12

Dorchester and The People First

The halting pathway to becoming a better organizer had already begun prior to the march in Lowell. Throughout 1969 my bifurcated life had spun on. I was organizing and participating in ever more militant protests, and at the same time, I continued to seek ways to spread the antiwar movement into the communities whose families were paying the steepest price, the blue-collar and low-income neighborhoods that continued to send their young men into the machine of war.

I had helped convince teams of student activists to move to the blue-collar cities of Lowell, Lynn, Worcester, and Fall River. That was how Ira and his team had gone to Lowell. Miles Rapoport led a team to Lynn where, in one of the more humorous moments of those bleak years, they passed out leaflets to high school students reprinting an R. Crumb comic. They were arrested and charged with sedition (under a law dating back to the early 1800s) and corrupting the morals of minors. The case was thrown out by an angry judge who declared it should never have been brought, and they continued to organize both high school students and local college students.

Overall, the strategy of focusing on state and community colleges began to pay off. When I wasn’t leading demonstrations and the occasional riot, I was meeting with students, especially returning Vietnam vets, at Boston State, the new U Mass Boston, Quincy Community College, and Quinsigamond Community College. I had been hopeful that students in these colleges would lead us back to their working-class neighborhoods and indeed, that began to happen. Soon I was in taverns and on street corners, talking about the war and how to exist in this fucked-up world. Now those conversations were with people who had never dreamed of attending Harvard or, often, any college at all.

One muggy August evening in 1969, I stood on a corner of Ronan Park in Dorchester. The park was on the top of a hill, from which one could see all the way to the harbor. Around me were a group of young and restless residents of the neighborhood.

They felt the rebelliousness that had seized so many under the age of twenty-five. Joints were passed around; the smoke hung in the hot evening air. A raw energy pulsed through the group. The conversation jumped all around, music and dope and the war and the “fucking cops.” Buddy O’Connor, talking fast, always moving, jiggling, his narrow face framed by long, wispy brown hair and his younger brother Mikey, golden handsome in leather jacket and goatee, wanted to know if I was free that weekend. They were getting a group of friends together for what they had heard was going to be a “freakin’ great” free concert in Woodstock, New York. “Come with us,” urged Buddy. “All the bands are going to be there. A whole group of us are going to go right after work and convoy all night. Come on. It’s going to be a trip.”

I passed. I liked the music, but I didn’t have the time to go traipsing around to a concert in New York. I had more organizing to do.

This group had reached out to us through Seamus Glynn, a Dorchester student at UMass Boston. Seamus, a river of red hair down to his waist, skin as white as lace, whip smart, had been active against the war. He heard of the endless conflict with the police going on in Ronan Park and talked with acquaintances there, telling them about us.

Since then, I had been dropping by regularly to talk with the Ronan Park kids. Their fathers were electricians, plumbers, butchers in supermarket meat departments, construction workers, and welders. Their mothers were nurses or telephone operators. They all came from large families and were always introducing me to siblings. The guys habitually wore leather jackets and bell-bottoms. Many had short beards, some ponytails. The girls also wore bell-bottoms, or short shorts and often psychedelic swirled t-shirts. Their world revolved around music, their friends, and dope.

They were furious that a few cops were forever chasing them from the park and from their street corners. They hated the war. Some were vets. Some were just released from “juvie,” Most still lived in their parents’ homes, feeling cramped, stultified. There was a constant, repressed anger. They were determined that they would not become their parents.

Soon they came with me to the Old Mole offices on Brookline Street where they produced a leaflet calling on kids to stand up to the cops, to fight police harassment. I helped them produce the leaflet but insisted that they write the content. “It needs to be yours, your words.” Then we discussed how they could organize, how they could be part of the rebellious movement rocking the country. They thought it sounded cool but first they had a concert in Woodstock.

A year later, Amy and I had moved to Dorchester to live and organize.

Dorchester was the largest neighborhood in Boston proper, home to a solid core of working-class families, living in the traditional three-deckers that predominated. It was as tribal as the rest of Boston in those days, with distinct neighborhoods. One was unlikely to say, “I come from Dorchester.” White working-class families would more often say they came from St. Peter’s, or St. Mark’s, or one of the other Catholic parishes that had been the core of their lives for decades. Or if you were not Catholic, you might describe yourself as living in Uphams Corner, Savin Hill, Fields Corner, Meetinghouse Hill, Mount Bowdoin, Neponset, or any one of the fifteen neighborhoods in Dorchester.

In 1969 Dorchester was experiencing rapid change. The areas around Franklin Park that had been a predominately Jewish neighborhood for the last sixty years were now being emptied of white families as African American families moved in. Real money could be made by turning the neighborhood over, with older residents being frightened into white flight by real estate brokers, bankers, and speculators so that they would reduce the selling price of their homes, and Black families being charged a premium to buy them.

Throughout Dorchester, white families were thinking the unthinkable: picking up and moving south to Quincy, Weymouth, Brockton and Abbington. The Catholic parishes, still strong, were losing their appeal for younger people. The old order that had held sway for decades was fraying. Older white working-class families had grown up in Dorchester with a set of certainties. They would vote for the candidates that the local Democratic Party ward leaders told them to vote for—and they could expect to be taken care of. They could expect that their sons would get jobs in the police or fire departments, other city positions, or the utility or phone company; or in the building trades, at the post office, at Gillette, or one of the insurance companies downtown, jobs with pensions and benefits. Their daughters could expect to become teachers, secretaries, nurses, and directory assistance operators—and mothers.

Now everything was changing. Their sons were coming back from a war that they did not understand, coming home with an unusual bitterness. The political machine was declining and, while still asking for their votes, was not providing access to solid jobs. The economy was uncertain. Recent mayors seemed more interested in urban renewal and placating downtown business interests than in the politics embodied for so long by James Curley, under whom, as my friend Marty Hanley once said, “It was one for the people and one for James Michael—and that was one more than the people have ever gotten before or since!”

In many parks and street corners, each weekend brought running skirmishes between kids who just wanted to be left alone to party with their friends, drink beer, smoke joints, and listen to music, and a segment of cops who felt it was their duty to rigidly enforce laws against underage drinking, public drinking, and dope smoking. An increasing number of the police who patrolled Dorchester had moved to the suburbs, coming back to what they derogatorily referred to as “the jungle” (even the white parts of the city). In past decades, the men who patrolled the streets of Dorchester had lived in Dorchester, were part of the parish, were rooted in the community. It used to be that when a Dorchester cop saw a Dorchester kid causing trouble, he would first haul them home to their parents. Now most of the cops didn’t know the kid’s family and simply hauled him to jail.

The young people of Ronan Park continued to clash repeatedly with the police. They were furious at the continual harassment, especially from one clueless motorcycle cop, Vinnie, who they took great delight in taunting, as well as claiming that his brother was a “mobbed-up arsonist.” They and Seamus Glynn, who had first brought us to Dorchester, were the heart of our initial efforts. Buddy, the eldest of three brothers, was fast talking and rebellious. He understood class and lack of opportunity. He was torn between a desire to simply smoke and sell dope and a desire to make change. Seamus and Buddy rapidly helped us launch a new organization that we named The People First (TPF), ironically the same initials as the Boston Police Tactical Patrol Force, the toughest of the cops.

Our little band of organizers spent time hanging with kids on street corners, talking with vets outside variety stores, talking about the war in veterans’ posts, knocking on doors, sitting in people’s kitchens. We had no set organizing methodology. But we did attract a growing and eclectic group. Soon we had a headquarters on Bowdoin Street, once the thriving commercial heart of Meeting House Hill and St. Peter’s parish, now with only a few active stores and many boarded up vacant storefronts.

Amy and I first moved into a house on Bloomfield Street and started a commune. It was not long before it was a disaster. We had our group of organizers living communally and soon some of the most dysfunctional young people joined us, often stoned and occasionally violent. Amy and I left that ill-fated experiment to move into a triple-decker just down the street from Ronan Park. I took a job working the late shift, pumping gas at an all-night Sunoco station on Gallivan Boulevard. My real job, of course, continued to be organizing in Dorchester and with the larger antiwar effort.

As we talked with people in the neighborhood, we realized that the lack of a real grocery store was an issue. Why couldn’t we create our own food distribution system, one that rejected profit and instead was a co-op? Such ventures were starting up in affluent counter cultural enclaves. Why not in a blue-collar neighborhood?

We started a small, fast-growing food cooperative. Each week we would get up to be at the Chelsea wholesale vegetable market by 5 a.m.; drive back to Dorchester loaded with fresh vegetables, bread, and other staples; and lay them out in the storefront. Co-op members came and purchased their food at drastic discounts. Everyone had to contribute a portion of one day a month as a volunteer. Soon we had young mothers and older women coming into the storefront for the food and to debate ideas and politics with us. Parochial schoolgirls from St. Peter’s in their plaid skirt school uniforms regularly helped out. Welfare mothers started to depend on the co-op and on us. Soon Donna Finn, petite in body but large in presence with a personality matching her fiery red hair, was a fixture in the store front. A group of women who had husbands, sons and loved ones in prison, began a discussion group, often led by Donna. In another corner, by long loaves of Italian bread, you might find an argument going on about how to best end the war. In the back a group of tenants would be composing a leaflet targeting an absentee landlord who refused to fix up their property. Dusty Maguire, a recently returned Vietnam vet would race up on his ever-present bicycle in cutoff shorts, bearing the news of the most recent outrages, determined to organize against the war. Soon Dusty had formed a local group of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The storefront hummed and buzzed, and soon those less marginal, older, and deeply curious residents could not stop themselves from dropping by to check out the strange happenings in the recently vacant but now busy storefront.

TPF had no real structure. It had no formal members. We published a sporadic newspaper of the same name. We brought Dorchester residents to antiwar demonstrations.

We were denounced by the established community leadership. Over time some of them began to open up to us even as others were convinced that we represented everything that was going wrong with the country and the neighborhood.

Ira Arlook, relocating from Lowell, worked with two well-established leaders from the Savin Hill neighborhood, Jim Canny and Peg Moran, to organize a community meeting about the war with Howard Zinn, a well-known Boston University antiwar professor, as the speaker. Many in the packed hall supported the war, but they were willing to listen in part because of the respect so many had for Jim and Peg. Jim was the head of the local neighborhood association and Peg was the driving force behind the local health clinic. Both had turned against the war. Peg and her son participated in antiwar protests where her husband, a Boston police detective, would be working the other side.

In less than two years, TPF became part of the political and social landscape of the community, albeit somewhat of an outlier. Ira and Donna Finn were part of the first task force formed by UMass Boston as it worked with the community to plan the new campus on Columbia Point. The group of women with loved ones in prison formed a prison support group that would outlast TPF. The storefront became a meeting place for kids and the rebellious of all ages.

I was particularly drawn to the returning veterans and was welcomed into their community. We often met at taverns to discuss the war, their experiences, the challenges of adjusting to being back, or sometimes just to drink beer, talk about sports and music and their wives and girlfriends. Many times, they wanted to know about the antiwar movement, why I did what I did, and if I had been in the military. They often thought the story of my predraft physical was hilarious; after all they knew that scene all too well; they remembered the day they reported to their physical in the same South Boston army base. Sometimes they wanted to have deep metaphysical discussions, what it meant for America not to win a war, how to think about what they had been a part of, how to honor the sacrifices of so many of their best friends.

The evening is blustery, dark, and cold. The few of us out walking are blown like sail boats being driven onto a reef. I am walking across Columbia Road in Upham’s Corner to keep an appointment arranged on a street corner several days before. I can see the neon lights twinkling in the small window of my destination calling me to warmth and light—and a meeting with a small group of vets who all work together at the local utility company. This tavern is where they are to be found most evenings—and it is a tavern not a bar. Bars serve women and men. Taverns, including ones like Reilly’s, which is attached to a bar, are exclusively for men. I pass O’Brien’s Liquors, pass the closed Strand Theatre, and arrive at my destination. As I open the door the light spills out onto the darkened street. Framed in the brightness is a large man standing inside the open door, his right hand pulled back into a fist ready to punch me. I stand silently and look at him. I realize the whole tavern is quiet, watching what is happening. The man facing me lowers his fist, turns around, and the whole establishment breaks out into catcalls and laughter as he slowly walks over to the bar, puts his head down onto his folded left arm and with the other, starts slowly pounding the polished wood, repeating in a despairing voice, “Just my fucking luck, just my dumb fucking luck… .”

I say nothing. I have no idea what is happening. The place is an uproar. I locate the guys I am to see, who are also roaring with laughter. They quickly rise from their round table in the corner to offer me congratulatory whacks on the back and tell me the guy sitting despondent at the bar, head in his hands, will stand me a beer.

They quickly fill me in. The guy at the door had taken a $5 bet that he would slug the next guy who came through the door regardless of who it was. I was the next guy. In a remarkable miscalculation, he decided that I—the large, husky, young man standing framed in the dark, wearing a leather jacket—was too tough to mess with. Ironically, I was probably the only person to walk through that door that evening whom he could have hit with complete impunity. But appearances count, and I looked as tough and as serious as these young guys who fought in Vietnam, who now make a place for me in their circle at their habitual table in the tavern, welcoming me into their battle-tested company.

Jimmy Kelly was typical of the best of the returned veterans I met in Dorchester. Smart, loyal, fearless, and abused by the country’s leaders over and over again. I met Jimmy one evening outside of the Geneva Street Spa. He was sitting on a milk carton. Jimmy had jet-black hair and startling blue eyes. He sees me passing out a leaflet about the war and stands up, says, “Sure, man” and then reels off a string of initials and words that I can barely decipher as they come tumbling out. “FTA coup qualified Dinky dau FUBAR BOHICA, yeah FTA!” I understood that FTA meant “Fuck the Army” and sat down to chat with him. His story was not atypical. I hope I remember it accurately: into the marines right after high school, enlisted with his best friend, long tour of duty in Nam. His best friend was the radio man and like so many radio men was killed, dying beside Jimmy. So, Jimmy re-ups for a second tour and insists on being the radio man. Humps his way through battle after battle. Finally begins to ask what this is all for and for that, gets disciplined. Ends up serving time in the brig. Hates the politicians that sent him and his friends to fight the wrong war in the wrong place in the wrong way. Now home, married, expecting a kid, and starting work at UPS, he would join our efforts and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I always think of Jimmy when I think of the best Americans. Honest, direct, courageous.

As impressed as I was by so many of these smart young Dorchester men and women, I also encountered many who bounced along on the edge of violence and a rage that would inevitably destroy them. I would come home stunned at the waste, the unbelievable waste, of so much promise. Tragedies abounded. For example, there were two young men from Meetinghouse Hill who had been peripherally involved in TPF, both strong, vibrant, and fucked up. They were the closest of buddies, inseparable. Both fathers were butchers at a Stop & Shop, and they fully expected to follow in their footsteps. One night they are playing cards and tripping on some powerful hallucinogenic cocktail washed down with copious alcohol. One thinks the other is cheating. The argument sends them to more drugs and more alcohol and stokes more hallucinatory anger. One grabs a shotgun from behind a closet door and “blew the other way.” In the morning, the survivor not only had to face a lifetime in prison but also the overwhelming guilt of murdering his best friend and for no reason at all.

So many people, so much talent, so many unrealized dreams, locked in a desperate struggle to just get through the day, through the week. It was not surprising that so many young people, especially the ones drawn to us, wanted a way out, wanted a different life. Feisty, creative, spirited, they were willing to march against the war, drop everything and head for the summer mud fields of Woodstock, and get up early to drive to Chelsea’s wholesale food depot. They were excited about learning how to put out their own newspaper and spreading it all over Dorchester. They engaged in numerous small acts of disobedience and confrontation. When the police insisted that they leave a park, more often than not they refused. They were wild and rebellious, and TPF was their way to express exactly how far they were willing to go.

Steadily more Dorchester folks, especially young ones joined in with TPF. Their parents told them not to go near us. The cops warned them. Still, they came and helped mount campaigns against high utility rates, and tackled absentee slum landlords. They worked with us to organize forums and marches against the war. But in a surprise to me and the other organizers, the real heart of what we did became the risky campaign to take on Jerome Troy, the chief justice of the Dorchester District Court. And that was driven completely by the young of Dorchester who refused to surrender to either fear or complacency.

I had never heard of Judge Troy before moving to Dorchester. Then we encountered kids who had been hauled before him and been shaken down by the bondsman in cahoots with the judge. We even heard from a few of the police who were furious that violent offenders could buy their way back to the streets. It was common knowledge that if you secured the services of the right bail bondsman, paid him the amount quoted, you could walk free. The word on the street was that murder cost “twenty-five big ones.” For minor offenses you might have to provide a service for the judge. Troy thought nothing of forcing construction workers to do work on his home. As he came in to work, he would stop in at the stores near the courthouse in Codman Square, without paying, taking whatever pastry or product struck his fancy, as if he were the king of Dorchester.

Often a mother receiving welfare appeared before him; perhaps her child was truant, perhaps she was in a legal dispute with a landlord. Judge Troy frequently demanded that the mother tell him the name and location of the father of her child. He would then issue a bench warrant for his arrest for nonsupport. If the mother refused, or did not know where the father was living, it was not unusual for Judge Troy to cite the woman for contempt of court and have her fined or locked up for several days, the consequences for her young children be damned.

As the Boston Globe would headline in 1973: “From a poor beginning, he progressed to two houses, yacht, Cadillac and frequent vacations in 10 years on the bench.”¹

For the young in Dorchester, Troy stood for all authority—corrupt, arbitrary, and not worthy of their respect. At a series of meetings, Buddy and his wilder, youngest brother Mikey argued for launching a campaign.

“C’mon,” Buddy argued, “Troy sucks. He is everything we are opposed to. We have to take him on.”

A few others quietly voiced their fears.

“Troy can send any of us away and no one will stop him.”

“He is too powerful. He has the cops in his pocket. We aren’t strong enough.”

Buddy, Seamus, and Donna Finn were not persuaded. “We need to put him on trial. Okay, we cannot try him in a court of law, but we can try him in the people’s court.”

“We cannot let him scare us. That’s what is so fucked up. Everyone being scared by Troy and his buddies. It’s way past time for a change.”

After several chaotic meetings, it was clear that most of our folks were willing to tackle Troy. Once the decision was made, the news that we dared to take on Troy spread rapidly, crackling through the community.

When we first launched our campaign against Troy, we did not understand that in the 180-year history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, no judge had ever been removed by a popular campaign. In Massachusetts a judge could be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate—and with Troy being a product of the Democratic cabal that controlled the legislature, that was not going to happen. The governor could remove a judge but that required the consent of the Governor’s Council, and the members of the council were all old cronies of Troy’s.

Still the young people of Dorchester were determined to do something. We passed out literature. At first everyone was amazed at our audacity. They fully expected that Judge Troy would have us all hauled before him and sent away. When that did not happen, we began to gather significant support.

One day as I was arranging tomatoes, lettuce, and cantaloupes for the food co-op, two middle-aged men in fedoras, suits, and heavy overcoats came into our dingy storefront, looking like noir detectives out of the 1940s. The smaller of the two never said a word. The other, heavily muscled, chewed on a toothpick and asked questions. No names were given. He wanted to know how seriously we wanted to get Troy. I explained that I thought Troy was the embodiment of the corruption of American justice. Suddenly he turned on me: “You think you know Jerry Troy? You don’t know nothing!”

I was slightly taken aback and replied, “Okay, I am willing to learn more. How would I learn more?”

“You sure you have the balls to take him on? Will you stick with it or when it starts to involve important people, will you cut and run?”

I answered, “I don’t care who his pals are. I have never backed down from a fight in my life, and I am sure as hell not doing so now. We’re going to get him, and if you’re a friend of his, it’s too bad.”

That produced a loud emphatic snort. “You really don’t know shit, do you? I know all there is to know about Jerry Troy, that fucker. You want to learn more, you meet me at ten p.m. at the Venetian Gardens two nights from now, and I will tell you about Jerry Troy. Be there.”

And with that the two of them left.

The Venetian Gardens was a dive of a bar between Upham’s Corner and the South End near the old meat-packing area. Seedy and dimly lit, it stayed open late. I was a little concerned at first. Was this some sort of setup?

But in the end my curiosity was too much. I learned the story of how Troy became a judge, and I made the most unlikely ally and friend I could ever have imagined.

Martin J. Hanley was a remarkable man. He had started out in politics with Mayor James Michael Curley, whom he idolized with a clear eye. In 1958 when John Thompson, the “Iron Duke” from Ludlow in Western Mass, became the speaker, Marty was his “bag man,” the one collecting the bribes and payoffs. He was given the position of commissioner of small loans.

In 1962, as Marty told it, the Yankee establishment, determined to roll back the rising tide of Irish political power, created the Massachusetts Crime Commission. One of their major targets was Thompson, and the best route to get him was through Marty. They indicted Marty on forty-seven counts of bribery and conspiracy. (Marty would say to me, “I have committed many crimes, just not the ones they charged me with.”) They also indicted Thompson, forcing his resignation in 1964.² Thompson died before coming to trial. Attorney General Edward Brooke, who would ride the Crime Commission all the way to the US Senate, continued to press Hanley to strike a deal. In 1966, Marty proposed that he would testify before the grand jury if, and only if, he would be allowed to share everything he knew including about those in the Massachusetts Senate. A document was written up codifying this agreement and placed in a safety deposit box at the US Trust Company. Hanley’s attorney, Robert Muse, was given one key and the assistant attorney general Herbert Travers the other.³ The box could only be opened with both keys.

When Marty went before the grand jury, he was betrayed. No testimony was allowed about those in the Senate. Furious, Marty repudiated his testimony knowing that he would face many years in prison. He defended himself in what became the longest lasting court proceedings in the history of Massachusetts. Marty became a committed truth teller determined to wreak vengeance or seek redemption; I was never clear which.

Of course, I knew none of that when I met him in the smoky, dank Venetian. The lights were low and the place almost empty as I greeted the two men from the storefront. I still was completely uncertain as to who they were and what to expect.

We walked to the back of the bar and sat at a grungy table. Marty, shedding his coat and taking off a hat to reveal his shiny, shaven head, ordered a whiskey and a beer chaser, and then immediately launched into a long soliloquy, posing questions and then answering them at great length. I didn’t need to say much.

“How did Jerry Troy get to be a judge? He bought his judgeship by paying twenty-five thousand dollars to Sonny McDonough who controlled the Governor’s Council. Outgoing governor Volpe appointed Troy with four minutes left in his term as part of a deal engineered by ‘Sonny.’ How do I know this? Simple, I arranged it. I set the amount and negotiated the deal for Jerry Troy, that ungrateful son of a bitch.” The shadows played across Marty’s large head as he reared back and said, “You want to know about Jerry Troy? I will tell you about Jerry Troy.”

Marty then went on at length about Troy’s corruption. It became clear that he had been a pal of Troy, but somewhere during Marty’s trials and tribulations, Troy had proved an ungrateful and disloyal friend. Now Marty would do everything he could to bring the man down.

Armed with information from Marty, we released a special edition of TPF, our episodic newspaper, blaring the scandal that was Troy from the very first day he became a judge. The response was raucous. Our audacity amazed many and inspired more to join the campaign.

The lawyers of the Boston Legal Assistance Project (BLAP) were critical to unseating Troy. Several would go on to become judges. At that time, they were young, idealistic, dedicated to serving the poor. We formed relationships with two BLAP offices. The first was the Fields Corner office, where a young, dynamic lawyer named Paula Gold was at work and the secretary was Ruth Gottschalk. The other BLAP office was in Grove Hall, where Michael Feldman and other young attorneys represented many welfare mothers in front of Judge Troy. They were appalled at his treatment of them.

We knew we could never get the legislature to remove Troy; he frequently took long vacations with groups of reps and senators. The judicial system had no internal way to remove a judge. However, we learned that if we could get Troy disbarred, he could not remain a judge.

The activists of TPF spread out across Dorchester, knocking on doors, standing in front of supermarkets, reaching out to their friends on street corners, in taverns and in the parks, even talking with their parents. The message was clear: it was time to get rid of Troy. They convinced 10,000 people to sign a petition asking for Troy’s removal.

A TPF delegation went to the governor’s office to demand that he act. He said his hands were tied. We brazenly picketed the courthouse. We held an Anti-Troy Day on Town Field in Fields Corner, with live bands, food, and a mock trial. Dorchester was abuzz; there was a sense that the young people of TPF were daring fate. Still more and more people agreed that Troy should go.

On September 30, 1971, lawyers from the BLAP representing TPF of Dorchester filed a petition with Chief Justice Franklin N. Flaschner of the Mass Supreme Court, a well-known reformer, alleging serious illegalities in Judge Troy’s courtroom conduct. They submitted numerous affidavits from those victimized by Troy. In response Justice Flaschner launched an investigation. On April 20, 1972, Justice Flaschner released a damning report, substantiating the many charges we had made. Flaschner asked the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) to act. The SJC replied it was up to Flashner. Judge Flaschner replied he did not have the authority to remove a judge. The SJC responded that he could reassign Troy, which he did, sending him to five different courts.⁴ Encouraged, we were still determined to get Troy off the bench entirely.

The Boston Globe ran a series of exposés of Troy. Finally, under pressure from us and the SJC itself, the Massachusetts Bar Association took up Troy’s disbarment. Defending Troy was Lawrence F. O’Donnell, a pugnacious lawyer famous through Boston for his aggressive defense of many cases that no one else would take. (His son of the same name would go on to become a progressive cable television news personality.)

Opposing him, the Bar Association brought in their own heavyweight, James St. Clair, the famed Hale and Dorr lawyer who first gained attention assisting Joe Welch in taking on Joe McCarthy in the Army McCarthy hearings. St. Clair came to this proceeding fresh off the defense of Richard Nixon in the Watergate mess. His choice was a clear message that the Bar Association found this whole affair an embarrassment and wanted it over quickly. Events moved with remarkable speed.

Troy was disbarred and forced off the bench. The governor nominated Paula Gold, the young crusading BLAP lawyer, to replace Troy. That was too much for Sonny McDonough, he who had sold Troy his judgeship and who still controlled the antiquated Governor’s Council that had a veto over judicial appointments. He killed her appointment. In the end another BLAP lawyer, Jim Dolan, took Troy’s place on the bench, and was a humane, fair, and honest judge.

TPF had done what had never been done before—launched a grassroots campaign that ended up unseating a Massachusetts judge.

Ironically TPF did not last to reap the benefits. While we were skilled at campaigns, we had not done the careful work of building the organization. While we were shedding some of the baggage of our student movement days, we still were confused about leadership and structure. We did not build organizational structures that developed leaders, tested them, and held them accountable. Instead of carefully cultivating leaders who had a base, who could turn out others to volunteer, to protest, to vote, we advanced anyone who was passionate. The young people most involved in TPF, for all their passion and courage, were frequently mercurial. In the end our campaigns, despite their creativity, were built on sandcastles that regularly washed away.

I realized, painfully, that I lacked the craft needed to build a deep, stable, community-based organization. Many of the Dorchester folks active with TPF stayed active in the community and politics for many years to come. But the actual organization was not sustainable.