Court clerks make quick work of council fight

They were all there together in the same New Bedford District Court hallway last week.

City councilors Linda Morad and Brian Gomes and longtime citizen and media activists Carlos Felix and Craig Ptaszenski. 

The longtime adversaries were not exactly gathered in the same clique in that hallway, but they were just feet apart. Unsurprisingly, they were not assaulting each other. Surprisingly, they were not calling out bad names, which of course is the more likely scenario with this crowd.

What was the occasion? The councilors had felt the advocacy journalists —  political gadflies they really are — were harassing them this past Nov. 30. They have told police that the citizen journalists had trespassed onto the council chamber’s balcony while the councilors had gathered to record their holiday greetings. The advocacy journalists felt there was a quorum of councilors present, so the gathering should have been open to the public.

You remember that balcony. Former Mayor Scott Lang and others were also on it one night a few months ago protesting the opening of a sober home in their neighborhood after the downstairs council chambers overflowed. 

The media gadflies even had the nerve to follow the councilors, very much public figures all, after they exited City Hall, “harassing” some of them outside the building. Morad, who was at the time the council president, said she feared for her safety, and it was not the first time she had felt that way with Felix, Ptaszenski, and a third activist of sorts, Evangelos “Gilly” Safioleas.

Felix and Safioleas are big guys and have a long history of harassment and intimidation charges, none of which have ever gone anywhere, because, in all honesty, they are just political “nuisance” charges designed to get bothersome people to shut up.

Safioleas, for instance, had a habit of sitting in the council chambers with a sign that said “Linda Morad is a tyrant” in full view of the city’s cable TV cameras. That was until she figured a way to eliminate the bench he was sitting on. A few years ago, the last time Morad was council president she also went to court with Safioleas when he wouldn’t stop clapping during council meetings. It ended up in a $100 fine from a judge for Safioleas, though he says he thinks he could have won a jury trial.

This sort of stuff.

Felix and Safioleas can be exasperating. Their delivery often comes across as bullying and they are righteous in a manner that brooks no opposition.

Safioleas was not a part of the court proceedings last week, but he was also at the court for them — which not surprisingly, the New Bedford District Court magistrates barred the public from attending.

The local magistrates’ insistence on no exceptions to their secretive hearings is a separate problem. Let me take a minute with that.

Clerk Magistrate Peter Thomas had made the closed-door ruling despite all the parties involved saying they thought the hearing should be public. And Assistant Clerk Magistrate Fred DeCubellis, who actually held the hearing, seemed to claim he had no power to reverse the initial decision of the senior clerk, which was made before all the involved parties had said they preferred the proceedings to be open.

They’re not public, he told three journalists of magistrate hearings, sounding as if he had never heard of an exception. 

DeCubellis and a second New Bedford assistant clerk magistrate, Tom Hibbert, both told the traditional-standards press that they could not remember a single magistrate hearing at the New Bedford District Court ever being public in their respective six and 26 years working at the court.

Astonishingly, both said they were not acquainted with the 2021 case of former City Councilor Hugh Dunn — whose magistrate hearing for leaving the scene of a motor vehicle accident and other charges — was somehow transferred from the New Bedford to the Fall River court and held there in the light of day, open to all. That’s the kind of case that you worry about a magistrate hearing burying in private. In New Bedford or elsewhere.

Back to the issue at hand. 

Felix and Ptaszenski are social media types who are most visible on the Facebook site New Bedford Live and the online news site, New Bedford Guide. They said they felt the councilors, along with City Clerk Dennis Farias, – who of course owes his job to the council – had made up a false story about them on the trespassing. Ptaszenski told reporters that police Officer Tim DeCosta had conceded to the magistrate that he had not in fact seen a sign limiting access to the balcony, but only obtained a photo of it from another officer. Ptaszenski says it wasn’t there.

We did not have an opportunity to interview DeCosta afterwards and an audio recording of the proceedings will not be available without a formal public record process by The Light.

DeCubellis quickly declined to allow charges to proceed against either the gadflies or the councilors. Poor Mr. Farias, an able city clerk, was left to tell reporters he thought the whole thing was a waste of time.

He’s right about that.

For my part, I’ve known all these folks a very long time. I know it sounds corny but I like all of them, to greater and lesser extent of course. I just thought that as they hung out there in the New Bedford District Court’s basement hallway, that this whole thing is silly.

Here’s the thing: The advocacy media types, whatever their good or bad motivations, have an important role to play in New Bedford politics and media. It was Safioleas who raised important issues in the Housing Authority’s operation of Tripp Tower that resulted in a City Council public hearing. The city might not have known about former Councilor Dunn’s late-night car crash were it not for Felix responding to the scene in the middle of the night. He covers more public safety incidents than anyone in the city’s current desert for breaking news. Ptaszenski has raised newsworthy questions on any number of issues facing the city over the years. 

The mainstream media ourselves are sometimes a target of these gadflies’ wrath. They are not easy.

It’s not just me who has known these players a long time. It’s the councilors and the citizen journalists themselves. Safioleas was a longtime Morad supporter before they had a falling out. Felix has tried to both report on the councilors and run for their office at the same time. He has commented derisively on any number of questionable decisions and actions that Morad and Gomes have made. Sometimes he’s way out of line but sometimes he’s very accurate and funny, too. He’s part of the New Bedford political milieu.

Ptaszenski a few years ago was an important player in a case over an abandoned dog custody dispute involving Councilor Morad and Animal Control officer Manny Maciel. Maciel and police oddly brought charges against him on a separate dog case, which DeCubellis also dismissed back then, according to the council critic.

It’s serious stuff, it’s non-serious stuff. It’s just New Bedford political stuff. I’ve written about most of it, goodly and badly, myself for many years.

The juvenile nature of it all reminds me a little of what my father used to do when my younger brother and I used to get into wrestling fights when we were kids, trying to suffocate the pride out of each other.

“You want to fight?” he’d say. “OK, fight,” and he’d press our bodies into each other. 

Of course, my father forcing my brother and me into each other immediately made us want to stop fighting. Because it was all stupid. And because we actually loved each other.

I’m not sure the councilors and citizen journalists actually love each other. They’ve certainly known each other for a long while, some of them. But I think they do like each other a little. They ought to show a little more of that.

Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

Edito’s note: This column was amended on Feb. 5, 2024, to more accurately reflect the time when the citizen journalists followed the city councilors.