Calling it ‘a shakedown’
Concert urged to hire union help while permit hung in the balance
City Hall officials were conducting a “shakedown” when they asked Boston Calling organizers to hire union stagehands just three days before the 2014 concert while permits for the show still had not been issued, prosecutors told a federal jury.
“It’s not a negotiation when you have a gun to your head,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Kaplan in closing arguments. “This was a shakedown, plain and simple.”
The jury of four men and eight women will continue to deliberate today to determine if city tourism chief Kenneth Brissette and city head of intergovernmental affairs Timothy Sullivan committed extortion and pressured a Boston Calling organizer into hiring unneeded union labor for a 2014 concert at City Hall Plaza.
Kaplan said Brissette and Sullivan were paying back a union that supported their boss, Mayor Martin Walsh, which she said counted as a benefit they derived from the alleged extortion of the concert organizer.
“Making sure your boss is not embarrassed and is happy with your work is a benefit,” the Kaplan said. “Making sure you keep your job is a benefit.”
Crash Line, at the time under contract with another production company, hired eight workers and one supervisor from the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 11 two days before the September 2014 concert.
Attorneys for Brissette and Sullivan argued that their clients did no wrong by simply asking Crash Line Productions to hire stagehands from a union, rather than forcing their hand.
“There is not one other individual in this case who has ever used the word ‘demand,’ ” attorney William Cintolo, representing Sullivan, said to jurors. “I can ask that you hire union. I’m not demanding. Did you hear one sentence of demand?”
Attorney William Kettlewell, representing Brissette, argued his client was attempting to avoid a picket and inflatable rat, meant to symbolize bad employers, at the concert to protest Crash Line’s use of nonunion workers.
“It’s not wrongful for a public official to help resolve a dispute among constituents,” Kettlewell told jurors. “That was Mayor Walsh’s policy, bring people to the table, get them to work things out. There is nothing wrongful about that.”
The case now goes to a jury three years after charges were filed, and after a U.S. Appeals Court overturned a dismissal of the case in March.