A1 Vellucci On The Spot

Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci resigned his job with the state Department of Corporations and Taxation last month, but the controversy surrounding his alleged "no-show" spot on the state payroll has continued up to election time. The affair has prompted an investigation and disciplinary action by tax officials, a feud among Boston area newspapers and cries of foul play from both supporters and opponents of the 63-year-old mayor.

Through it all, Vellucci has remained serene, confident he can turn yet another political crisis to his advantage.

At first, the report in The Boston Globe that Vellucci took an unauthorized leave of absence from his state tax department job appeared to deal a serious blow to his chances of winning a 12th consecutive term on the City Council. The Globe's "Spotlight Team" of reporters trailed Vellucci for a day and reported he was actually showing visitors around Cambridge, although he previously said he would be in Everett on state business. The report prompted Vellucci to resign the job with what appeared a weak protestation of innocence. A departmental investigation followed, resulting last week in the five-day suspension of Ralph Antonelli, Vellucci's supervisor, for failing "to report and supervise properly Alfred Vellucci, an employee under (his) supervision."

But Vellucci's supporters rallied quickly. While Vellucci has stated he does not know why Antonelli was supended, some of his supporters hint the department's action was little more than a slap on the wrist, a face-saving move designed to end the political firestorm as quickly as possible. They contend that the supervisor did not deserve a suspension but the reprimand was an easy way to avert a long investigation. Two weeks ago The Real Paper--like Vellucci, a staunch advocate of rent control--lashed out at the Globe report as "sleazy journalism." The "Spotlight Team," it noted, trailed Vellucci for only one day and failed to report that he legitimately signed out for the day before returning to Cambridge. The Real Paper discounted the Globe report as an easy wedge for the city's big real estate interests to hammer into chinks in the mayor's supposedly shining armor.

Still, the suspension of Antonelli lends support to the Globe's conclusion that Vellucci behaved improperly. Owen L. Clarke, state commissioner of corporations and taxation, said yesterday the suspension of Antonelli does not necessarily imply Vellucci violated the law.

The state allowed elected officials to take time off to attend to their official duties, and records indicate that over the past several years Vellucci signed out properly before taking his leaves, he said. The suspension of Antonelli stems from a charge that he did not supervise Vellucci's activities properly, Clarke said. The two most important questions--whether the suspension was levied for just cause, and if so, if it was related to wrongdoing on Vellucci's part will not be answered until the department holds a hearing for Antonelli. That will not take place until after Tuesday's election.

Vellucci defended Antonelli in an interview this week, saying he does not understand why the department suspended him. "He knew where I was; he did nothing wrong," Vellucci said. He would not, however, attribute any political motivations to the move.

Elsewhere in the department the suspension is a touchy subject. Antonelli is in the hospital and could not be reached for comment this week, but Thomas McDonough, head of the unit where Antonelli and Vellucci worked, stresses that he does not want the department's investigation to become an electoral football. "Whatever we have done--and that includes disciplinary action--has been in the best interests of the Tax Department. It's a dead issue," he says.

Other sources in the department confirm that Vellucci was frequently absent from the office, but do not know whether the absences were legitimate. The mayor frequently signed out for the day to attend to city business--especially duties attached to the Cambridge School Committee, of which he is chairman--but the time sheets that record each employee's comings and goings are not open to the public without the employee's consent.

Vellucci, however, is more than open on this point. The day after the Globe story ran, he showed reporters from The Herald-American the time sheets for the day in question. According to the records, Vellucci had legally signed out that day at 10 a.m.--long before the "Spotlight Team" placed him in Cambridge. Moreover, Vellucci claims he never received any money for the numerous leaves of absence he has taken in the past. Records show he collected less than $12,000 from the state last year and "This year it won't amount to $5000." he said in an interview this week. Vellucci's job normally pays $17,000 per year; the mayor's post is unsalaried.

Richard Kindleberger, a member of the "Spotlight Team," insists that the Globe story accurately represented Vellucci's activities. He maintains Vellucci told the reporters he would be in Everett the entire day, although Vellucci says he went out for only a short time and finished his state business before signing out. More important, he insists Vellucci let them know he would be working the entire day and signed out only after he realized the reporters might be checking on him. "It could be that later he decided, 'Well, I'd better cover my ass,' so he signed out--but it seemed to us if he was signed out beforehand, he would have said so at the time," Kindleberger says.

Kindleberger allows that the Spotlight report does not support subsequent allegations that Vellucci had a complete "no-show" position. "We're not saying that he never went to work, just that he took unauthorized time off," he says. The question of how much unauthorized time Vellucci took is a difficult one--he says only that "sources indicate it happened fairly often." Unfortunately, the fact that Vellucci was frequently absent from the office does not prove much, for without access to the time sheets it is almost impossible to know whether any of the absences were authorized. And if, as Kindleberger implies, Vellucci could alter the time sheets after the fact, to "cover his ass," it may never be possible to answer the question.

Yet despite Vellucci's explanations, and despite the Globe team's lack of documented evidence, the fact of Vellucci's resignation may be enough to convict him in the minds of many voters. Dealing with a public that has by experience learned to equate resignations with cover-ups, Vellucci might have lost badly-needed votes by his seeming reluctance to ride out the storm. But if the post-Watergate political mentality costs the mayor some support, his grasp of conventional political wisdom will probably save him quite a bit more--by resigning early in the game, Vellucci undoubtedly kept the bad publicity from getting out of hand, and prevented his trial in the press. Give the voters a month or two to forget, the reasoning goes, and even the worst publicity will fade away.

The strategic argument is a good one, but Vellucci cites a more practical reason for leaving the post: "I wanted to anyway." Citing a state regulation that elected officials who also hold state jobs may not retire with benefits and still remain employed by the city, he maintains that the Globe story merely prompted him to speed up his planned exit from the department. "The only thing I could do was resign; I couldn't retire," he says. With the family insurance business, his salary as a councilor and other interests to fall back, Vellucci says the state job was expendable. "If I was dependent on that job for survival, I would have fought it to the end--and I would have won," he says. He notes that a month before the Globe story ran he switched his insurance coverage from the state plan to the city's--in preparation, he says, for his exit from the state payroll.

But if, as Vellucci tells it, he was able to give up the state job almost casually last month, that was not how he obtained it in the first place. Vellucci enjoys relating the story of how, in 1949, he decided to sell his small family restaurant in East Cambridge (the mayor claims among his culinary achievements the invention of the hero sandwich roll), and then went looking for a job. Naturally, the first place for a young politician to look in those days was the State House, so he finessed his way into an interview with then-Gov. Paul Dever. Dever, the story goes, was so impressed with Vellucci's reputation as a rising political star (he had already made a name for himself as a perennial School Committee candidate) that he arranged the tax department job on the spot." Paul Dever was a fine man," Vellucci concludes.

The story may impress Vellucci's supporters with the extent of his political connections, but to many current observers it smacks of a style of political wheeler-dealing that was supposed to have vanished decades ago. When the Boston Phoenix ran the story in Vellucci's own words last June, it only gave credence to the impression some people had of the mayor: that despite his self-proclaimed independent label, Vellucci is a politician born and bred in the ways of the precinct clubhouse. Vellucci, of course, denies the assertion. "I was given that job, sure, but I had to qualify for it. I had to pass the Civil Service test. It was no real gift," he says. But the impression has lingered, and the Globe report only strenghtened it.

Vellucci, however, has made a career of capitalizing even on his bad breaks, of making political hay out of the worst turns of fate. And this year, in what he says is his last campaign, Vellucci proved true to form--his handling of the near-scandal, he insists, will actually gain him votes in the long run. The key word is publicity, and Al Vellucci obviously knows how to use it.

Pointing to the crowds jammed into his son's insurance-office-turned-campaign-headquarters, waiting for marching orders, the white-haired field marshall boasts, "These people never used to come out to work for me, but they do this year. They used to take me for granted, but now when they hear maybe they shouldn't, they come out." The publicity, he maintains, had a reverse effect from what most people expected. "It just generated a lot of people to come out. I just couldn't generate any interest the past few years. But now I'm getting a lot of moral support, and I think it's going to turn into votes."

Vellucci's logic may or may not be true--certainly, most of the campaign workers in his office that night cited the mayor's stand for rent control and against condominium conversion, instead of an urge to defend his integrity, as motives for supporting him. But other Cambridge politicians are obviously conscious of the possible ill effects of trying to promote the scandal, and it has not become a campaign issue. Cambridge Councilor Walter J. Sullivan, a long-time Vellucci ally who has now turned against the mayor, urging voters not to vote for Vellucci for any of the spots on the City Council, sums up the mood best. "That's a personal thing with Al. There's no sense in making a big thing out of it. I wouldn't do that to a guy when he's down--that's not my type of business," he says. Needless to say, it is also not good politics--kicking a man when he is down has traditionally been one of the best ways to get kicked back on election day, and Sullivan and the others know it.

And so Vellucci keeps campaigning, confident that he has put the Globe story, the furor over his past, and even the fact of Antonelli's suspension, behind him. Shrewdly generating the confident image, he greets reporters with left hand extended--"bursitis, shaking too many hands with the other one" has claimed his right arm, he says. Predicting "a bigger vote than last time, for sure," he dismisses newspaper reports of his impending political death as greatly exaggerated. "The newspapers know nothing about politics. This is street politics, and they don't teach that at the School of Government at Harvard," he boasts.

Vellucci might be wrong in his political predictions, but he is certainly right about one thing: the press has not been able to hurt him as badly as most people thought. Whatever the merits of the Globe report, he managed to neutralize its impact with a strategically timed resignation, letting columnists on both side of the issue keep his name in the spotlight with harmless but well-read arguments about innocence or guilt.

Milking the press for all it is worth; win or lose, that is a game Al Vellucci plays very well.