On an August Saturday in 1994, a 17-year-old Chicopee teen named Christopher McGrory showed up at the Milton Bradley headquarters in East Longmeadow for what he thought was going to be a job interview. But the interview was just a ruse; waiting for him, instead, was Ronald Allard Jr., a 21-year-old Springfield man. Allard’s fiancee had recently broken off their engagement and begun dating McGrory, a former boyfriend and the father of her infant son. A few days earlier, Allard had persuaded a friend to call McGrory to set up the fake interview.
Now, in the parking lot outside the building, Allard brutally beat McGrory with a metal pipe. Allard then drove the dying teen, in McGrory’s own car, to a wooded area in Longmeadow and dumped his body in a shallow grave, then abandoned the car in Enfield.
The case was assigned to Mark Mastroianni, a young prosecutor who’d been rising steadily through the Hampden County District Attorney’s office. Fifteen years after the trial, Mastroianni recalls the technical and legal difficulties of what he calls “the most complicated criminal case I’ve ever had”: jurisdictional issues created by the fact that the crime took place in Massachusetts but a key piece of evidence, McGrory’s car, was found in Connecticut. A corpse so badly decomposed—Mastroianni was with the police when it was found—that only the skin that had been covered by clothing was still intact. Complex forensics work involving blood splatters, bloody finger and palm prints, and efforts to prove that a rusty piece of metal pipe entered as evidence could, in fact, have been the clean pipe earlier seen in Allard’s possession. A witness who identified the suspect after seeing him on a television news report. A formidable courtroom opponent in veteran defense attorney Linda Thompson.
It was Mastroianni’s first murder case, and he won. After less than two hours of deliberation, a Hampden Superior Court jury found Allard guilty of first-degree murder; he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Daniel Hiersche, the friend who had set up the phony interview, was later sentenced to five to six years in prison for being an accessory to the murder.
Mastroianni offers the story of the McGrory case as a roundabout explanation of how he developed both his professional expertise—in crime-scene analysis, forensics methods, evidence gathering—and his professional aspirations. In the six years he spent as an assistant district attorney, and the subsequent 15 years he’s spent as a criminal defense attorney, Mastroianni has developed a reputation as a talented and thorough lawyer, the kind who’s at his best piecing together tough cases and then arguing them in the courtroom.
Now, as he campaigns for the Hampden County District Attorney’s seat, he’s aiming to bring that background to the highest-profile attorney job in the region—and to do it in a way that circumvents politics as usual.
As Election Day approaches, Mastroianni hopes the electorate will value professional experience over political connections. “Don’t vote as if this were a political trophy,” he urged. “You’re going to need this district attorney. Vote as if your family has been victimized—it’s your son or your daughter who doesn’t come home one Friday night, and you get a call from the police that there’s a body at the morgue.”
Mastroianni is, by all accounts, supposed to be the underdog in the DA race. His opponent, Democrat Stephen Buoniconti, started his career as an assistant district attorney (he spent about a year in the Berkshire County DA’s office, then four in Hampden County) but has spent the last decade in the state Legislature, first as the state representative for the 6th Hampden District, then, since 2004, as senator for the Hampden District.
Buoniconti’s political positions have afforded him two key advantages in the race: name recognition and the ability to do some serious fundraising. So far in the race, Buoniconti has spent more than $200,000, a good portion of it carried over from his Senate campaign account. Mastroianni, in contrast, has spent about $45,000.
But Buoniconti’s political background is not an unalloyed benefit. Indeed, Mastroianni—whose campaign slogan is “Justice, Not Politics”—is counting on voters not just to look past his opponent’s political background and connections, but also to question whether they could, in fact, prove a hindrance to the county’s top prosecutor.
“Let’s give Steve his credit: he’s been an accomplished politician; he has a great following; he can raise all this money because he’s good at being a politician,” Mastroianni said in a recent interview. “Is that negative, is that positive? I don’t know. But he’s good at it.”
Mastroianni was a long-time registered Democrat, but is running for the DA seat as an independent. Deciding to run as an independent has had its strategic benefits: it meant Mastroianni could sit out the crowded, contentious race for the Democratic nominee (which Buoniconti won over four other candidates), allowing him to save his money and keep a close eye on his eventual opponent in the Nov. 2 general election. (There is no Republican candidate for the seat.)
Mastroianni says he opted not to run with a party affiliation to underscore that the district attorney’s job should be firmly divorced from all political considerations. “I’m running as an independent not because I’m some kind of political rebel, but because I really think the district attorney position has nothing to do with politics, has nothing to do with party affiliation,” he said. “If I run as a pure Democrat, I’m married to party politics, I’m married to what their party line is.”
As a legislative candidate, “you could make a recognizable argument that the strength of the party, the philosophy of the party, you need to have and you need to carry forward to get things accomplished,” he went on. “For the district attorney’s office, none of that applies. … I don’t need the power of the party. I don’t want connections to the party.”
And the public, Mastroianni contends, doesn’t want its top prosecutor to adhere to strict political expectations—conservative Republican, liberal Democrat—but to be able to move comfortably across that spectrum as demanded by the particulars of any given case. “That’s all about the exercise of discretion,” he said. “You have to trust the district attorney that you elected, that he has the ability, the experience and the qualifications to go back and forth between those two [extremes].”
Underlying Mastroianni’s words is a basic message of his campaign: that his 20 years in the courtroom have given him the background to make those tough decisions, and that his opponent simply lacks the experience to do the same. Asked whether he considers Buoniconti to be a liberal or conservative attorney, Mastroianni responded, “It’s impossible for me to know what he would be in practice as a lawyer. I’m not saying that in a negative sense. It’s just impossible because he hasn’t been a lawyer for so long & and when he was a prosecutor, it was very limited to the district court—which is important—but to the really lower levels of the district court.”
In contrast, Mastroianni points to his own long resume. While in the DA’s office, he supervised other attorneys at the district court level, went on to win convictions in major cases in superior court, and successfully argued a case before the Supreme Judicial Court. In 1995, with a young family and a new mortgage, he decided to leave the DA’s office in hopes of making a better living in private practice. As a criminal defense attorney, he’s appeared in district, superior and federal court, handling everything from major drug cases to white-collar crime. He’s never lost a murder case, whether for the prosecution or the defense, he notes.
Mastroianni points to the Buoniconti campaign’s emphasis on community outreach—like public forums on how people can prevent housebreaks—and lobbying at the state level for more money for the DA’s office as evidence that his opponent lacks the credentials the job requires.
“He’s saying, ‘Let’s expand the district attorney’s office, let’s get out into the community, let’s go to Boston’—I’ve heard that many times—’and get more money,'” Mastroianni said. “Steve is running, it seems to me, on changing the job description of the office to fit what his experience is. Because his experience is not in court. It’s not as a trial attorney. It’s not in going in and solving unsolved cases.”
Buoniconti’s talk of “reform,” Mastroianni continued, “is actually political. I mean, what are you actually saying? ‘I’m going to throw an ADA at every problem that comes up’? That’s what it pretty much boils down to. I appreciate the social concern & but how does this work when your office is buried? How are you going to do this?”
When Mastroianni talks of the public’s need to trust their district attorney, he’s not just talking about trusting his professional record over his opponent’s. He’s also drawing voters’ attention squarely to a controversy that’s been plaguing Buoniconti since shortly before the Democratic primary, when the Springfield Republican reported that Buoniconti had failed to report $114,000 in taxpayer-funded income as required by state ethics laws.
Buoniconti had earned that money over four years as an attorney for the Hampden County Retirement Board, a job he held alongside his $80,000-a-year Senate position. In the Republican article, by reporter Jack Flynn, Buoniconti said he had gotten a verbal opinion from the state Ethics Commission that he didn’t have to report the income.
In the days before the primary, opponents of Buoniconti called for him to release his tax returns; instead, the candidate provided the Republican with a one-page letter, signed by a CPA, listing his annual income from 2007 to 2009 (it ranged from $126,000 to $136,000) as well as the taxes paid each year (from $8,880 to $10,200). Mastroianni released his full tax returns for the same period.
Buoniconti’s ethics omission—and what Mastroianni characterizes as his continuing failure to provide full disclosure—are “fair game for people to consider when they’re going to trust that decision-making ability of Steve’s,” Mastroianni told the Advocate.
While Mastroianni said he’s taken pains to avoid negative campaigning—he finds it “distasteful,” he said—Buoniconti’s ethics issue can’t just be ignored. A district attorney, he said, faces ethical questions regularly, including needing to disclose if he has a conflict of interest that would interfere with his prosecution of a particular case. “It’s only the conscience of the district attorney, and the sense of the integrity of the district attorney, to say, ‘That’s a conflict case; let’s get a special prosecutor from the [Attorney General’s] office,'” Mastroianni said. Can voters have faith in his opponent’s willingness to disclose such things, he asked.
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Buoniconti, meanwhile, has raised his own criticisms of Mastroianni—namely, his long and by all accounts quite successful career as a criminal defense attorney.
At an Oct. 4 candidates’ debate, Buoniconti told the audience, “The last 15 years, as both a prosecutor and as an elected official, I continued to fight for you, the citizens, the good citizens of the county. Now my opponent has chosen a different path. He tried to get people out early. Represented the most notorious gangsters and criminals. And it’s his choice, and I respect that. But to be able to do that and turn on a dime and all of a sudden become the chief law enforcement officer is something I can’t understand and put my head around.”
Buoniconti’s strategy—to paint his opponent as soft on crime, and in league with the region’s biggest criminals—is a risky one. It will, perhaps, appeal to voters who are anxious about crime rates and convinced that the legal system is too easy on criminals. But it also attacks one of the basic tenets of that legal system: that every person accused of a crime has a right to legal representation and to his or her day in court.
And if working as a defense attorney is, indeed, dishonorable, Buoniconti is himself apparently tainted. As Republican reporter Buffy Spencer pointed out in an Oct. 11 article, he has represented criminal defendants in both the district and superior courts over the past decade, on charges including assault with a dangerous weapon, unarmed robbery, threat to commit murder, and drunk driving. “I have never represented a member of organized crime, murderer, rapist, or drug dealer,” Buoniconti told Spencer.
Mastroianni offers no apologies for his success as a defense attorney. “I defend a lot of drug dealers. I’m not a drug dealer. I defend a lot of gang members. I’m not a gang member,” he told the Advocate. “You name the controversy, I’ve been involved with it as a defense attorney. But I’ve never become part of that. … Defense lawyers cross the line when [they] become so enamored of the clients they represent [that] they become [part of their clients’ world].”
The justice system, Mastroianni added, can too easily be reduced to a contest between “good guy” prosecutors and police eager to lock up criminals, and “bad guy” defense attorneys who will do anything to get clients off. In reality, the process is much more complex, and depends on each side being fairly represented. As a prosecutor and, now, defense attorney, “I’ve really been a student of the law, working for justice on either end,” he said.
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Buoniconti’s charge—that Mastroianni’s defense work leaves him unsuitable for the top prosecutor’s job—is nothing new, said Tom Rooke, a veteran criminal defense attorney in Springfield.
Twenty years ago, Rooke served as campaign manager for Bill Bennett, now the incumbent district attorney. (Bennett opted not to run for re-election, opening this year’s heated race to succeed him.)
“That is the exact criticism that his opponents leveled against Bill Bennett,” Rooke said. “Bill Bennett was a very well respected defense attorney, just like Mark Mastroianni. … Bill Bennett has been the epitome of a DA with integrity and respect, and Mark Mastroianni can fill those shoes without hesitation. Stephen Buoniconti cannot.”
In the DA’s office, Rooke added, prosecutors need to be able to respect their boss and trust in his judgment and experience. Buoniconti, he said, just doesn’t bring the necessary experience to the job. “I know [Mastroianni] has the highest degree of respect from members of the bar, the judiciary and the district attorneys,” Rooke added. “He has tried every major felony case. He has the skill, the understanding of the law, and he has the compassion to be an aggressive prosecutor, where he will respect the individuals but perform his duties fairly.”
Rooke himself considered a run for the DA’s seat this year, but opted against it; now he’s among a large group of local attorneys who support Mastroianni’s bid. Mastroianni’s list of endorsements includes the State, Springfield, West Springfield and Palmer police unions, the police supervisors’ unions in Westfield, Holyoke and Agawam, and Holyoke Police Chief Anthony Scott. (Mastroianni says that he and Scott have their disagreements over issues, including Scott’s repeated criticisms that local judges are too lenient, but sees the chief’s endorsement as a vote of confidence in his legal abilities.) He’s also been endorsed by two of the losing candidates from the Democratic primary: Michael Kogut and James Goodhines, an assistant district attorney. (Buoniconti’s endorsements include another of his former Democratic rivals, ADA Steve Spelman, and Hampden County Sheriff Mike Ashe.)
Pat Markey, a former Springfield city councilor and city solicitor under the Ryan administration, recently hosted a fundraiser for Mastroianni. Years ago, as an attorney for the U.S. Justice Department, Markey said, he saw how energized veteran attorneys were when Janet Reno became attorney general. Unlike others who’d held the post, “She had all the experience they had. They felt they could connect with her,” Markey said. “That taught me that it’s important for the rank and file to have respect for the legal skills, the trial skills of their boss. …
“[Mastroianni has] got the experience,” Markey said. “You want the DA to be the best lawyer, or among the best lawyers, in the DA’s office. Mark is that lawyer. Mark has more experience than virtually any criminal defense lawyer in western Mass. Buoniconti has no experience.”
Like Rooke, Markey dismissed Buoniconti’s contention that Mastroianni’s work as a defense attorney makes him unsuitable as a DA. “Yes, he’s definitely defended some people we don’t normally like to associate with,” Markey said. ‘But there’s a dark line between Mark and his clients. He doesn’t socialize with these guys. He doesn’t want to be a mobster. He’s giving them the defense they’re constitutionally entitled to. … What’s important is to have the criminal experience, whether from the prosecutor’s or defense side.”
His opponent’s criticisms aside, Mastroianni’s defense work apparently doesn’t bother everyone in the county’s legal community. Late last month, a group of 41 former prosecutors from the county and federal levels endorsed the candidate in downtown Springfield. “As concerned citizens and former prosecutors, we believe the next District Attorney should be a highly experienced and skilled trial attorney. Mark Mastroianni not only represents these ideals but he is also fair, honorable and well respected by members of the legal and law enforcement community,” read a statement from the group.
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Given his success in private practice, why is Mastroianni looking to move to the DA’s office? “I’m not looking for this because I’m going to make more money,” he said; nor does he expect to be in office long enough to rack up a big pension. (If elected, Mastroianni said, he would likely only serve a couple of terms.)
Instead, he describes his decision to run as a chance to return to the office where, as a young attorney, he discovered the kind of work he liked to do and could do well. “I’m 46 years old, and I start to ask myself the question: have I reached the level of personal fulfillment and professional fulfillment I want to reach in life?” he said. “What’s going to make me have that feeling I did as a young lawyer?’
When Bennett announced that he was leaving the DA’s office, Mastroianni saw an opportunity. After many conversations with family and friends, he decided to enter the race. “If you keep waking up in the morning after three or four months thinking about it and you still want to do it, then it’s the thing to do,” he said.
While Mastroianni speaks with great respect for Bennett and the job he’s done as DA, there are a number of changes he’d make in the job. When Bennett first took office, Mastroianni said, he developed a tough-on-crime prosecutorial model designed specifically for Springfield: an insistence on charging defendants with every mandatory-minimum law applicable; a reluctance to allow plea bargaining.
“That was the approach at the time that was accepted socially,” said Mastroianni, who was a young prosecutor in the office when Bennett was first elected. “At the time, this was what we needed.”
But now, he said, it’s time for a new approach, one that takes into account the diverse needs of the communities served by the Hampden County DA’s office. Crime patterns, he noted, vary from place to place. In Agawam, the drug of choice among young people is heroin; in Ludlow, it’s prescription drugs; in Westfield, it’s alcohol. Palmer has high rates of domestic abuse cases; those victims need direct, intensive assistance from the DA’s office in navigating the legal system. In Springfield, which has been tagged as Hampden’s crime capital (earlier in the campaign, candidates tussled over Spelman’s description of the city as a “war zone”), crime is actually concentrated in specific parts of the city, with little crossover into other communities. Right now, the DA’s office is not structured to offer the kind of individualized approach the county needs, said Mastroianni, who would reallocate the office’s resources, many of which are now concentrated in Springfield.
Mastroianni would also rethink the current DA’s disinclination to plea bargaining and tendency to prosecute every mandatory-minimum charge. One striking example: a 2008 report by the Easthampton-based Prison Policy Initiative found that the Hampden DA’s office charged drug defendants with school-zone violations at a dramatically higher rate than any other DA in the commonwealth. These laws carry mandatory-minimum sentences of two to 15 years for drug crimes that happen within 1,000 feet of a school or daycare center, regardless of the perpetrator’s previous record. The PPI report found that school zone laws unfairly affect residents of urban areas, where population concentrations mean you’re much more likely to be within a school zone, whether or not you know it, than if you live in a rural area.
Mastroianni said he doesn’t support abolishing school zone laws, or others that carry mandatory-minimum sentences. But, he said, “I think the District Attorney’s office needs to exercise a lot better discretion in who they apply them to. Because, let’s be honest: some people are getting school zone charges because they’re selling drugs in an apartment building that just happens to be down the street from a school, and they’re doing it at two in the morning, and it has nothing to do with the school. But let me tell you, there are people who wait on a corner and do want to sell to kids on their way to school, and that’s the kind of person [about whom] I’m saying, ‘I’m so glad I have this school-zone statute, and I’m so glad to have mandatory minimums.'”
The overuse of certain charges, Mastroianni added, has led to a “tremendous backlog” in the courts: “That’s why you can’t get a court date in Springfield—because there’s so much over-charging.” And when that backlog means that prosecutions of serious crimes drag on for months and months, justice is not being served.
In a similar vein, Mastroianni described Question 2—the 2008 ballot question that decriminalized possession of an ounce or less of marijuana—as “a step in the right direction for trying to get rid of the backlog of cases in the courts.” When minor possession carried a criminal penalty, he said, “it was putting a stain on a lot of people’s criminal records which really shouldn’t be there, which really didn’t reflect them, should—10 years down the road—they need a job.”
But the Question 2 issue also gets right to the heart of Mastroianni’s insistence that the DA’s job should be apolitical. The Mass. District Attorney’s Association took a stand in opposition to Question 2, actively lobbying for its defeat. How does that square with Mastroianni’s contention that a DA can offer a professional opinion on how a proposed law—whether it’s decriminalizing pot or legalizing casinos—would affect local crime rates, but should not be in the business of issuing endorsements or political opinions?
“That’s a difficult question,” said Mastroianni. But right now, he said—reserving the right to change his mind if the reality of the job leads him to—he sticks to his belief that the DA must steer clear of politics. While district attorneys, by the very nature of how they get their jobs, are political beings, he said, “I just so hope I never get to the point where I care if I’m going to lose a vote because of a certain opinion.”
