A change of gravity

"Since those five-grand-a-cycle donations began, our figures show Kuiper's company's raked in over nineteen million dollars' worth of state contracts. "And before that?" you ask." He snickered. "Before that Kuiper Electric, in business for almost ten years, had had one state contract: Eleven thousand dollars' worth of repairs to lighting systems in the barns at the Berkshire County Agricultural Society Fairgrounds and racetrack out in Hancock.

"Those're illustrations," Bissell said. "I'm not going to show all the files to you, uncover our whole hand at this point in the game. But I can assure you that we've got a dozen more just like them. If you compare the list of Hilliard's major contributors to the list of individuals and companies that got fat while he was in office, what you see is a virtual template of political corruption; rampant corruption, corruption abounding. If you gave generously to Hilliard's campaigns, your gifts returned to you not a hundred- but a thousand-fold, at a minimum, in the form of fat state contracts. It's a textbook case of political chicanery and larceny. I know Mister Merrion's Dan Hilliard's close friend and associate, and he wont like hearing me say this, but Dan Hilliard is a common crook."

Merrion inhaled audibly, so that his chest visibly expanded, and he gripped the arms of his chair hard, so that his knuckles whitened.

Cohen grabbed Merrion's right forearm with his left hand and said:

"Your Honor, I know you want to move along as rapidly as possible, without a lot of bickering, but could I be heard? This's hard to take in silence."

"Go ahead, Geoff," the judge said.

"In the first place," Cohen said, "I represent Amby Merrion not Dan Hilliard. Bob Pooler represents Dan. So, when I respond to these attacks, I'm at a disadvantage I assume Bob would not be. But I'm sure Bob'd include among the pieces of his far-better argument the reminder that the period of the Seventies and Eighties covered by' he deepened his voice 'this rolling program' he resumed his normal baritone 'were decades of unprecedented prosperity, not just in western Massachusetts but across the entire country. And decades as well of galloping inflation that brought us to the point we're now at, where what was worth a buck when Hilliard first began to run now costs at least three.

"And in the second place, if Dan Hilliard hadn't been attentive to the best interests of the whole region; if instead he'd worked solely within the narrow confines of his own legislative district, he never could've forged the alliances he needed to rise to chairman of Ways and Means, and the influence to channel those state contracts out here.

"The businessmen and manufacturers who supported him all those years weren't acting purely selfishly. Sure, they were in it for themselves, and many of them prospered. But so did their hundreds of employees.

And therefore so did the merchants and builders, and lawyers, and all the other people who serve our communities. Property values increased, and therefore so did tax revenues. We all depend upon a healthy industrial economy as the foundation of our prosperity.

"Today if we don't have that, we're a heck of a lot closer to having it than we were when Dan Hilliard first ran for office. Those contracts Mister Bissell now finds so sinister were important building blocks, vital to this region. Coming from the eastern part of the state Gloucester, did you tell me, we were chatting outside there?"

Bissell nodded. Cohen continued. "Yeah, I thought so; growing up there the coastline as he did, Mister Bissell wouldn't know this, but until that state work began coming inland, out here, what we had was a predominantly agricultural economy. Our industries, the mills and factories, had first declined, then folded up. The economy was in sad shape. We were in the doldrums. Young people were leaving; they had no choice. Either they went into farming, like it or not, assuming they could find farming jobs, or else they moved away.

Those state contracts meant they didn't have to; they could stay. Some who had left came back, renewed family connections, once there was work for them here. Those contracts were tickets of admission to a new world of light-manufacturing and skilled blue-collar work, and the new incomes that came with it. A better life for all of us.

"I sound like a candidate myself now. If that record were mine, I might very well be. By rights I ought to do well. A politician with that history to present, I'd deserve to be re-elected by a landslide.