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There is some poetic justice to the fact that Biff MacLean went out on the eve of the biggest snowstorm Greater New Bedford has ever seen.
The former state senator and longtime South Coast political godfather of the region was a big, big man. For both good and for bad and in every sense of the word, William Q. MacLean Jr. was large. And he inescapably dominated the fortunes and misfortunes of Southeastern Massachusetts for a half century.
For myself, Biff MacLean — although I only met him a handful of times — has defined my entire 26-year career as a New Bedford political journalist. Even though “Biff” — as virtually everybody called him — had already been out of office for six years in 1999 when I arrived in New Bedford, he still remained the guy that virtually every decision had to be run by.
As a guy who was brought to New Bedford to cover politics, and who did his best to do it, I very quickly learned that Biff MacLean was the sun around which every other local political planet revolved. And even as MacLean was a largely quiet lion in winter these last few years, people still consulted him until the very last. He could still give the word and it would move the South Coast needle.
It was always “What did Biff think?” “Who was Biff with?” “What was Biff trying to accomplish?” Those questions always mattered regardless of what anybody else was trying to do.
It wasn’t that Biff always won. He didn’t. But he often did, and his take on things always had to be considered. He was the old-fashioned boss of what literally used to be called “The Machine” in these parts. He was the guy to whom everybody had to genuflect, whether to become part of his team, or merely to keep him from annihilating them for not being on the team.
Biff MacLean, the nickname this son of Fairhaven’s beloved mother first gave him, strode over this region like some sort of colossus from the time he was a middle-school varsity athlete at Fairhaven High School. He was the shining star that a whole lot of people wanted to be, and failing that, they wanted to be his good friend.
Biff MacLean used that knowledge of who he was and what people thought of him to take the region in the direction that he personally thought it should go. He bestrode nearly every major institution — the government, the waterfront, the state university, the business community — during his heyday and even afterwards for a long time. Many of the region’s important institutions — UMass Dartmouth, the independently run Crapo Hill landfill, the city assessors’ office — were the better for Biff’s work, certainly compared to some of the elected officials we have nowadays.
Former Mayor John Bullard is a scrupulously honest and visionary man and when he says Biff made the difference for the region having a state university campus, its law school, and an assessor’s office that could be trusted, you can believe him.
But Bullard is also a politician and he didn’t get to be successful without learning to cooperate with those with fewer moral quibbles. So it was clear to those who knew him that Biff MacLean’s actions always came with a generous dose of largesse for himself. Some folks think that’s inevitable, it’s just the way politics works, they say; others think that’s the kind of vested personal interest that has brought this country to its knees. Conflict of interests involving one’s public office very much did not begin with Donald J. Trump.
My opinion is that Biff MacLean did a lot of good when he wanted to. He certainly genuinely loved his hometown region, and the people he and his minions got jobs for, or helped out of personal situations. But very much like Donald Trump (albeit in a much smoother way), Biff almost always used his access to power to make money.
MacLean always did both. And he was rewarded for that and he was punished for that.
I want to say a word about Biff that I think counts for a lot, and explains why people both loved him and feared him.
Despite his rough reputation, he was usually gentlemanly — he was in no sense a buffoon the way Trump is. MacLean could be empathetic and even straightforward if you caught him at the right moment. I remember one time he told me that it was a myth that his power came from all the folks he had done favors for. There were just as many people who hated him, he said, because he did not do favors for them.
When I first came to town, I wrote a story about MacLean’s appeal of the loss of his $23,000-a-year state pension (which seems a paltry sum in this day and age). He had automatically lost it by pleading guilty to two conflict of interest charges connected to state employees retirement plans and from money he and his then wife had received from the development and operation of a Fairhaven elderly housing development.
I spent a long time with the story and it was thoroughly researched and balanced. Biff told me he thought it was the fairest local story he had seen. He changed his mind, however, when he lost that same case and I wrote about it again, this time after the Supreme Judicial Court had scoured him.
“This is not a case of a small infraction worth less than a few thousand dollars triggering hundreds of thousands of dollars in pension benefit forfeiture,” wrote the court. As part of his plea, MacLean had repaid the state $512,000, which was less than half of the money he earned in the public employees’ retirement benefits scheme.
Our relationship really went south, however, when I showed up at MacLean’s insurance business on Orchard Street one day because I had heard that former City Councilor David Gerwatowski, just out of law school, was meeting with him. After waiting for what seemed like hours, Gerwatowski and Biff came out of his office with the former heading straight for the door and the latter coming straight over to me, getting inches from my face and telling me that I had better not ever come to his office again.
I told that story like a badge of courage for years.
Then there were endless other stories about Biff’s power, mostly exercised through his prodigious fundraising. Every reform politician on the South Coast seemed to eventually succumb to Biff. I did stories about Biff and one of his lieutenants, former School Committee power broker Jack Nobrega, raising money for the likes of late Mayor Fred Kalisz and state Rep. Tony Cabral. I wrote another on his connections to UMass Dartmouth and his longtime principal lieutenant, former City Councilor and current County Commissioner John Saunders. Saunders had scored an $85,000 a year job as “director of leased campuses” for UMD, which basically meant keeping an eye on the former Star Store campus as it went without upgrades. MacLean had once donated $100,000 to UMD from his former campaign funds for student scholarships and had the student center named for himself.
Most recently there was the story mentioning Biff’s connection to Saunders working for MacLean’s friend and Star Store owner Paul Downey as the director of maintenance for the New Bedford arts campus (before he transferred over to UMass for essentially the same job.) That’s right, the same campus that was abandoned by UMass Dartmouth two years ago.
There are so many stories about Biff MacLean. One of my favorites was when he was helping a developer who wanted to build a gas station at a city plaza. He reportedly told a onetime city councilor that there should be no hearing with the neighbors who were opposing the project. “You are either with us, or against us,” the councilor told me he had said.
It was about a year ago that I called Biff about Downey, and the old guy, probably unaware it was me, picked up the phone. Yes, he said, he knew what was going on with the Star Store and that state Sen. Mark Montigny had zeroed out UMass Dartmouth’s lease payment. No, Biff said, he did not have anything to say. He did not want to get into it, he said. He sounded like a man who had run his race, or at the least even in his old age was savvy enough to see there was no payoff in getting into a war between a local businessman friend and the state senator, even a senator who had distanced himself from him.
I will miss old Biff MacLean. Not because he always did good, or always did bad. It was neither. He was a complicated man, a man of his time, a charismatic and generous and venal character all at the same time.
But when a man of great stature and influence passes from the scene, it marks a changing of the guard.
The South Coast will now enter a new era once and for all. The Biff MacLean era is history.
Jack Spillane is a news and opinion columnist for The New Bedford Light. You can contact Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
Editor’s note: John K. Bullard was a three-term mayor of New Bedford and is a co-founder of The New Bedford Light. The Light’s newsroom is scrupulously independent. Only the editors decide what to cover and what to publish. Founders, funders and board members have no influence over editorial content.
Changing of the guard? There will never be another man like William Q Maclean. Many people willand have tried to become the powerful man that he was. And the outcome has and will never happen again. There are people that think Jon Mitchell thinks he will take over that role, laughable. Look at the mess our city is in financially. He’s spent your tax dollars unwisely not even anywhere near a balanced budget for the 14 years that he has been in office. It’s time for him to move on and step down making way for someone else that understands you can’t spend money you don’t have.
Very well said Mr. Spillane. I grew up and lived through the Biff years and in politics sometimes against him. That said, we need more of his type (And you are also accurate about Trump). This “activist” mindset nowadays at all levels by the Democrats is nothing more than street corner rhetoric. They look like imbeciles.
Nice job on the article regarding Biff and yes he was a complicated man but what a lot of people don’t know about this is he didn’t have to know you to help you. Thank you Jack but I might be a little impartial being his son. LOL