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In the 1990s and early 2000s, New Bedford was a different place.
The grand old Irish-dominated political Machine was still muscular. It may have eventually lost the mayorship to Fred Kalisz, but it still controlled much of the City Council, most of the School Committee, the New Bedford Housing Authority and a bunch of minor boards and bureaucracies.
It wasn’t long before the ultimate New Bedford insiders enticed Kalisz himself to make peace with them, in the interest of what I’ll call New Bedford realpolitik.
Old Biff MacLean was no doubt the guy behind the scenes still pulling the levers and strings, but it was District Attorney Paul Walsh Jr., with his shock of white hair, Kelly green ties and all-around good looks, who was The Machine’s public face.
In fact, so powerful was The Machine in those days, that it actually tipped a Massachusetts gubernatorial election.
In a 1998 news column, then Standard-Times editor Ken Hartnett wrote about a New Bedford political rally for Republican candidate Paul Cellucci. Celluci was running against Democrat Scott Harshbarger, who a few years earlier as attorney general had successfully prosecuted former state Sen. MacLean of Fairhaven. Harshbarger had indicted MacLean, a Democrat, on conflict-of-interest charges because he had profited from state contracts while in office. Harshbarger called it “a new era in prosecuting public corruption.”
“Payback is a ‘b—-,” as the cliche goes, and MacLean swung his New Bedford-based political operation into high gear on behalf of Cellucci. Walsh Jr., the son of legendarily powerful School Committee boss Paul Walsh Sr., was the master of ceremonies for the local Cellucci rally.
The rest is history, as they say. The South Coast voted for the Republican and Cellucci narrowly defeated Harshbarger.
The great heyday of The Machine, as they used to commonly call it in these parts, came to mind in recent weeks with the untimely passing of Paul Walsh Jr. at just 70 years of age.
The charming and ever-unapologetic former DA had been out of office for some 16 years, having lost in a 2006 upset to one of his former assistant DAs, the ever-ambitious Sam Sutter. By all reports, Walsh was just a shadow of his charismatic self by the time he passed. Still, his death seems, in some respects, like the beginning of a drawdown of the curtain for an era when the great Irish-American diaspora controlled so much of New Bedford politics this past half century.
At Walsh’s funeral Mass a week ago Saturday, there was no evidence of MacLean, now 90. And MacLean’s man in New Bedford, John Saunders, was way off in a side pew. Mayor Jon Mitchell, another Walsh fan, was off to another side. Former Mayor Scott Lang, always careful to maintain communication with some elements of The Machine, was in a very last row.
I liked Paul Walsh Jr. He was personally charming and always courteous. I did not, however, like Walsh’s clannish approach to politics in which connection often trumped merit. I certainly did not like Walsh’s inability to better stem the violence associated with the rampant illegal drug economy of his era.
No, I liked Paul Walsh Jr. because he was affable and good-natured. Always professional, he understood politics was not bean-bag and actually had a philosophical attitude about the game. His sense of blarney and affinity for mischief grew out of the same Irish culture that I myself was raised in, and count myself as a member to this day. I am of Walsh’s Celtic DNA, though not his politics.
At St. Lawrence Martyr Church a week ago Saturday, they had a time for Paul. There had been no Irish wake — perhaps due to his unorthodox personal life — just instructions for everyone to show up in green for a week-delayed Mass of Resurrection. The storytelling took place later at the Wamsutta Club.
The endearing service included big green banners at the front of the Church (it was by good luck the green liturgical season in the Catholic Church) and the Irish national flag was at half staff in place of the Vatican flag that usually flies just outside St. Lawrence. This grandest of West End churches was literally built by the sweat and tenacious devotion of the city’s first Irish immigrants, and Paul Walsh Jr. was as much a reflection of them as the green banners and his own green ties.
They delayed the whole Walsh funeral until the weekend so that the broad swath of the New Bedford court and legal systems that he had once dominated could be there. And everything about his Mass was unusual, God love the good Father Michael Racine who went along with it all. He no doubt knows who it is that’s in the pews of the Whaling City Catholic Community.
Most odd of all was that the service kicked off with the eulogy, not the Mass itself. Anyone who knows Catholic funeral services knows that this is just not done. For years, the Church didn’t even like including secular-led eulogies at all, and isolated them as an afterthought after the Mass, like some second-tier, add-on.
None of that for Paul Walsh Jr. at St. Lawrence’s.
Pat Walsh, Paul Walsh’s first cousin and from all accounts, great buddy in his adventures of life, gave a eulogy along the lines of a traditional Hibernian tribute. Long and personal and funny.
Pat, an assistant clerk magistrate at the district court, spoke off-the-cuff, telling wild story after wild story, about his seemingly always outrageous cousin. It was one of the most deeply affectionate talks I’ve ever heard, and whatever you think of Walsh Jr.’s politics, he was in some way a good man and from a noble background to elicit such love and pride from those close to him.
Don’t get me wrong, it was not all unmoored from reality.
Pat started off with his very own twist on the old joke about Irish mothers thinking their sons are Jesus.
He talked about having a dream the previous night in which he was at the pearly gates of heaven, and there to his jock delight were football and baseball stadiums, and also a basketball court, like the one Walsh Jr. had once excelled on at Holy Family High School.
“And there was a guy over there by himself,” Pat said. “He had a bright green tie and he had a long white, full-length fur coat. And he was shooting foul shots sideways. And I said to St. Peter, “Who’s that?” And he said, “That’s God, he thinks he’s Paul Walsh.”
The green ties and scarves in the pews broke up.
Anyone who ever knew Paul Walsh Jr. for five minutes immediately got the joke and the congregation roared and clapped. Like all good jokes, and this was a very good one, it captured truth but with a very light touch. The human condition.
I wish I could repeat all Pat’s great funny stories here but my editor would think I’ve gotten even more long-winded than usual, so I’ll just include two more that I think get at who Walsh Jr. was, and what his role was in recent New Bedford history.
Pat talked about a West End guy that the Walsh tough-guy teenagers once got in a rumble with, and to which Walsh later led a posse with his cousin for revenge. I couldn’t hear the guy’s name because of course I was at the very back of the church, and Pat, very understandably, didn’t want to return my call inquiring about it. Just as well.
Anyway, years later, now defense attorney Pat was representing this same low-level, now middle-aged, criminal type, and he was on the Superior Court steps when cousin Paul, the DA, showed up.
Pat says he told Paul that his familiar client was now 50 years old and had been clean and sober for over a year.
The assistant DA was pushing for jail time, but Pat would just as soon keep him out of jail. Perhaps because he knew he wouldn’t make any progress there.
Paul Walsh Jr. told Pat to wait a minute and he went inside to talk to the assistant DA. He made the deal to get the guy probation, and then went back out to the steps to tell his old foe to not let him down.
The guy, whose name I’m sure a bunch of you know, didn’t let Walsh Jr. down, and Pat says he and Paul both went to his funeral years later.
Now, I’m of two minds about this story.
On the one hand, it gets at Paul Walsh Jr.’s very personal approach to justice. He depended on his trusted cousin and his knowledge of the alleged perpetrator and the individual circumstances to decide on whether to prosecute.
On the other hand, I know Walsh’s record as a DA, and the complaints that the violent crime rate was high during his time. I know that he was often criticized by police and members of the minority community for aggressively going after some cases but not aggressively going after others.
I know that Walsh Jr. opposed things like wiretaps and mandatory sentencing for crimes taking place in school zones, tough sentencing for small-time drug dealers. In that way, he presaged the whole movement to decriminalize low-level transgressions that skew to minority community incarceration.
At the same time, Walsh Jr. did little to try to reform the system. And some thought his opposition to wire-taps and the like may have had something to do with his own reputation for a hard-living lifestyle.
Pat Walsh seemed to know he was giving this eulogy not just as a tribute to his friend and cousin but for the public record at large and he sought to defend Walsh’s legacy, and situational approach to justice.
Pat even went so far as to draw a distinction from the more doctrinaire prosecutorial approach of state Rep. Chris Markey, another local Irish guy who at the time served as Walsh Jr.’s first assistant DA.
“Working with the New Bedford police and the State Police, he vigorously prosecuted cases that deserved to be prosecuted,” Pat Walsh said. And then added, “It took Chris Markey a long time to learn that, but he finally got it.”
The real Paul Walsh was the behind-the-scenes Paul Walsh that you folks knew, Pat told the crowd, insisting that their friend and cousin’s legacy was that he made New Bedford safer. And though Walsh Jr. was a glib and casual man, his real feelings about things ran very deep, Pat said.
The night that Sam Sutter defeated Paul Walsh Jr., Pat said he and his wife were at the Cafe Funchal as Paul was getting ready to give his concession speech. He told his wife they should leave now so they didn’t have to face Paul afterwards.
That’s the Irish way, or at least the traditional Irish way. Don’t show emotion, don’t let them know what you’re thinking, don’t let the g–damn Brits win. An Irish goodbye, as they say.
But Pat said Paul came up to him and asked him to stay a bit longer.
“Paul said: ‘Do me a favor, Pat … Would you just wait ’til I make my concession speech before you leave? I don’t want to walk out alone. Would you please walk out with me?’ And as we went to the car afterwards, he started crying.”
You could have heard a pin drop at St. Lawrence’s.
Pat then said, “‘That’s the real Paul Walsh.’ And if the world had saw that, Sam Sutter would never have beat him. And I told Sam that two days ago, and he agreed with me.”
Sutter is presently running for Fall River mayor again, and it may have been just the kind of thing you say to a man who is grieving, but I think there was also some truth in it.
Depending on their politics, people will debate Paul Walsh Jr.’s legacy in New Bedford for a long time. Was he just another Machine guy who helped his friends but not others? Or was he a dedicated lawman, doing his best to be fair-minded?
Pat Walsh sought to cast it one way for the folks wearing green at St. Lawrence’s. Others, in the historical record, have cast it another way in the storms and controversies that occurred during Walsh’s time in office.
I don’t agree with everything in Pat Walsh’s assessment of his cousin and friend, but I’m inclined to give him the last word:
“So how will he be remembered in his hometown of New Bedford?” he asked. “I think people will say: ‘He never forgot where he came from, wherever he went to represent to us, he made us proud, and he was always our guy.’”
Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
