The strange tale of a former Holyoke city councilor

Puello-Mota’s tenure was scandal-plagued and short. Mere months after taking office, it was revealed that for nearly two years he had been facing child pornography charges in Rhode Island involving a 17-year-old teen. That’s right. He ran for office without disclosing the pending criminal case.

Holyoke is making international news, and not in a way leaders of the workingclass Western Massachusetts city like. But while the strange tale of disgraced former city councilor Wilmer Puello-Mota — who appears to have fled to Russia to fight for its army in the brutal invasion of Ukraine — shouldn’t be held against the city, it does offer a few insights into Massachusetts politics.

After all, it’s pretty striking that a guy like the 28-year-old Puello-Mota — who was awaiting trial in Rhode Island on child pornography charges before he escaped the country — got into office in the first place. Holyoke officials didn’t offer any single theory for how that happened, but it appears to have been through a combination of Massachusetts’ famously uncompetitive elections, misguided (but common) assumptions about Latino politicians, and the nationalization of even the most mundane local offices.

Here’s the story. Puello-Mota was a firsttime city councilor of Latino descent of whom little biographical details are known publicly. He served in the Massachusetts Air National Guard as a security forces technical sergeant until October 2022.

In 2021, when he was in his mid-20s, Puello-Mota ran for City Council in Ward 2, a heavily Puerto Rican district. He was unopposed and was elected with roughly 400 votes. That’s part of a larger story: By some estimates, Massachusetts has the least competitive elections in the nation, with countless candidates running unopposed in state and municipal elections.

A factor that may have played a role in the lack of competition, observers of Holyoke politics tell me, was a mistaken assumption that someone of Latino descent would vote with the council’s more progressive block.

“People thought he was going to be progressive and form a coalition with the other Puerto Rican members of the council,” said a former elected official in the city who would only speak anonymously.

Holyoke politicos aren’t the first to make that mistake, but it bears repeating: Latinos aren’t all the same. Know someone’s last name and you know their last name.

Instead, Puello-Mota joined a conservative, Donald Trump-supporting group of councilors, according to several interviews. Which points to another lesson the saga might offer: The nationalization of local politics is drawing some odd people into local politics, and voters ought to be cautious about candidates who seem a little too focused on national issues.

“I only had one real conversation with this dude, before we started serving on the council,” wrote another former councilor, Jose Luis Maldonado, on Instagram. Puello-Mota allegedly said to Maldonado in that conversation that “he understands supporting [Trump-aligned counselors] may mean his family gets deported, but it’s the economics of it all.”

Puello-Mota’s tenure was scandal-plagued and short. Mere months after taking office, it was revealed that for nearly two years he had been facing child pornography charges in Rhode Island involving a 17-year-old teen. That’s right. He ran for office without disclosing the pending criminal case — and apparently no media outlet uncovered it before the election, perhaps another symptom of problems in the Massachusetts political ecosystem.

Then in May 2022, he was arrested on a warrant based on obstruction of justice and forgery-counterfeiting charges that he faced.

The City Council attempted to remove him from office, but a judge ruled that “Holyoke bears the burden of proving that Puello-Mota has been convicted of a crime” and “Holyoke has failed to meet its obligation.” Puello-Mota didn’t run for reelection and officially left the council by the end of 2023.

What was already a weird story then took a downright bizarre turn in January. Right before a scheduled court appearance in Rhode Island, Puello-Mota disappeared. Then someone who looked and sounded like him started appearing in Russian military videos, including one of a soldier planting a US flag in a Ukrainian city recently captured by the Russians. Court documents filed by Rhode Island prosecutors leave little doubt that the person in the videos is the former Holyoke councilor.

It’s an irresistible story for news outlets — and they haven’t resisted it. From the Guardian to the Daily Beast — with a clickbait headline: “Is Russia’s New U.S. Propaganda Star Wanted on Child Porn Charges?” — to the Moscow Times, Holyoke has made headlines across the globe. And in the Globe, to the consternation of city officials who pointed out that the online and print headline of a recent Globe story didn’t point out Puello-Mota was a former councilor.

“Holyoke already has a tough reputation,” said Tessa R. Murphy-Romboletti, the president of the Holyoke City Council. “We have a lot of of great things happening in our city. So when something like this happens, it just detracts from the good things that are happening.”

But the only reason Puello-Mota’s in a position to embarrass Holyoke now is because he got elected in the first place — despite his age and inexperience. It goes without saying that only Puello-Mota is responsible for his actions. But his brief political career is a symptom of problems in Massachusetts politics that may not make international news — and shouldn’t be ignored.

Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com. Follow her @marcela_elisa and on Instagram @marcela_elisa.