Just a few days after state Sen. Stephen Buoniconti announced his candidacy for Hampden County District Attorney came a rather uncomfortable story in the Boston Herald: on Saturday, the Herald’s Dave Wedge reported that the former prosecutor has taken $4,800 in campaign contributions from what Wedge describes as “convicted criminals and tax cheats.”
Specifically, the article names three donors: Cornell Lewis, convicted in 2004 of embezzling from the publicly funded Greater Springfield Entrepreneurial Fund; Giuseppe Polimeni, who pleaded guilty in 2003 for his role in a no-show job scheme at the Mass. Career Development Institute; and Charlie Kingston, a one-time Springfield city tax collector who was convicted of tax fraud in 1994. Kingston was granted a new trial in 1999 and the following year pleaded guilty to misdemeanor tax charges.
Of the three, Kingston—who now operates as a political consultant—was the most generous, contributing $2,000 to Buoniconti’s war chest in recent years. Buoniconti told the Herald he’d be returning at least some of that suspect money—“Now that it’s been brought to my attention, I will be returning that money,” Wedge quotes him saying—although he will hold on to Kingston’s donations, seeing how his crime was a misdemeanor: “I make a differentiation between misdemeanors and felonies . … I believe in rehabilitation . . . especially with misdemeanors. People can’t be perfect all the time.”
Buoniconti isn’t the only Springield-area pol with a relationship with Kingston. Kingston helped Mike Albano defeat Paul Caron in the bitter 2001 mayor’s race. And when Domenic Sarno ran for that office in 2007, eyebrows were raised over the prominent role Kingston played in his campaign. (In an interview with the Advocate at the time, Sarno described Kingston as a supporter and old family friend.)
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In other intriguing news, Springfield Republican reporter Stephanie Barry yesterday offered an update on Anthony Arillotta, whom the feds have described as the regional boss of the Genovese crime family and who is facing charges in the 2003 murder of his predecessor, “Big Al” Bruno. When last seen in late March, Barry reports, Arillotta was on his way to a federal prison in Manhattan. But now, she writes, he’s fallen “way off” the radar; according to her article, federal prison records show his status, inexplicably, as “released.”
No one seems to be offering a clear official explanation of what that means—although, Barry writes, “In the slippery, often treacherous world of organized crime, it takes little more than a whisper to raise suspicions over a player being a potential turncoat. And, with his unexplained exodus from the federal prison system and the lack of anyone leaping to Arillotta’s defense, those questions are ricocheting around law enforcement and street circles.
After several years covering the local mob scene, Barry owns the story. Here’s hoping the Republican gives her to time, and expense account, to travel to New York to cover the trial of Freddie Geas, another man charged in Bruno’s murder—and of Arillotta, should he ever resurface.
