MASSACHUSETTS: Curley's Boys

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The civic conscience of Boston, like a goboon in a Scollay Square saloon, is a battered vessel. It was severely dented last November when Mayor James Michael Curley, a man with a mountainous contempt for public opinion, returned happily to his $20,000-a-year job after spending five months in prison for mail fraud. Since then, Boss Curley has given the vessel a few more kicks.

On All Fools' Day, he appointed one John Joseph Connors, a dapper, poker-faced ward heeler, as chairman of the Boston Board of Election Commissioners. The salary: $7,000. In addition to supervising elections, the commission compiles lists of prospective jurors for Suffolk County and is charged with keeping them free of criminals.

Unplugged. Connors is an ex-jailbird. An ex-hot check passer and panhandler, he now & then augmented his income by filching nickels from telephone coinboxes. He would stuff toilet paper into the return slot, wait a couple of hours, then unplug the jackpot. He has spent over a year in jail.

Boston reacted to this appointment with monumental indifference. Two weeks later Jim Curley found a job for another ex-convict. This time it was a ruddy, amiable lawyer (once suspended) named Charles H. McGlue, who had been a Curley campaign manager, state Democratic chairman and head of the state Ballot Law Commission, which irons out ballot disputes. In 1939, McGlue had been convicted of federal income-tax evasion, spent five months in jail. Curley decided that McGlue was just the man to be assistant chief of the city's licensing division (at a modest $4,000).

Unmoved. Another of the boys was in trouble last week—for a brief moment. Former City Councilman Joseph M. Scannell went on trial in Suffolk Superior Court charged with attempted shakedown. The prosecution said he had demanded $3,000 from a man who wanted a license to run a water-taxi service from a Congress Street dock to Logan Airport. Cherub-cheeked Joe, who holds down a $5,200-a-year job as a construction inspector for the Curley-controlled city housing authority, pleaded nolo contendere (I ain't sayin' a word).

The judge ordered him to pay $300 in court costs. The housing authority was severe with Joe, too. Joe would lose a day's pay for the time he spent in court.