street. In fact, Ms. Dobbs had been offered two hundred thousand dollars to relocate. For Christ’s sake, how much more generous could Mr. Callahan be?

Speaking of generosity, the PR flack said, just look at Mr. Callahan’s record, how he and his wife contributed more than two million dollars last year to organizations like Big Brothers, the Boys and Girls Clubs, the YMCA, and Habitat for Humanity. Yeah, the spokesman concluded, Sean Callahan was a good guy and he resented a powerful congressman, for purely political purposes, saying he was otherwise. And by the way, the spokesman said, Mr. Callahan’s project was providing jobs for a whole lot of working folks and, if anything, Elinore Dobbs was taking a paycheck out of those workers’ pockets.

In short, Callahan’s spokesman sent a message to John Mahoney. The message was: Go fuck yourself.

And Mahoney responded accordingly. He called the police commissioner and told him if he wanted any more of those federal antiterrorism funds, he’d better get off his fat ass and protect Elinore Dobbs. Mahoney wanted big guys with nightsticks patrolling the neighborhood. He wanted these McNulty clowns who were intimidating the old folks leaned on and leaned on hard.

He called the secretary of the Treasury and said he wanted Sean Callahan’s crooked development company audited. The secretary informed him that the last director of the IRS had been forced to resign for auditing Republicans to make the Democrats happy. Mahoney’s response was that this wasn’t about partisan politics; in fact, the guy he wanted audited was a registered Democrat. The secretary said, “Man, I don’t know,” to which Mahoney said that maybe it was time to review the secretary’s last trip to Jamaica, the one where he’d flown in a government plane, accompanied by a secretary that everyone knew was his mistress, and then spent the whole time playing golf and hide-the-pickle in his hotel room. “You’re right, Congressman,” the secretary said. “A man like Callahan who would push an old lady around is very likely to be defrauding the government out of its rightful share.”

Mahoney’s called the chairman of the SEC, saying he wanted Callahan investigated for insider trading. He didn’t know if Callahan was guilty of this particular crime but suspected a man with his money and connections might be. Mahoney, in fact, had been guilty of insider trading many times but as a member of Congress, and despite recent changes to a vaguely worded law called the STOCK Act, he could get away with it. But Callahan couldn’t. So unless the chairman of the SEC wanted to be dragged in front of a House committee to explain why his commission was so damn useless . . .

He contacted the director of the FBI next, and told him that he wanted the bureau to investigate Elinore’s claim that Callahan’s people had stolen her mail. Stealing mail was, after all, a federal crime. The head of the bureau languidly said, “Not my job, Congressman. You need to talk to the Postal Inspection Service.” Mahoney had never dealt with the Postal Inspection Service in his life. He looked them up on the Internet and found that, yep, they were the guys who investigated if your mail got stolen. They also investigated mailbox destruction, letter bombs, identity theft, lottery fraud, and a whole bunch of other stuff. They had over a thousand inspectors, seventeen field offices, and even had their own forensic laboratory. No wonder the price of stamps kept going up. But when Mahoney learned that the postal service’s top cop had started off his career as a mail carrier in Mississippi, he “imaged” a guy with a wandering eye, in those shorts mailmen wear, one of those white safari hats on his head—and decided not to bother.

Lastly, Mahoney called the mayor of Boston and the city councilman representing Elinore’s neighborhood. He told them one thing he wanted done immediately was to have the right people inspect Callahan’s project looking for building and safety code violations. He wanted inspectors crawling over Callahan’s development like red-hot ants. He also wanted to know why the civil suits Elinore and other tenants had filed to stop Callahan’s terrorist tactics hadn’t prevailed. He screamed at the mayor, “You tell the useless son of a bitch who’s supposed to keep Callahan from breaking the housing laws to do his goddamn job!”

The mayor and the councilman said they’d do what they could but their response was noticeably lukewarm. It was apparent to Mahoney that those two jackals were in Callahan’s pocket, either getting a kickback from him or a promise to contribute to their next campaign—and Mahoney couldn’t help but wonder if the mayor might actually be thinking about running against him.

Two days after meeting with Elinore Dobbs, a disgruntled Mahoney sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair at Logan Airport waiting for his plane to D.C. to board. On one hand, he felt good that he’d done the right thing by siding with Elinore against Callahan. Maybe his reason for siding with her had more to do with pride than anything else—but he’d done the right thing. On the other hand, he had this queasy feeling in his stomach that his next run for the seat he’d held for more than three decades might not be so easy.

The other thing was, in spite of all the bureaucrats he’d leaned on, Mahoney knew that eventually Callahan was going to win and Elinore was going to lose. There was no way she could hold out for three more years against Callahan. He also knew that after a couple of weeks the media would become bored with the story, if they weren’t bored already. So he needed to do more. He needed to find some way to keep the heat on Callahan, and what he really needed was to find some legal way to stop him from harassing Elinore. Then he thought: Who says it has to be legal?

He called Mavis, his secretary in D.C. “Track down that lazy bastard DeMarco. He’s probably playing golf. Tell him I want him in my office tomorrow, and to pack a bag. He’s going to Boston.”