More mental hospitals, please

  By ROBERT WHITCOMB

While we know a lot about Elliot Rodger, the young man who murdered six, injured 13 others and then killed himself on a rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., on May 23, we still do not know as much as we should to derive all the painful lessons; there are ambiguities galore. But his case has rightly energized the debate about gun laws and the fragmented American mental-health “system.”

I’d guess that the Second Amendment was far more about state militias than individual possession. Otherwise why did the Founders write in the amendment of the need for a “well-regulated militia” as its justification? (Especially note the phrase “well-regulated.”) Still, the amendment is badly written and it’s impossible to know for sure what the Founders wanted. Meanwhile, the firearms makers and gun-rights absolutists hold sway in Congress, whatever the public-opinion polls, and presumably will continue to do so for the indefinite future. (The one argument that gun-rights absolutists have that I think has a smidgen of sense is that our heavily armed population might make it more difficult for a dictatorship in Washington or outside invader to impose its will. Still, could they defeat military forces?)

Anyway, since the late ’60s and early ’70s, with the new drugs marketed as panaceas for severe mental illness, and the deinstitutionalization movement, which closed many mental hospitals, it’s been increasingly tough to commit people to institutions against their will.

Things got worse with the Health Insurance Portability and Affordability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, a part of which makes it agonizingly arduous for relatives to obtain essential psychiatric and other medical information about adult mentally ill people. We need to make it easier for families to obtain such information and then be able to act on it by obtaining a court order to involuntarily hold people who have shown themselves as potentially dangerous.

Legislation in Congress filed by Rep. Timothy Murphy (R-Penn.), Congress’s only clinical psychologist (Congress needs many more of them!), would help. It would encourage states to commit severely mentally ill people to mental hospitals or mandatory outpatient treatment by, among other things, loosening the privacy rules to give families more actionable clinical facts about troubled relatives.

But unfortunately it fails to speak to the need to build more mental hospitals, both private and state-run. Far too many of the mentally ill will not cooperate in outpatient therapy, be it sessions with therapists and/or taking medication. The fact is that some people need to be committed for long periods, and some for the rest of their lives. And that’s what happens anyway. We use our prisons for this function; at least half of America’s huge jail population is mentally ill in varying degrees, with many out-and-out insane.

At the same time, laws should be changed to more clearly limit the ability of people declared by a judge to be mentally ill to buy guns. Further, there should be more legal mechanisms to let police obtain warrants to take firearms away from people deemed dangerous. (And, yes, I know that Elliot Rodger stabbed to death three of his victims. But it’s far easier and faster to kill people with guns than with any other weapon except of course with what a competent bomb maker could make.)  Look at the mass murders of recent years.) As it is, the police have remarkably little legal power to stop crazy people from perpetrating violent crimes.

Will any major reforms involving the interface of guns and the mentally ill actually be implemented? Yes, though it may take a few more massacres. Meanwhile, who will lead to the way to build more mental hospitals to hold and treat people for whom outpatient treatment may be insufficient? Liberals and some libertarians will complain about the threat to civil liberties, conservatives about the cost. But what about the right of citizens not to be imperiled by crazy people walking around, and what about the huge financial cost of law enforcement and incarceration for so many of these people?

***

Thus we begin another summer. (I take June 1 as the real start of the season.) First comes lushness and freshness — “And what is so rare as a day in June?” asked James Russell Lowell, the 19th Century New England poet. He went on, in romantic (corny?) Victorian fashion:

Now is the high-tide of the year,

and whatever of life hath ebbed away

Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer,

Into every bare inlet and creek and bay;

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfill it

Then it gets grittier as we go into July and the lawns turn brown. Then comes a renewed freshness, almost a second spring, but with dimmer light and school-return anxiety (whatever your age) toward the end. Faster and faster comes Labor Day.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) oversees newenglanddiary.com.  He is a former Providence Journal editorial-page editor, former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune and former  managing editor of several newsletters on mental and behavioral health.

Stupidity more than corruption

Perhaps if Rhode Island were bigger, the larger pool of public-official talent made available would make such stupidities as  the outrageous state investment in 38 Studios less likely. Also helpful would be if we in the media didn't make politics so unalluring for intelligent and civic-minded people to enter that too much space is left for stupid and/or corrupt people to fill. The low level 0f knowledge and intelligence of too many elected officials in Rhode Island has always struck me as a far bigger problem than out-and-out corruption, of which, yes, there's plenty in all states, including Massachusetts and Connecticut.  In the RISDIC scandal, in 38 Studios and some other Ocean State outrages, there have been various forms of corruption (felonies or more minor)  but stupidity, wishful thinking  and not necessarily criminal taking care of pals were the biggest culprits.

Meanwhile, I have often thought that we should consider abolishing the state and splitting the land between the Bay State and the Nutmeg State, thus reducing the pathologies associated with too much political intimacy.

Triumph for the Taliban

It seems clear now that President Obama made a very bad deal in swapping five Taliban people for Bowe Bergdahl.  Some or all of them will probably end up back in Afghanistan or Pakistan t0 resume their fanatical violence, and the swap will incentivize more kidnapping. We don't yet know all the circumstances of how Sergeant Bergdahl ended up in Taliban hands. Did he defect or just desert? Or a combination thereof?

President Obama's strongest moral argument, if he used it, for doing this bad deal is that Sergeant Bergdahl was and is mentally ill and was not acting out of rational volition in Afghanistan. But that is far from an adequate reason to do a deal that  so strongly favors the Taliban and signals weakness to it and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and its Western allies continue to  signal weakness to Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of eastern Ukraine continues and who is eying stealing other Eastern European real estate to further strengthen the Kremlin kleptocracy.

Fast flower

 

"Iris,'' by MA QINGXIONG, at the Lexington (Mass.) Arts and Crafts Society through June.The iris flower's fast coming and going --- brilliantly purple one minute -- and drooping and wilted seemingly the next  --  signals the end of high spring.

The death of David and Anne Burnham

I have just heard the sad news that David Burnham, a leader in private and public education (among the institutions he graced were the Moses Brown School, St. Andrews School and the Paul Cuffee School) and  many other civic endeavors, has just died, hours after the death of his wife, Anne. He was one of the most energetic, congenial and public-spirited people I have met in my time in Rhode Island.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Challenges to clinics

Last fall, when I was writing about my Cambridge Management Group (CMG) colleagues' work in helping to turn around a financially troubled  Federally Qualified Health Center  (FQHC) called Community Health Connections, based in Fitchburg, Mass., I learned about the role these centers  play in addressing  changing American health-care demographics in general and illness — especially chronic illness — in low-income populations in particular. Such centers will continue to face reimbursement and other issues as the restructuring of the health sector accelerates.  The Affordable Care Act, in increasing the emphasis on primary care while more closely integrating it with acute care, will almost certainly  increase the importance of FQHC’s and other clinics. With all the publicity about  trying to get everyone signed up for insurance to use at physicians' offices and hospitals, we should keep in mind the need for facilities that are neither hospitals nor physician-group offices in treating  underserved populations in places like the old mill towns of north central Massachusetts, with their high incidence of poor behavioral health and such related chronic diseases  as diabetes, and sluggish economies.

Such institutions will have their hands full overcoming  the clinical, financial and administrative challenges of  meeting new federal and state health-care reform mandates while refocusing the payment structure on fee for value and away from fee for service in a new, far more accountable and evidence-based health-care sector.

Who knows what it will all look like in five years?

-- Robert Whitcomb

Chris Powell: Empty buses, broken train line

Last week brought another disastrous service interruption on the Metro-North commuter railroad in southwestern Connecticut as a 118-year-old swing bridge over a river in Norwalk malfunctioned and took hours to repair. The state Transportation Department said a replacement for the bridge is being designed and might be completed in ... 10 years. Meanwhile, the state Transportation Department hopes to have  the crown jewel public-works project of Governor Malloy's administration, the bus highway from Hartford to New Britain, operating in 10 months-- remarkable progress, except, of course, that there is no need for the busway, whose buses probably will run mostly empty for many years between hubs that have become mainly centers of welfare dependence and government bureaucracy.

By contrast, Metro-North is the busiest commuter rail system in the country and in southwestern Connecticut it serves people who not only work for a living in the private sector but provide the bulk of the state's income-tax revenue. The suckers are not likely to get any respect from state government until they go on welfare or join a public-employees union.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Arbor art

 

Work by a a student of Mary Wayss, who runs the young artists summer program at Dedee Shattuck Gallery, in Westport.  The gallery is rapidly becoming a major multi-arts regional cultural center.

Rebuilding mills as communities

   

Fall River, "The Spindle City. In the foreground is the Algonquin Mill, for which there are big plans and high hopes.

Photo by TOM PATERSON

The Mills Alliance, which wants to protect and reuse Massachusetts's old mills -- many built in the 19th Century -- for economic, environmental, sociological and, of course, aesthetic reasons is a terrific resource for developers, owners, public officials and local residents in general who see the big long-term advantages of saving these old stone and brick structures, which could last for many hundreds of years more if they are taken care of. Major centers for this beautiful and utilitarian architecture include Lowell, Fall River, New Bedford, Brockton (the former shoe-making center) and Taunton.

While the alliance is now focusing on Southeastern New England, members see it eventually expanding its activities to include mills in all of southern New England and perhaps beyond in the Northeast.  (Upstate New York and parts of Pennsylvania have some beauties.)

Many of them are highly adaptable for residential space and commercial activities, including assembly.  Yes, some can be turned into real factories again! These buildings are so large that people can work on one floor, live on another and shop in stores on a third (presumably usually the ground floor).  These are some of the ways in which saving them reduces sprawl.

The roofs of some of these mills are big enough to support commercially viable vegetable farms. (See the Brooklyn Grange as an example.)

And now Mills Alliance people are making a push to teach people that the carbon footprint of tearing them down is heavy.

The alliance says: "We believe that in an era of increasing population, decreasing economic stability, increased competition for natural resources, generally rising prices and abundant pressures on all of us to live smartly, economically and in harmony with our environment, mills offer great hope and possibility by their central locations and adaptive reuse.''

It goes on:

"Pull our mills into the 21st Century by the embrace of new technology, the promotion of tax incentives for recapitalization, and encouragement of mixed-use, live/work communities that will provide housing and employment and an agreeable, sustainable quality of life in our beleaguered industrial centers.''

Quite right.

A dash of healthier salt, and no app is needed!

  How refreshing to hear about a product that’s not an app or yet another social network but a physical thing. It seems that the business pages only cover the latest digital delight invented by a 23-year-old graduate of Stanford.

Here is something real called,  called “Salt for Life’’,  distributed by Nu-Tek Food Science LLC. It’s a blend of sea salt and potassium and has 70 percent less sodium than table salt; excessive sodium intake is associated with various health problems, particularly heart disease, about which I have more than a passing familiarity. I have no financial stake in this product, but do predict that these sorts of products will be bigger and bigger with the aging of the population and attempts to curb health-care costs.

The wine-dark Acushnet

Here's a terrific essay by William Morgan, with great pictures, about  the grand Greek Revival buildings put up in the 19th Century in and around whale-oil-rich New Bedford, which for a time was the richest community in America. The discovery of the many uses of petroleum ended that golden age for New Bedford (while constraining the nightmare of the whales -- highly intelligent mammals that the whalers consigned to excruciatingly painful deaths). See "Athens on the Acushnet''.

The aesthetics of thread

A nice tribute, in a way, to New England's textile industry is "Holding The Line,'' a show of fiber work at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth's College of Visual and Performing Arts through Sept. 11.  The show's notes say that he work "captures a point of view,  maintains a perspective, and defends a principle through the linear qualities of thread.''

Sounds pretty windy. Still, there's real art here.

Mirror of memories

"Woodland Water Flood 2'' (acrylic on canvas), by CHERYL CLINTON, at Fountain Street Fine Art, Framingham, Mass.

She says her work is a "developing story about memory, reflection and the passage of time.''

Kindly keeper

  A film about Ida Lewis, the famous lighthouse keeper.

The world its oyster

  Read about the glory days of aquaculture in Rhode Island in this story about Pawtuxet Cove.

The VA hospital mess: Demographics, history, hypocrisy

  This piece originated on the Cambridge Management Group Web site.

Merrill  Goozner, editor of Modern Healthcare, has written a fascinating and provocative  editorial that well explains why the Department of Veterans Affairs, which for some years had a stellar reputation for care, now faces a mess. And,  sadly, it's become a political game mired in hypocrisy.

Consider Phillip Longman's  book about VA health care, called <em>Best Care Anywhere</em>, which, Mr. Goozner noted, praised "the 1990s transformation that turned a scandal-plagued, dysfunctional system into one that pioneered the adoption of electronic health records, improvements in patient safety and coordinated care.''

He and many others note that the current scandal involving care delays  reflects the VA's inadequate preparation to receive hordes of aging Vietnam veterans and veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he says, don't blame the folks who run it but the politicians who failed to adequately fund  the VA.

Mr. Goozner notes that the health status of the Vietnam vets "reflects the fact that they are somewhat poorer and less educated than the general population since that was the first conflict where college-bound young adults were largely exempted from frontline military service.''

As for the vets of Iraq and Afghanistan:

"Like Vietnam-era vets, the younger vets bring with them a special set of problems brought about by the miracles of modern battlefield medicine and logistics. Compared with previous wars, many more survive disfiguring bomb blasts and traumatic head injuries, which will require a lifetime of care and support.''

"Yet until last year, the VA's medical care budget hadn't increased any faster than the general rate of medical inflation, rising from $25.5 billion in 2003 to $45.5 billion in 2012, according to data from the VA.''

Mr. Goozner also notes the hypocrisy of politicians denouncing the  "high salaries'' of people running VA hospitals that are a small fraction of salaries paid to hospital execs at "nonprofit'' hospitals. "Maybe the real lesson here for Congress and the White House is they are getting what they pay for — from the VA executive salaries to the promptness of the health care services the VA offers our worthy veterans.''

Llewellyn King: Habits to develop and monsters to avoid

No one having asked me to give their commencement address this year, I have decided to give it anyway. Here. I have been reading reports of these addresses, mostly given by public figures, some stirring debate, demonstrations and boycott. All in all, the passion is wasted because most of these addresses are not worth the fuss, the fee or the honorary degree. They occupy the unhappy space between a Sunday sermon and a sales meeting. Having exhorted the students to heights of moral rectitude they urge on them a manic menu for striving; of getting to the top of the class of life by making a lot of money and keeping America in front of China, India and, on a good day, Germany.

To read these addresses is to be told that life is a marathon in which most of the participants are from Asia and the United States is on the slippery slope to oblivion, and it missed the starter’s pistol shot.

With fine irony, it is many of those who have made a hash of national policies and foreign adventures who feel the most obliged to urge the bewildered young people of the class of 2014 to sally forth and do great things. I would humbly suggest they sally forth and live their lives: less striving, more living.

My commencement wisdom:

Do not be defined by where you work, but by what you do. Working for the dominant institution in your field may sound swell at a cocktail party, but it is almost guaranteed to be less fun and less invigorating than a lesser institution, which is not inhabited wholly by strivers. Strivers can be very tedious.

The same goes for the institution you are leaving. Worry less about where you studied and more about what you learned.

The best thing I can advise any young person is to have a well-stocked mind. It is a bulwark against adversity, a comfort in disaster, and a place where you can find strength all the days of your life; in success and disaster, in helping to heal a broken heart – and there are going to be broken hearts aplenty in this class, as there have been in all the preceding graduating classes.

Life has stages and it is worth knowing them, without being dictated to by them. In your twenties you will suffer Cupid’s arrow, the ecstasy and pain of love, make your professional mistakes, and begin the intriguing business of finding out who you are.

The thirties are the great decade: The idealism is intact, most of the mistakes are in the past, and you have the enthusiasm and energy to make your move in life. It is a golden decade when everything starts to come into focus.

The forties are for consolidating, watching children grow and deciding what is possible.

From age 50 on, you are in the harvest years. Harvest the rewards of being good at what you do, the respect of your peers, while as ever stocking your mind -- the permanent joy of learning, and especially of learning that you have not taken the human pilgrimage alone.

I have known too many people who do not know the reward and sanctuary of reading. Prodigious readers, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, would read in the five minutes before a meeting, or while waiting for a call to come through. It was the secret life that balanced the public life.

My father was not a lettered man, and reading was not something that came easily for him. As result, he missed the great community that is open to all with the good fortune to know how to read.

Do not fence yourself in — and do not let others do it for you. Do not believe that you have aptitude for this or that on a hunch: Please find out.

I have made a living as a public speaker and broadcaster for many decades. But a lawyer, in a traffic case, once told me that she would not put me on the stand because she felt I was not good at speaking in front of people. The terrifying truth is that I accepted her judgment – and lost the case.

Besides being corralled by false knowledge of ourselves, the other great monster lying in wait for you is rejection. We all dread rejection, not just those who meet it constantly like writers and sales people. Fear of rejection is a great disabler; fight it, you are not unique that way. Treat “no” as the prologue to “yes.”

Good luck.

Llewellyn King, of Washington, D.C. and Rhode Island, is executive producer and co-host of  White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is lking@kingpublishing.com.

Snobs and art lovers

"Memories of Caesar's Forum,'' by GEORGE NICK, in his "George Nick: Paintings and Legacy''  show at the St. Botolph Club, in Boston's Back Bay, through June 26.

The St. Botolph Club is one of those cultural centers -- in the case of the St. Botolph mostly for visual art (of which it has quite a permanent collection) -- spawned by the new  industrial and trading money of the late 19th Century, mostly in the Northeast.

Members prided themselves on promoting an educational and civic mission instead of simply enjoying establishments where the elite could eat and drink with the comforting sense of being in the cocoon of the financially and socially very comfortable, with no Jews, Catholics or Blacks, please.

Such ethnic and religious limitations (at some clubs enforced without anything in writing) have since mostly been dropped in these buildings, though there's still a disproportionate share of the descendents of  the old Yankee mercantile aristocracy among the membership. Yes, the Brahmins.

That is not to say that they didn't offer plenty of food and drink, too; they still do. Indeed, evidence of alcoholism  has been far from absent over the years in these brick piles, especially since enthusiastic drinking could be taken as a sign of collegiality, within limits, of course.

I remember once being asked by a friend to drop by the St. Botolph on a very quiet Sunday morning and the front door was opened by member who had been staying there during the time of his divorce. Divorces were considerably more complicated and time-consuming then; at least something has gotten simpler.  (Presumably the staff had the morning off.)

The member wore a very long, Mandarin-looking silk bathrobe (or would you call it a dressing gown?) and a glass of brandy in his hands. Who could expect any less in "the Athens of America''? This member was not alcoholic, by the way. He was just trying to settle his stomach.

Botolph, by the way, is derived from the name of a  7th Century Saxon saint living in England. The place name "Boston'' is said to come from it.

A reminder of the Anglophilia that permeated these clubs.

Sam Pizzigati: R.I. joins war on huge pay of CEO's

Have you heard about Domino’s Pizza CEO J. Patrick Doyle? He pocketed $43 million over the last three years running an operation that stiffs low-wage workers and rakes in taxpayer subsidies.

That news prompted the New York Post to open its coverage with a rather brilliant quip: “Hey, J. Patrick Doyle, save some dough for the pizzas.”

Almost every day, the headlines remind us how outrageous CEO pay in America has become. Will these outrages ever end?

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers in Congress give us no particular cause for optimism. But at the state level we actually may be in for a pleasant political surprise. Two new imaginative state proposals are now seeking to leverage the power of the public purse against executive excess. In California, lawmakers are zeroing in on how government taxes. New legislation pending in Rhode Island targets how government spends.

California’s pending Senate bill 1372, introduced by state Senators Mark DeSaulnier and Loni Hancock, would tie state corporate-income tax rates to corporate pay disparities.

Corporations in California currently face an 8.84 percent tax on their profits. The DeSaulnier-Hancock legislation would raise that rate to 13 percent for companies that pay their top execs over 400 times what their typical workers are making.

The same legislation lowers the state corporate tax rate to 7 percent on companies with a CEO-worker pay divide less than 25-to-1. Under the bill, all firms with a ratio under 100-to-1 would end up with a tax cut, all above that ratio with a tax hike.

Back in the 1970s, few firms in California or anywhere else in the United States paid their top execs over 25 times what their workers were making. And today? The AFL-CIO has just reported that major U.S. corporate CEOs last year averaged 331 times the pay that went to America’s workers.

The California legislation, writes Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, would give top corporate execs a simple choice. They could either continue to “overpay themselves and underpay their employees,” a course of action that would up their corporate tax bill, or they could narrow their internal corporate pay divide and watch their corporate tax bill shrink.

Top execs would have a third option as well. They could try to game the system by contracting out their lowest-paying jobs to reduce the gap between their company’s highest and lowest paychecks.

But the California legislation covers this possibility. The bill raises by 50 percent the tax rate on any corporations that increase their outsourcing.

The DeSaulnier-Hancock legislation has made it through a key California Senate committee. But final passage will take a heavy lift. The bill needs a two-thirds legislative majority.

In Rhode Island, Senate Bill 2796 would give preferential treatment in state contracting to companies that pay their highest-paid executive no more than 32 times what their lowest-paid employees take home.

This preferential treatment, says bill chief sponsor Catherine Cool Rumsey, would give firms with reasonable CEO-worker pay gaps an edge in competing for state contracts.

“We need to give companies the incentive to do the right thing,” the freshman senator told me earlier this month.

The Rhode Island legislation has already won the support of key state legislative leaders. Those senators not yet on board, notes Rumsey, fear “ruffling business feathers.”

Her message for the hesitant: Corporations that lavish pay on top execs and underpay workers are forcing low-wage families to draw on government social service programs. These corporations are costing state taxpayers millions.

All levels of government in America today, advocates for the Rhode Island bill point out, already deny contracts to companies that discriminate by race or gender. Our tax dollars, Americans believe, shouldn’t be subsidizing racial or gender inequality.

The Rhode Island bill extends this consensus. Our tax dollars shouldn’t be subsidizing economic inequality either.

Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow and a columnist for otherwords.org, where this piece originated. He edits the inequality weekly Too Much. His latest book is The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class.

Dear Whitey

PARODY!!! (From Paul Steven Stone, at paulstonesthrow.com)

February 14, 2010

FROM: John J. O’Brien, Commissioner

TO: James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, Jr.

ADDRESS: Somewhere in Santa Monica, CA (for internal use only)

RE: Your application for employment

Dear Whitey:

How wonderful to receive your application for future employment in our agency, in the event you ever return to your home state. Here at the Patronage Department we receive numerous applications, but rarely from someone so highly qualified to deal with criminals, killers and thugs.

However, as Commissioner of the Mass. Patronage Department it often falls upon me to perform the most difficult and unpleasant tasks. Thus, with a heavy heart and my hands raised high in the air, I regret to inform you I must reject your application for employment at the MPD.

Please don’t take this as a personal rejection. Far from it! With two of your nephews already on the department’s payroll, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to bring another Bulger aboard. Your brother William has written to me with expressions bordering on outright bragging about your numerous talents and accomplishments—your entrepreneurial spirit, your gang leadership skills, your hair-trigger response to challenges, your managerial finesse in parceling out punishment. All skills we could easily put to good use at the MPD.

In fact, because of the many obstacles you face in returning to Massachusetts for a personal interview, I took the liberty of having a surrogate sit through your civil service exam. And I’m pleased to inform you your score was so exceptional you already outrank almost all other applicants.

But alas, I cannot offer you a job should you eventually return to Massachusetts. Ordinarily, someone like you with glowing recommendations from the F.B.I. and the Massachusetts Senate, not to mention multiple good-0conduct reports from the Mass Correctional System, would be a shoo-in for almost any position in the MPD. But I cannot step aside and allow you to take the Commissioner’s job, as you requested. Not even if you hold a gun to my head as you—no doubt jokingly—suggested.

And so, Whitey, I hope you won’t hold it against me that I cannot fulfill your request for suitable employment at the MPD. As for your idea of serving our department in some security capacity, I can only reply that MPD employees are not allowed to carry loaded firearms, especially in the commonwealth’s courthouses. Another reason why I hold our prissy, pettifogging judges in such contempt.

Next thing you know they’ll be turning patronage into a crime!

And so, Whitey, I wish you great success in finding a new career path for when you ultimately return to your home state. A career path that would support any claims of personal redemption and improved moral character you might need to offset all those murder, robbery and extortion charges.

Your nephews send their love and wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day!

Sincerely,

John

John J. O’Brien

Commissioner and CDJ (Chief Dispenser of Jobs)

Massachusetts Patronage Department