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Moment of truth: A major Mass. upset seems unlikely in Tuesday’s Democratic and Republican primaries, but never say never

Voters are angry over the soaring cost of living and increasingly disillusioned with both major parties, and Massachusetts is no exception.

But party primaries bring out the faithful, not the run-of-the-mill voter far more concerned with a sky-high grocery bill than whether a candidate can pass an ideological purity test.

And with the left wing of the Democratic Party fired up right now, in Massachusetts and across the country, Tuesday’s primary could spell trouble for more moderate candidates, especially those seen as insufficiently progressive.

In 2020, Sen. Ed Markey’s embrace of the Green New Deal and AOC helped him fend off a challenge from Congressman Joe Kennedy III.

Now Markey’s robotic adherence to progressive orthodoxy may very well save his bacon in 2026.

On Monday, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, once seen as a potential challenger, went on GBH’s Boston Public Radio to endorse the senator.

Pressley called Markey a “reliable voice” on issues like abolishing ICE, Medicare for All and “fare-free” public transit, among others.

His challenger, Congressman Seth Moulton, has read the tea leaves, too. After years of positioning himself as a more moderate voice, Moulton has attempted to outflank Markey on the left and make his age — the senator turned 80 last month — the central issue of the campaign.

Moulton pulled within a few points of Markey earlier in the summer, only to fall back again, with the latest polls showing the senator with a double-digit lead.

Also hoping to ride a progressive wave to victory in Tuesday’s primary?

That would be Patrick Roath, an attorney who served as an aide to former Gov. Deval Patrick.

Roath is campaigning to unseat a longtime incumbent, Congressman Stephen Lynch, who has carved out a lane over the years as a relative moderate. Before getting elected to Congress in 2001, Lynch worked for years as an ironworker and led Local 7 in South Boston.

While prediction site Kalshi puts Lynch’s odds of winning at more than 60 percent, that still gives Roath a fighting chance — and significantly better odds than Moulton has right now in his bid to unseat Markey.

The progressive versus moderate battle is also playing out in the Middlesex County DA’s race, which pits longtime incumbent Marian Ryan against the former head of the cold case unit in her office, David Solet.

A former Middlesex Prosecutor of the Year, Solet has made a real race of it, winning the endorsement of both the Globe and Herald and dozens of local police unions.

Solet has hammered Ryan’s allegedly overbearing management style, which has led to significant turnover in the DA’s office, while also questioning decisions that led to lighter sentences for armed and hardened career criminals.

Ryan, in turn, has leaned into her progressive credentials, noting, in a recent interview with Fig City News, that she has not accepted police union endorsements since signing a “Justice Collaborative Pledge” in 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, which led to now-former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s conviction on a host of charges, including second- and third-degree murder.

On the Republican side, wealthy former medical device company CEO Michael Minogue is favored to beat Brian Shortsleeve, former MBTA chief during the Baker administration, and win the right to take on Gov. Maura Healey in the November general election.

Then there is Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who is not technically on the ballot, but whose political acumen is arguably on the line.

Wu has backed bids by a pair of challengers to unseat two more moderate state senators, fellow Democrats William Brownsberger and Nick Collins, who bucked her efforts to hike tax rates on struggling Boston commercial properties and businesses.

Chalk that one up to the politics of revenge.

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Back from vacation and looking to catch up with the news? Here are some recent Contrarian Boston stories you might have missed:

New in Contrarian Boston: “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” does rants and raves, from a new doc about eBay’s terror campaign against a Natick couple to slimy Michael Cohen’s budding radio career

The “Beat the Press” panel weighs in on media stories ranging from allegations that Madison Square Garden tracked and rated celebrity customers to disturbing reporting on private schools receiving taxpayer-funded vouchers despite scant oversight. Scott Van Voorhis praises the documentary “Whatever It Takes,” about eBay’s extraordinary harassment campaign against Natick newsletter publishers Ina and David Steiner, while Emily Rooney unloads on WABC for giving former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen a platform.

Mass. taxpayers cleaning up Phillip Eng’s mess? MBTA will shell out close to half a million dollars to settle allegations he pulled the hair of his communications chief — a story Contrarian Boston first broke back in June

The MBTA agreed to pay communications chief Gabrielle Mondestin nearly $500,000 to settle claims stemming from General Manager Phillip Eng pulling her hair during a 2024 team gathering at a brewpub. The settlement leaves taxpayers picking up the tab for Eng’s conduct after the T initially downplayed an episode Contrarian Boston first reported in June and that potentially implicated Massachusetts’ Crown Act.

District attorney’s woke justice? Middlesex County DA Marian Ryan let a trio of hardened criminals off with lighter sentences as social justice activists ramped up attacks on law enforcement in the early 2020s

Internal emails and court records obtained by Contrarian Boston raise questions about whether Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan’s office adopted a policy in the early 2020s that resulted in habitual-criminal and armed-career-criminal enhancements being dropped against defendants with serious records. Ryan’s office denies there was any categorical policy, but Democratic primary challenger David Solet argues that the decisions allowed dangerous offenders to escape substantially longer prison sentences.

Squeeze play exposed: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s City Hall jacked up assessments on more than 150 struggling office and commercial buildings in retaliation against owners who filed for abatements, city records show

Boston officials have identified 151 commercial properties whose assessments were increased after their owners challenged their tax bills, dramatically expanding the number of properties allegedly caught up in a retaliatory assessment practice. The Pioneer New England Legal Foundation, which is suing the city, says the increases have forced property owners to pay more than $19 million in additional taxes and is pressing the state Department of Revenue to investigate.

Some progress, but same old T problems: Bus driver takes Orange Line riders on a wild ride, while one of Phillip Eng’s top lieutenants pulls down hundreds of thousands of dollars while working from South Carolina

Despite progress under Phillip Eng in reducing the MBTA’s maintenance backlog, a pair of episodes raises fresh questions about whether the agency’s dysfunctional culture has really changed. An inexperienced shuttle-bus driver mistakenly carried Orange Line passengers all the way to Stoneham, while a former Eng colleague earned more than $713,000 as a senior T adviser while spending more than 90 percent of his working hours at home in South Carolina.

City of secrets: The Wu administration hits new lows in its contempt for government transparency, now refusing to release a pair of slavery reparation reports that were due more than two years ago

This was a great story by Colman M. Herman: The Wu administration is refusing to release two taxpayer-funded studies examining discrimination against Black Bostonians even though the reports, originally due in 2024, have been in the city’s possession for months. City Hall rejected Contrarian Boston’s public-records request by invoking the deliberative-process exemption and arguing that disclosure would be “harmful” to the continuing work of the Reparations Task Force.

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City of secrets: The Wu administration hits new lows in its contempt for government transparency, now refusing to release a pair of slavery reparation reports that were due more than two years ago

By Colman M. Herman

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is exploiting a provision in the Massachusetts public records law to delay releasing history-making reports on reparations to Black Bostonians — reports that the city has had in its possession for months now.

Back in 2022, the City Council passed an ordinance creating a Task Force on Reparations to study ways to provide restitution, granting Wu the power to appoint all the members.

The task force commissioned two reports: one by Tufts University on discrimination against Black Bostonians from 1620 to 1940, the other by Northeastern University covering the period after 1940.

All the work was supposed to be completed by June 2024. If you actually believed that would happen, dear readers, I have this bridge connecting Boston to Chelsea I’d be happy to sell you.

Months after finally receiving the Tufts and Northeastern reports, the Wu administration appears to be doing its utmost to shield the findings from public scrutiny while scrubbing away the unvarnished truth.

Not to be put off, Contrarian Boston submitted a public records request on June 18 to Wu’s office seeking a copy of both reports.

The response we received was nothing short of shocking.

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District attorney’s woke justice? Middlesex County DA Marian Ryan let a trio of hardened criminals off with lighter sentences as social justice activists ramped up attacks on law enforcement in the early 2020s

Maurice Morris is a poster child for why Massachusetts years ago passed tough armed career criminal laws for use against incorrigible violent offenders.

A little after rush hour on an August evening in 2021 in North Cambridge, Morris came upon Che Merand, a Boston man he had a beef with, and fired into Merand’s white SUV, where two children, an eight-year-old and a one-year-old infant, were sitting.

Speeding off in their cars, the two men engaged in a running gun battle through the streets of Cambridge.

“This type of gun violence cannot be tolerated in our communities,” Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan said in a press statement following Merand’s conviction on a slew of charges, taking special note that he had children in his car.

Yet Ryan and the DA’s office could have charged Morris, who had fired into a car with the two young children in it, as a Level 2 Armed Career Criminal, which comes with a 10-year mandatory sentence and a maximum of 15, but they didn’t.

Instead, the Middlesex DA opted not to use a prior conviction for distributing cocaine and settled instead on a Level 1 ACC charge, which comes with a three-year mandatory sentence.

Ryan and the DA’s office also declined to use serious narcotics charges in two similar cases over the past few years, passing up a chance to put away other armed and violent career criminals for years.

As the Middlesex DA Marian Ryan battles a serious challenge in the Sept. 1 Democratic Party primary from one of her former top prosecutors, her handling of some of these cases warrants scrutiny.

Amid a backlash by social justice activists against the aggressive enforcement of drug laws, did the Middlesex DA’s office under Ryan go woke? Did the top law enforcement officer of New England’s most populous county institute a secretive policy that disregarded serious drug convictions when deciding whether to pursue armed career criminal or habitual criminal charges?

David Solet, a veteran prosecutor who cracked some impressive cases as head of the Middlesex County DA’s cold case unit and who is running against Ryan in the Sept. 1 party primary, is raising just that question.

“Marian Ryan is not being honest about the decisions she made about criminal cases against some of the most hard-core offenders in the Middlesex Superior Court,” Solet told Contrarian Boston.

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Office of mayoral politicking? Boston Mayor Michelle Wu turns Office of Neighborhood Services staffers into a cheerleading section as she pushes a controversial proposal to hike tax rates on struggling businesses and office buildings

They are supposed to be Boston City Hall’s friendly go-to people in the neighborhoods, there to help families out after a fire or ensure complaints about drug activity, litter, traffic, you name it, reach the powers that be.

But the Wu administration has been sending its neighborhood liaisons out to community meetings not just to talk about filling potholes, but also to push for Mayor Michelle Wu’s controversial proposal to jack up tax rates on half-empty office towers and other commercial buildings, according to a complaint filed with the State Ethics Commission.

Neighborhood liaisons, the foot soldiers of the Office of Neighborhood Services, as well as top ONS officials, appeared at five different public meetings earlier this year and late last year to urge residents to call state lawmakers and tell them to pass Wu’s contentious tax bill, according to the complaint.

The Boston mayor and her supporters argue that raising commercial tax rates would offset some of the devastating impact remote work has had on city coffers and ease the burden on city homeowners — even as businesses and building owners warn of more foreclosures and an exodus to the suburbs.

Overall, tanking office tower values in downtown Boston could cost the city an estimated $2 billion in revenue, according to the Boston Policy Institute.

The Wu administration has also used the Office of Neighborhood Services’ supposedly nonpolitical newsletter to flood the zone with messages of support for the mayor’s tax plan, which needs State House approval to push even more of the city’s revenue-raising burden onto commercial property owners than currently allowed by law.

Here’s an excerpt from the complaint:

“That several ONS employees and managers, in form or in substance, engaged in non-election-related political activity by advocating for passage of the Petition and for the change, use, and reconstruction of White Stadium in the course of performing their official duties and while being paid by the City suggests this was not a ‘one-off occurrence; it may have been part of an orchestrated plan to use City employees to advocate for passage of the Petition.”

Wu has also fomented challenges to two state senators who opposed her tax hike plan, Nick Collins, whose district extends from South Boston into Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and other neighborhoods, and William Brownsberger, who lives in Belmont but whose district includes a piece of Boston.

Moderate Democrats, the two argued that more targeted measures aimed at protecting seniors and other vulnerable homeowners would achieve the same goals without the damage an increase in commercial tax rates would inflict on an already struggling downtown Boston.

In another reflection of the allegedly partisan atmosphere surrounding the city’s Office of Neighborhood Services, Maccon Bonner, a former ONS staffer, now works for the campaign of Latoya Gayle, a Dorchester woman who, with Wu’s backing, is gunning to unseat Collins.

Meanwhile, Wu’s supposedly nonpolitical ONS minions, on at least one occasion, also spoke publicly in favor of the mayor’s controversial pet project, the $325 million redevelopment of the old White Stadium in Franklin Park into a pro soccer palace.

That project faces potential cancellation as a lawsuit by park advocates and community activists gains traction, with the state’s highest court on Friday delaying a ruling, saying it needs more time to consider the case.

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Now here’s something to keep an eye on: Don’t be surprised if Jeff Bezos someday casts a covetous eye on John Henry’s sports and media empire as he buys a big piece of one of its prized holdings

Over the last two decades, billionaire John Henry has built a prestigious sports and media empire.

Henry’s holdings include the Red Sox, major development plans around Fenway Park, The Boston Globe, the successful health care, life sciences, and medical news site STAT, and, last but not least, the powerhouse British football club Liverpool FC.

On Friday, an investment group that includes fellow billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced plans to buy a 30 percent stake in Liverpool FC, owned for years now by Henry’s Fenway Sports Group, for about $2 billion.

We’ll acknowledge this is pure speculation at this point, but is this a case of the camel — in this case, Bezos — getting its nose under the Fenway Sports Group tent?

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Mass. taxpayers cleaning up Phillip Eng’s mess? MBTA will shell out close to half a million dollars to settle allegations he pulled the hair of his communications chief — a story Contrarian Boston first broke back in June

Guess it was a pretty big deal after all.

On Friday, the MBTA announced a nearly $500,000 settlement with communications chief Gabrielle Mondestin over one of the more bizarre incidents in the troubled transit authority’s history.

The agreement effectively settles any monetary claims stemming from an incident in late 2024, in which T General Manager Phillip Eng pulled the hair of Mondestin, a veteran Boston political hand named the T’s first overall head of communications in 2023, at a team meeting in a brewpub.

However, the MBTA did all it could to downplay the story when Contrarian Boston first reported in June that Eng, now the state’s transportation czar as well, was in settlement talks with a top staffer over a serious harassment allegation.

We also knew the nature of the allegation: that Eng had pulled the hair of his communications chief, who, maybe not so incidentally, also happened to be a Black woman who was sporting dreadlocks at the time.

But Contrarian Boston held off reporting that explosive detail for two days to give the T and Eng a chance to respond, which was the right thing to do but proved to be a mistake.

In either a fit of pique or just plain idiocy, the T never responded to Contrarian Boston’s requests for comment on the hair pulling, but then sent out a statement of apology by Eng to seemingly every news organization but ours.

Eng’s vague apology, issued by the T on the Juneteenth holiday, offered few details, omitting the fact that the employee was a Black woman and that the hair-pulling potentially violated the 2022 Crown Act, a state law barring discrimination based on “natural and protective hairstyles.”

The T then trotted Eng out on WCVB’s “On the Record,” where he offered up another vague apology for his behavior at a team meeting of top staffers and their families at a brewpub.

“I had an interaction I shouldn’t have done,” Eng said.

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Elite college cartel? Ivy League and other top schools with six-figure annual costs stifle price competition through the early admission process, fed-up students contend in class-action lawsuit

Sky-high demand for prestigious degrees may not be the only thing driving up the cost of America’s top higher-ed institutions.

A potentially explosive lawsuit playing out in federal court in Boston is casting a harsh light on an ugly underside of the admissions process.

As the annual cost of attendance tops $100,000 at elite places like Dartmouth, Northwestern and USC, officials at dozens of colleges and universities have been engaging in a little price-fixing, according to a class-action lawsuit by four current and recently graduated college students.

Colleges across the country, including longtime New England powerhouses like Brown, Smith, Amherst, Williams, Mount Holyoke, Trinity, Middlebury, and Bowdoin, are using and abusing the early admissions process — misleadingly presenting it as a binding contract that prevents students from entertaining other offers — to short-circuit price competition and squeeze the most favorable financial terms possible from families.

All four students, including one from Cambridge, paid either full-freight or shouldered most of the bill, but for some grants and a smattering of financial aid, to attend Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where the annual cost of attendance now tops $101,000, as well as Vassar and Washington University in St. Louis.

The schools involved have deployed a small army of high-powered attorneys — while surely burning through many millions of dollars — to make it all go away.

But so far, it’s not working. In a Tuesday ruling, federal Judge Angel Kelley preserved the bulk of the case while dismissing companies involved with the common online platform the institutions use to field early admissions applications.

Schools that use early admissions programs have also been able to raise their tuition rates higher than competitors that don’t have such programs, according to the lawsuit.

“The elite colleges and universities with standard Early Decision programs impose full tuition rates that are, on average, thousands of dollars higher than those charged by comparable schools without such Early Decision programs,” the lawsuit contends.

Meanwhile, the way these elite schools operate their early admissions programs violates federal antitrust laws, the lawsuit claims.

Students are enticed into the early admissions process to improve their chances and led to believe it is a binding, legal contract, when it’s not, barring students from applying to other schools and using competing offers to negotiate, according to the complaint.

Students are also told they have to accept the financial package the school offers them, with colleges using the process to squeeze as much money as possible out of upper-middle-class and wealthier families, while other students, from less well-off families, are less likely to take part in early admissions given the high cost.

The colleges and universities share lists of early decision applicants, with 32 different institutions even having inked a formal agreement not to compete for early admissions students.

“Early Decision is a classic per se violation of the antitrust laws. Ultimately, Early Decision is enforced by mutual agreement between would-be competitors not to compete for students offered admission through Early Decision at other schools.”

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Man about town

Dining out on the public’s dime, interim Mass. convention center czar picks up where his free-spending predecessor left off

By Colman M. Herman

John Barros is only the interim executive director of the quasi-public Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA).

Yet in his short time in that slot, he is already on track to spend more of the commonwealth’s money wining and dining at upscale restaurants than even his controversial, spendthrift predecessor, Marcel Vernon Sr. This is according to public records pried loose from the MCCA by Contrarian Boston.

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Who’s calling the shots here? Pressure from powerful teachers unions could force Massachusetts and other blue states to forgo billions for tutors and other programs at a time when most third-graders are still struggling to read

Talk about shooting the multibillion-dollar gift horse in the mouth.

Governors of blue states across the country, including Massachusetts, are considering something so illogical that only fear of political retaliation — in this case by powerful teachers unions — can explain it.

The Democratic governors are weighing whether to block potentially billions in scholarships from flowing to families in their own states to help pay for tutoring for kids struggling to read, tuition, home-schooling materials, you name it.

Some, like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — remember him — have said outright their states won’t take part in the federal scholarship tax credit program, passed last year as part of Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill.

We are not talking about small change here. Minnesota has walked away from an estimated $400 million.

The rest, like Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, have yet to say what they’ll do, even as governors of some 31 other states have opted into the federal scholarship tax credit, set to take effect on Jan. 1.

Massachusetts has $600 million or more at stake in the governor’s decision, a huge amount at a time when a shocking 58 percent of third graders can’t read at grade level and when even many middle-class families can ill afford to pay for tutoring as they struggle to make ends meet.

Yet the Massachusetts Teachers Association and other teachers unions across the country, which are forever arguing for more money for education, have launched a full-court press to stop states from opting in.

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Time to get that competitive mojo back: Once the nation’s leading hotbed for innovation, Massachusetts and, above all, Greater Boston, is losing ground not just to Silicon Valley, but now the “Silicon Heartland” as well, new report warns

Forget about Silicon Valley, which has been pummeling the Boston area’s once world-beating innovation economy for years now.

Meet our rather surprising new rival for tech jobs and investment dollars: the “Silicon Heartland.”

Greater Boston’s innovation engine has stalled out. And with even Ohio, aka the Silicon Heartland, now eating our lunch — attracting hundreds of billions in AI and tech investment — we are in bigger trouble than we realize.

That’s our takeaway from local tech entrepreneur Ian Cain’s provocative report, “Capital Is the Only Magnet,” on the rise and now decline of the Bay State’s once world-beating innovation economy.

Cain is co-founder of QUBIC Labs, a Quincy-based incubator for startups in blockchain, AI, and other tech sectors.

Former president of the Quincy City Council, Cain generated a flurry of headlines back in 2024 when he launched a bid for U.S. Senate, losing in the Republican primary.

Now Cain has launched a high-profile campaign of a different sort. The veteran private equity and venture capital exec is raising the alarm about the Boston area’s decline as a leading center for tech and innovation, while laying out a vision for regaining its preeminence.

World War II and the Cold War catapulted Greater Boston from a sleepy backwater to the nation’s innovation engine in the 1950s and ’60s.

The state’s congressional delegation worked to keep a “firehose” of federal defense spending flowing to local universities like MIT, while a Harvard professor’s pioneering venture capital firm financed legendary startups like Digital Equipment Corp., founded by MIT researcher Kenneth Olsen.

Half a century later, the Massachusetts economy is stuck in the doldrums. Silicon Valley has long surpassed Greater Boston as the nation’s top innovation hub, and surprising new rivals, like Ohio, have emerged, with the Buckeye State now ground zero for the emerging “Silicon Heartland.”

The Buckeye State has some of the nation’s lowest electric rates, far less onerous taxes for businesses, and a congressional delegation that parlayed billions in federal funding into a growing tech and AI sector that is attracting massive new investment.

Massachusetts has some of the highest electricity rates in the country, deterring investment in new AI infrastructure and tech manufacturing, and a tax structure that deters innovation by taking a big bite out of the check when startup founders decide to sell.

The Bay State needs an all-hands-on-deck campaign by elected leaders and university and corporate leaders, Cain argues in his 22-page paper, which has sparked comments from everyone from a member of the congressional delegation to local tech entrepreneurs.

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Will MassHousing scandal get the investigation it deserves? Amid the cozy world of Massachusetts politics, it’s an open question how deep the AG or anyone else will dig into allegations of fraud at the state housing authority

Life in a prohibitively expensive blue state like Massachusetts isn’t easy, what with bidding wars for million-dollar dumps, sky-high electric bills, crippling health insurance premiums, and a not inconsiderable state and local tax load.

So the fraud allegations that have rocked MassHousing are galling, featuring a now-former senior exec, a pair of unscrupulous developers, phony invoices, and what appears to be a lot of public money wasted, the Globe’s Spotlight Team has reported.

The whole point of a state housing authority is to finance the construction of badly needed affordable homes and low-cost mortgages, not provide cushy sinecures for state government lifers and political operators and opportunities for graft.

But here’s what’s even more galling: In a go-along-get-along state like Massachusetts, with its insider political culture, there is no way to know whether we will get a real investigation into the allegations or just one of the Potemkin variety.

Last week, MassHousing appeared to do the right thing. The state housing authority referred fraud allegations involving a $1.4 million program to fix up old mill-town apartments to state Attorney General Andrea Campbell.

In recent days, potential oversight problems with another MassHousing grant program — financing the installation of sprinkler systems in sober homes — has surfaced in the press.

A second major Globe Spotlight piece details allegations that the head of a chain of sober homes obtained a $700,000 grant from MassHousing to install sprinklers in nine of his homes, and then submitted bogus invoices for work that was not done.

In a statement, a spokesperson for MassHousing says the authority in 2024 referred to the AG’s office “irregularities” the state authority’s inspectors had identified involving one of the sprinkler program’s grant recipients.

In response, MassHousing also rolled out “additional inspection protocols” for the sprinkler and other grant programs.

“MassHousing is committed to sound financial management and responsibly administering public resources,” the spokesperson said. “MassHousing takes allegations of potential fraud and noncompliance seriously.”

Yet even as the AG has been probing the potential abuse of MassHousing’s grant programs, MassHousing CEO Chrystal Kornegay has been maxing out in her contributions to AG Campbell’s campaign coffers.

Kornegay, who earns $392,000 a year, contributed $1,000, the legal maximum, to AG Campbell’s campaign coffers on June 15, and in 2024 and 2022, a review of state records by Contrarian Boston reveals. The eight other contributions Kornegay made were much lower, ranging from $500 to a Boston mayoral candidate in 2013 to $60 to now-former Lawrence Mayor Daniel Rivera.

No one is suggesting that Campbell would skew an investigation because she received a few campaign contributions or that the MassHousing CEO would have similar expectations.

There are many reasons people give, from genuine desire to support a candidate they believe in to a form of political insurance.

But politicians certainly know who’s footing the bill for their campaigns. And come crunch time, it certainly can’t hurt to have maxed out in contributions to the state AG who may be investigating a scandal at your agency.

There’s another factor to consider: Campbell has not exactly been a profile in courage in dealing with State House bosses.

Campbell has fired off lawsuit after lawsuit against the Trump administration, but she is oh-so-careful not to rock the boat when it comes to the Legislature.

The AG has seemingly done everything she can to avoid providing legal backing to state Auditor Diana DiZoglio in her attempts to examine the Legislature’s books and enforce the 2024 ballot question that 72 percent of Massachusetts voters supported.

And then there is MassHousing’s transparently cynical decision to hire the law firm Mintz to conduct a so-called independent investigation into the allegations.

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The Willy Wonka of narcotics or just a big ole “misunderstanding?” Former Mass. cannabis CEO alleged key player in trafficking ring that infused hard drugs into chocolate bars for sale across the country, authorities say

He was the entrepreneurial son of the owner of a successful local construction company.

So when Massachusetts legalized pot in the early 2010s, Tim Caraboolad saw an opportunity and seized it with both hands.

Joined by his father, Geoffrey, Tim Caraboolad, the CEO for years of Native Sun Cannabis, waged a long and contentious battle with neighborhood residents to open a South Boston cannabis shop in an old industrial building, ultimately suing the city and winning, though opposition continues to simmer.

The Caraboolads opened cannabis retail shops in Hudson and North Attleboro and a growing complex in Fitchburg a well.

But the father-and-son team is apparently no more. In June, a Colorado grand jury indicted Tim Caraboolad and six others on charges of running “a sophisticated drug trafficking operation” out of a facility in the small town of Basalt that “distributed large quantities of narcotics infused in candy and nasal sprays.”

The operation that led to the arrests was dubbed “Molly Wonka,” with authorities alleging that the drug ring infused hard drugs into chocolate bars and drew up “custom menus” for buyers from across the country to peruse and order from.

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Ideal candidate must have a high tolerance for scandal: Wu administration seeks new tax chief as it battles allegations that it retaliated against downtown Boston tower owners by jacking up property assessments

By Scott Van Voorhis

In late May, Boston’s embattled tax chief suddenly resigned amid a growing scandal.

Nicholas Ariniello’s cryptic announcement at a City Council hearing came as a lawsuit by downtown tower owners alleging that they had been hit with tax hikes after seeking abatements began to gain traction.

Now, a little more than two months later, the Wu administration has launched a formal search for a successor to Ariniello, who served as commissioner of assessing for seven years.

Even with pay in the range of $160,000 to $180,000, this is no job for the faint of heart.

The job posting for the assessing chief makes no mention of the legal cloud hanging over Boston City Hall from the class-action lawsuit, which could force the city to shell out a huge payment to the dozens of tower owners who may have been slammed with tax increases.

Ditto for the growing financial and budgetary crisis Boston faces from the collapse of the office market amid the shift to remote work, which the Boston Policy Institute estimates could wipe out up to $2 billion in tax revenue.

But whoever takes the job will also likely inherit the unenviable task of defending the actions of Ariniello and other city officials in the tax case. The Wu administration’s legal team failed to convince a state judge to dismiss the lawsuit, so it now may very well be headed to trial.

As the job listing notes, whoever is hired will be responsible for overseeing the “legal defense of values at the Appellate Tax Board.”

It’s not clear whether Ariniello acted on his own or on orders from the Wu administration—there’s considerable doubt among city insiders that the wonkish and cautious Ariniello would have cooked up something like this on his own.

In a rather amusing footnote, the job posting notes, in bold type, that Boston residency is required.

As Contrarian Boston first reported a couple of years ago, Ariniello commuted to work at Boston City Hall from his home in the upscale suburb of Winchester.

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Harvard calling the shots at Boston City Hall? Redevelopment of an old Jamaica Plain monastery into housing stuck in endless reviews as Harvard-managed Arnold Arboretum warns that building shadows may hurt the park’s trees

By Scott Van Voorhis

All trees are created equal in Mayor Michelle Wu’s Boston.

It’s just that some trees, like the ones that Harvard “curates” at the Arnold Arboretum, are more equal than others, like the dozens of trees clear-cut at Franklin Park to make way for the mayor’s showcase $325 million soccer stadium.

The Franciscan Poor Clare Nuns of Jamaica Plain pleaded for years with City Hall to OK plans to redevelop their monastery next to the Harvard-controlled Arboretum into 158 housing units.

The sisters need the city’s approval to complete the sale of their now-empty property to a local developer and complete work on their new home in Westwood.

But despite a dire housing crisis, the Wu administration has consigned the proposal, which includes a significant chunk of affordable units, to a never-ending bureaucratic paper shuffle, recently extending the public comment period once again on a project that has now been in the works for five years.

Not coincidentally, the Harvard biology professor who manages the Arboretum under the university’s 1,000-year lease with Boston has led the pushback against the nuns’ plans, arguing that the proposed five-story residential building—up from the three-story monastery that sits on the site now—would have a detrimental impact on the Arboretum’s prized collection of trees.

“We have an ethical and scientific responsibility to provide each living specimen, to the best of our capacity and ability, an environment to thrive,” Harvard biology professor and Arboretum Director William “Ned” Friedman wrote in a public letter, according to the Harvard Crimson.

One would be forgiven for wondering exactly how a rather modest, mid-sized condo and rental project—to be built solely on the site where the monastery now stands, with no overlap with the Arboretum—would have any impact at all on the sprawling, 281-acre, Harvard-run park.

However, Friedman is up in arms over the “shadows” that the proposed five-story residential building would cast on some of the Arboretum’s trees, while also claiming that it would mar the views from the Arboretum.

And the Wu administration, which should be doing everything it can to get more housing built in one of the nation’s most expensive cities, is instead playing right along with the Harvard prof and the Arboretum.

Kairos Shen met with Friedman earlier this year to discuss the Arboretum’s concerns, according to the Globe. The pair also exchanged multiple emails about the housing proposed for the nuns’ property, with Shen doling out advice on how to deal with inquiries from a local reporter.

By contrast, it took the nuns months to secure an audience with the city’s planning czar.

Now compare the Wu administration’s indulgence of the Arboretum’s hand-wringing with the Boston mayor’s high-handed dismissal of concerns about the environmental impact that her own massive pet project is having just a couple of miles away at another Olmsted-designed park.

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Editor’s note: Welcome to another segment of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” now a regular Contrarian Boston feature. Today we do our rants and raves. Since the segment first aired, Ina and David Steiner, the Natick couple who publish a respected industry newsletter that eBay attempted to silence with a surreptitious campaign of terror, have inked a $55.7 million settlement with the California-based e-tailer.

Emily Rooney was joined by Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, The Boston Globe’s Lylah M. Alphonse, editor of Globe Rhode Island and Globe New Hampshire, and Scott Van Voorhis, editor and founder of Contrarian Boston.

And thanks to Tonia Magras, principal owner of Hull Bay Productions, who produced today’s piece. Tonia was the supervising producer for “Beat the Press” when it was on GBH and is the principal owner of Hull Bay Productions.

If you would rather use a different platform, you can also watch “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” on Contrarian Boston’s YouTube channel.

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Emily Rooney: All right, time now for our Rants and Raves, and I’m going to start with you, Dan.

Dan Kennedy: [01:21:18.12]

Okay, I have a rave for Wired magazine, uh, which reported that Madison Square Garden is spying on its customers according to reporters Noah Schachman and Maddie Varner. The Garden tracks celebrities and assigns a risk score to them. For instance, if they criticize James Dolan, who controls the Garden and the New York Knicks, those with high risk scores get shut out of goodies like free tickets. The Wired story also says that the Garden is tracking celebrity fans who are LGBTQ for some unknown reason. Now, The Garden has sued, claiming that Wired used hacked data to construct a false narrative. And Wired not only stands by the story, but they’ve dropped the paywall so that anybody can now read it.

Emily Rooney:

It just seemed to me, Dan, that that would be a lot of work for the Garden to pull off and a lot of man-hours. And it’s like, it seemed like a really odd thing to be tracking.

Dan Kennedy: It certainly does. Uh, I guess we’ll find out more.

Emily Rooney: All right, Lylah, what do you got?

Lylah Alphonse: [01:22:27.14] So I have a rave for ProPublica, which co-published a piece with the Arkansas Times looking into a private school in Arkansas and the way that even though the number of private and micro schools have increased thanks to the school voucher program, oversight is nonexistent. This particular private school was founded by someone who was abusing the students: having students attack a fellow classmate, having them scrub the floor while she yelled at them. And they still were getting public money in the form of school vouchers. This is part of a larger investigation that they did into the school voucher program and oversight in general. Another piece that they co-published with the Arkansas Times, the Mountain State Spotlight, and the Assembly looks at schools in Florida. It’s really eye-opening. School choice is one thing, giving parents lots of options if the public schools where they are failing. But their investigation really showed that, that parents need to be investigators themselves when they’re looking at private schools. And it showed that if you follow the money, things aren’t as they seem.

Emily Rooney: Yeah, the voucher system is screwy. And I was shocked. I looked at those reports. I mean, they were beating up a little kid, a circle. He was sitting in the middle. They were literally beating him up.

It almost looked like it was fake, but it wasn’t. All right, Scott, what have you got?

Scott Van Voorhis [01:23:51.00]

I have a rave about a new documentary that just came out, “Whatever It Takes.” It just started streaming on Amazon Prime. I think they have a European distribution deal, and it details the harassment campaign by eBay against this Natick couple, Ina and David Steiner. They’re the publishers of the E-Commerce Bytes newsletter, which is small but I guess very influential, and so much so that eBay and their now-former CEO Devin Wenig launched a campaign by giving his now-infamous order, which comes from the title of the documentary, to do whatever it takes to crush the couple and their publication. Wenig was never charged. His security team, a few people went to jail for a couple of years because they interpreted whatever it takes to mean things like mailing a bloody pig mask to Steiner’s Natick home, and sending them a pamphlet of advice on how to prepare for the death of your spouse, stalking them, and shadowing the Steiners as they drove around town, running errands. I am really glad this documentary got made.shows that, I mean there's a lot of focus.

[01:25:14.22] - Speaker 3

We talk a lot about government and freedom of the press, but corporations can use their power to try to silence people as well

And it was shocking that eBay went to all this effort for this, you know, to try and intimidate an influential, but small industry publication. Their offense was they wrote about a lawsuit against eBay and the CEO’s salary. So I;m hoping it does well.

Emily Rooney: [01:25:50.04]

I agree. All right, well, finally tonight I have a rant for WABC Radio for hiring President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who has now made amends with Trump. I didn’t even realize this. He has gotten back into his inner circle and now discredits the very prosecutors that he was siding with when he first, you know, he went to jail, but he was giving them data about, you know, the Stormy Daniels case and other things like that. I mean, I realize that WABC has largely a conservative lineup and they’re in line with Trump and everything, but this guy is just, I mean, he has lost all credibility and I guess he’s angling to have his, you know, his own show. He’s filling in right now for Andrew Cuomo, I guess. But he’s just, repulsive.

Anyway, I hope it’s a failure. What can I say? All right, that is it for Beat the Press. Catch us on Contrarian Boston or YouTube. Thanks to Scott Van Voorhis, Lylah Alphonse, and Dan Kennedy. I’m Emily Rooney.

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Sore losers? Boston-based gambling giant DraftKings faces an onslaught of class-action lawsuits by customers who lost money wagering on games using the company’s new Predictions app

They went online to bet on their favorite teams, they lost, and now they want their money back, saying they were shocked, shocked to find out that gambling was illegal in their state.

A spate of seemingly outlandish class-action lawsuits from losing bettors across the country could spell trouble for a Boston-based, multibillion-dollar sports gambling giant.

On Wednesday, DraftKings, which is headquartered in downtown Boston and has a payroll of more than 5,000, was hit with the latest in a series of lawsuits from disgruntled customers who are citing state gambling laws in a bid to recoup their losses.

Backed by two high-powered consumer fraud firms, Michael Chan, a California man, has filed a class-action lawsuit against DraftKings in federal court in Boston.

Chan contends that he wagered and lost money on the DraftKings Predictions app, which allows users, among other things, to buy sports event contracts that pay out, or not, based on the outcome of a game or the performance of a certain player.

The lawsuit contends that the Predictions app is effectively an illegal sportsbook, designed to circumvent the sports betting bans in California and 15 other states.

“Mr. Chan was not informed by DraftKings that Predictions is an unlicensed sportsbook when he wagered and lost money on the app,” the lawsuit states.

That may not be as much of a stretch as it sounds. A federal judge in California has dismissed efforts by another class-action lawsuit to recoup gambling losses. But U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer kept open the door to a potential injunction, according to Courthouse News Service.

“In a technical sense, this case is about a class of losers,” Breyer noted in the order he issued on Wednesday, according to Courthouse News. “In a legal sense, this case is about games that were prohibited by the California Penal Code.”

A court injunction would halt DraftKings Predictions offerings in California as the issue of whether the app constitutes illegal sports betting is hashed out.

Contrarian Boston reached out to DraftKings for comment, but had not heard back by deadline.

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Caught in the spotlight’s glare: MassHousing CEO Chrystal Kornegay faces questions about her leadership as fraud scandal rocks state housing authority

By Scott Van Voorhis and Colman M. Herman

Last month, the Boston Globe Spotlight Team reported that the quasi-public Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency (MassHousing) had awarded $1.4 million to two developers who submitted bogus invoices.

The invoices listed the names of several subcontractors who later informed the Globe that they had not done the work.

The apparent fraud, for which the two developers were paid more than half a million dollars as part of a $1.4 million project, left the multi-unit buildings in Pittsfield and Worcester they were supposed to rehab in poor condition.

It doesn’t stop there. Months earlier, according to the Globe, Anthony Richards II, the MassHousing executive who awarded the two developers the money, got a sweetheart deal from them. He purchased a home in West Roxbury from the pair for $204,000 less than the original asking price. Richards failed to disclose the connection at the time, a likely violation of Massachusetts ethics laws.

This all went down on MassHousing CEO Chrystal Kornegay’s watch. But Kornegay got little attention in the Globe’s powerful, 4,300-word exposé, which is odd.

After all, Kornegay, who has headed the state housing authority since 2018, was herself aware of the questionable transaction nearly two years ago, according to the Globe’s own reporting.

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Defying common sense: A thug who allegedly played a key part in the brutal slaying of a Cambridge DPW worker could avoid a stiff sentence thanks to an eyebrow-raising decision by the state’s highest court

The alleged lookout in Cambridge DPW worker Xavier Bautista’s murder had a long and vicious rap sheet to his name before that fateful July 4th morning.

Rayquon Brown allegedly stood guard, gun in hand, as a gang of masked men confronted and fatally shot the 32-year-old father in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, The Port, leaving Bautista to die in a pool of blood in the pre-dawn darkness of Independence Day, police say.

Brown’s life had been one long crime spree to that point, with the 29-year-old Canton man having pled guilty to assault and battery on a pregnant woman, trafficking of deadly fentanyl, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, among other serious charges, court records reviewed by Contrarian Boston show.

Up until a few months ago, Brown’s three previous felonies, atop his alleged role in Bautista’s murder, would have put him in prison for at least a decade and a half as a Level 3 Armed Career Criminal.

Not anymore. In January, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in a key but little-known ruling, made it significantly harder for police and prosecutors to drop the hammer on hardened career criminals.

Thanks to the SJC decision, Brown now faces a minimum prison sentence of just three years, with prosecutors able to count only one of his felonies - not all three - in charging him as an Armed Career Criminal. That’s down from a minimum of 15 years behind bars that Brown would have been eligible for before the court ruling, when authorities could have used all three felonies to charge Brown as a Level 3 Armed Career Criminal.

If that sounds bad, it is, for the court’s reasoning defies common sense. For police and prosecutors to charge Brown as a Level 3 offender, under the new rules, he would have had to commit all three crimes sequentially, with no overlap between them.

That means Brown would have had the most orderly career of any criminal who ever lived. To face that much stiffer penalty, he would have had to, for example, beat his pregnant girlfriend and then go through months of court proceedings and be sentenced, before moving on to trafficking and repeating the whole process, with no overlap in the timeline of the cases.

To the court, the gap between crimes signals that the criminal in question had a chance to show remorse and reconsider his felonious lifestyle, but instead chose to keep on offending.

But someone living a chaotic life of crime is unlikely to commit felonies in such an orderly, step-by-step fashion. Certainly Brown didn’t. Court records reviewed by Contrarian Boston showed evidence of a chaotic decade before the murder of the Cambridge DPW worker.

While Brown committed three of the most serious offenses in a roughly sequential manner, the timelines and court proceedings in each case had the unfortunate habit of overlapping each other, ruining the neat symmetry demanded by the SJC.

One veteran prosecutor said that to convict someone as a Level 3 Armed Career Criminal, he sees the sense in the court requiring that the offenses all be tied to separate incidents.

Otherwise, police could trigger the stiffer Armed Career Criminal penalties by charging a suspect with several felonies stemming from a single incident.

But requiring a neat sequence of crimes, with no overlap? That makes no sense — unless the court is not a fan of minimum sentences in the first place.

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Time to get worried? AI giants are gobbling up more office and research space across the country, but not in Greater Boston

Some days it feels like the 1970s all over again, what with the crazy high prices, slow or no growth, chaos in Washington, and sour grapes all around.

The one bright spot — such as it is — has been the AI boom, which is single-handedly keeping the U.S. economy afloat with massive research and data center spending.

By contrast, the Massachusetts economy has been increasingly stuck in stagnation mode over the last few years and now lags the nation as a whole.

So it is definitely concerning news that Greater Boston is now seeing a drop in real estate activity by AI companies, even as they expand their footprints in other markets, a new report finds.

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Mayoral delusions: Wu’s happy talk about Boston as a low-crime oasis collides with reality as violent assaults and shootings spike downtown and residents plead for a police crackdown

The nation’s safest city sure doesn’t look so safe right now.

That noted criminal justice expert, Mayor Michelle Wu, repeatedly proclaimed Boston the “safest major city” in the country during her reelection campaign, a claim that rankled downtown residents dealing with an explosion of open-air narcotics use, drug dealing, and street crime.

Wu’s insistence that Boston is a low-crime oasis would be downright risible were the situation not so serious amid an explosion of summer violence, including a gruesome murder near Boston Common and a nearly 30 percent jump in assaults, per city crime stats.

A 27-year-old Bedford man’s bizarre rampage early Wednesday morning left one man dead near Boston Common, while coming close to seriously injuring a student near Chinatown, who was hit in the face with a metal pole.

Just a few weeks ago, Wu repeated her “safest major city” through a spokesperson in response to questions from the Boston Herald.

Since then, downtown Boston has seen five shootings, a stabbing and the murder next to the Common, which took place near the Boylston Street T station and the Emerson campus, said Rishi Shukla, the co-founder of the Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association.

Details of that homicide have not been released, but a brick and a pool of blood were spotted near the scene of the crime.

Overall, assaults in downtown Boston are up a staggering 27 percent this year through the middle of July compared to the same period in 2025, Shukla told Contrarian Boston, citing city crime stats reviewed by his organization.

Shukla is putting together another meeting of city, state and law enforcement officials to discuss the downtown crime situation, similar to the one held in the spring of 2025 that led to a noticeable, but ultimately temporary, drop in crime downtown.

“I know we are in a resource-constrained environment, but I don’t care,” Shukla said. “If you lose Boston Common and you lose downtown, you lose the city.”

From hero to zero in the blink of an eye: Top MassHousing exec goes from being lauded and helping advise the governor on Black empowerment to persona non grata in the wake of a devastating Globe expose

Well, that was fast.

Just a little over a month ago, MassHousing’s Tony Richards II was a hot commodity around town in state political and business circles.

An executive at MassHousing, Richards had made it onto the Boston Business Journal’s 40 under 40 list, was mentioned in write-ups about programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and was profiled in the Suffolk University Magazine, where he had earned a master’s degree in 2021.

As vice president for strategic community initiatives at the quasi-public state agency, Richards pulled down $255,000 and served on the Governor’s Advisory Council on Black Empowerment.

Everyone wanted a piece of Richards.

Now, in the wake of a devastating Boston Globe investigative story, people can’t get away fast enough from the once high-flying MassHousing exec, who recently resigned from the quasi-public state housing authority.

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Bipartisan media hypocrisy: A newly released documentary on the infamous eBay/Natick stalking case shows that companies touting progressive values can behave very badly toward the news media

Trump is taking heat for threatening to yank the licenses of ABC and other broadcasters, who refused to air his doozy of a prime-time “election security” speech.

But here’s something the mainstream media isn’t particularly eager to acknowledge: Progressives can get downright nasty too when the media does what it is supposed to do and reports facts that prove inconvenient to the powers that be.

Exhibit A? That would be the media’s coverage of the eBay stalking scandal. In 2019, Silicon Valley-based eBay’s corporate security team flew across the country, set up shop in a downtown Boston hotel, and then spent months tailing and terrorizing a Natick couple, Ina and David Steiner.

The eBay hit squad posted ads on Craigslist for sex parties at the Steiners’ house, sent a pig’s fetus to their suburban home, and surveilled and followed the couple as they drove about town on various errands, among many other things.

The Steiners’ offense? Their trade publication, EcommerceBytes, had the gall to run articles critical of the e-tailer that pointed out, among other things, that the now-former eBay CEO had built a replica of his favorite Big Apple bar on the company’s campus and that he earned 152 times what the average eBay employee took home.

The case is back in the news with the release of “Whatever it Takes,” a documentary about the shocking 2019 case that has begun streaming on Amazon Prime.

The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and other mainstream outlets have treated it simply as a straightforward story about the corporate abuse of power, though the Times, in its story on the documentary, gets an honorable mention for a humorous riff on eBay’s founding motto, “people are basically good.”

But the mainstream media coverage has all but ignored that eBay portrayed itself as a paragon of progressive values and culture, with a billionaire founder, Pierre Omidyar, who reaped all sorts of great press posing as a savior of independent journalism.

Just take eBay’s now-former CEO Devin Wenig, whose infamous order to his corporate security chief to “do whatever it takes” to silence the Steiners and their doggedly independent digital news site became the title of the documentary.

If you think Wenig was some Trumpster, ranting about the fake news, think again.

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Editor’s note: Welcome to another segment of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” now a regular Contrarian Boston feature. Today, we dive into the Trump administration’s decision to issue subpoenas to journalists at The New York Times. The move came after the Times broke the story that the Secret Service had raised security concerns about Trump’s new Qatari-gifted Boeing 747-8, forcing a high-profile change in the president’s travel plans. We also dig into Trump’s threats to pull the license of broadcasters for not carrying his doozy of an “election security” speech, and offer our shock at how the World Cup turned out to be a hit in Greater Boston, defying gloomy predictions by the local press of chaos and gridlock. Last but not least, we offer our very own rants and raves.

Emily Rooney was joined by Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, The Boston Globe’s Lylah M. Alphonse, editor of Globe Rhode Island and Globe New Hampshire, and Scott Van Voorhis, editor and founder of Contrarian Boston.

And thanks to Tonia Magras, principal owner of Hull Bay Productions, who produced today’s piece. Tonia was the supervising producer for “Beat the Press” when it was on GBH and is the principal owner of Hull Bay Productions.

If you would rather use a different platform, you can also watch “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” on Contrarian Boston’s YouTube channel.

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Questions mount in wake of Cambridge DPW worker’s tragic murder: Local mainstream media silent on defund-the-police activists pushing ShotSpotter bans in Cambridge and other cities across the country

It would be easy to dismiss the ShotSpotter ban as just more People’s Republic of Cambridge flakiness, yet the city’s decision did not take place in a vacuum.

Rather, the Cambridge City Council’s controversial May vote came amid a national campaign by anti-police activists that has pressured cities across the nation to ditch the gunshot detection system, according to documents reviewed by Contrarian Boston.

Just how much of a role groups tied to the Black Lives Matter movement played in the city’s decision to unplug ShotSpotter is a relevant question in the wake of Cambridge DPW worker Xavier Bautista’s fatal shooting in the lonely, early morning hours of July 4th.

Inexplicably, it’s also a question that The Boston Globe, GBH, and other local mainstream media outlets aren’t exactly rushing to examine, either.

Cambridge police say they might have been able to respond sooner had city councilors not voted to pull the plug on the gunshot detection system a few months before.

Instead, a pedestrian found the 32-year-old father lying in a pool of blood at around 5:24 a.m., an hour after he was confronted by a group of masked men and fatally shot.

“He might well have been found alive if a gunshot detection system—a system that helped me solve a 2015 murder case in Everett—had not been dismantled,” veteran prosecutor David Solet, who is running to unseat Middlesex County DA Marian Ryan, said during his campaign kickoff event on Tuesday.

There is a lot to dig into here, yet local media coverage of the ShotSpotter controversy has followed a predictable pattern. Stories cite ShotSpotter opponents questioning the system’s accuracy in detecting gunshots, often seemingly without any effort to scrutinize the claims.

Then a police spokesperson or two is quoted in response.

Completely unreported by the local mainstream press? The push to ban ShotSpotter is part of a coast-to-coast campaign that has the fingerprints of the Black Lives Matter movement, according to documents reviewed by Contrarian Boston.

DeRay Mckesson, an early leader of Black Lives Matter, now earns more than $236,000 as executive director of We The Protestors Inc., a New York-based nonprofit that emerged out of BLM.

The organization spent $8.5 million in 2024 alone on a series of research projects and campaigns, including Campaign Zero, which DeRay Mckesson also heads, per IRS filings reviewed by Contrarian Boston.

A “project” of We The Protestors, Campaign Zero launched the Ban ShotSpotter campaign in 2022 and now claims to have pushed 50 cities across the country to cancel contracts, including Cambridge.

If you are wondering where these groups are coming from, We The Protestors describes itself as “committed to a world beyond policing and the carceral system.”

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