Lawyers: Pair facing extort rap acted on behalf of constituents
Lawyers for City Hall aides Kenneth Brissette and Timothy Sullivan claim the men were bringing pressure to bear on the Boston Calling promoters on behalf of constituents — “what public officials do every day” — and argue it shouldn’t be grounds for extortion charges.
Both sides will be back in U.S. District Court Monday on a defense motion demanding U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling’s office clearly and concisely spell out what evidence it has to support charges that Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s lieutenants conspired to bully producers of Boston Calling into hiring unwanted union labor or face embarrassing consequences such as the presence of a giant inflatable rat at the popular music festival.
Brissette, Walsh’s director of tourism, sports and entertainment, and Sullivan, chief of staff of intergovernmental affairs, are due to go on trial March 26. They are facing up to 20 years in prison if convicted of Hobbs Act extortion, conspiracy and aiding and abetting.
Meanwhile, their lawyers are pulling out all the stops to persuade Judge Leo T. Sorokin to drop the case.
“Extortionists frighten other people into paying them money so that the extortionist doesn’t hurt them. It is a very simple crime — simple to allege and simple to prove,” attorneys William Kettlewell and Thomas Kiley assert in a court filing made Tuesday. “The difficulty with this prosecution is that even the government at its most cynical knows that is not what happened here.
“According to the government, at worst this case ‘involves public officials putting pressure upon an employer, through threats of economic harm, aimed at coercing them into entering an agreement to hire members of a labor union,’” the defense motion states. “But that is the essence of what public officials do every day — bring pressure in a variety of ways in order to secure benefits for their constituents.”
The lawyers contend the government must show that Brissette and Sullivan somehow benefited financially by pushing to have members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 11 paid wages and benefits as a result of the pro-labor administration’s alleged strong-arming of Crash Line Productions in 2014.
“The government does not and cannot allege that even a penny of that money went into the Defendants’ pockets, directly or indirectly,” the defense filing states.
The federal appeals court in Boston last year threw out the extortion convictions of two Teamsters after finding they had a legitimate labor objective when they threatened businesses to hire their brethren. Prior to that, a federal jury acquitted four other Teamsters of ganging up on and bullying the cast and crew of the hit Bravo series “Top Chef” for trucking jobs that had already been filled by nonunion hires.