Everett News – Everett Leader Herald

Fine & Discrimination

Leader Staff

The serenity of the Thanksgiving weekend was broken just a bit by two news reports in the Boston Globe.

Dependent upon who you are and where you stand in the Everett political morass, the twin Globe articles were either devastating or just more of the same, destined to have no impact on law enforcement officials than they have for the past five years.

The first report detailed how Greg Antonelli, the well- known supporter of the mayor and Everett’s chief public contractor made illegal donations to the DeMaria campaign – which have been returned in addition to a fine of $6,000 Antonelli paid to the Office for Campaign and Public Finance.

This was a short piece but a telling piece. It revealed that Antonelli and his relatives talked with or were interrogated by officials at OCPF who apparently investigated Antonelli’s checking accounts and those of his relatives, in order to make ultimate determinations that illegal contributions had been made.

Antonelli will likely laugh off the $6,000 fine. He is a very successful businessman for whom paying a $6,000 fine is an inconvenience somewhat like a mosquito bite.

However Antonelli’s payment of the fine indicates his aura of invincibility has been broken by law enforcement – if you want to consider OCPF a law enforcement agency.

An agency of the Massachusetts state government actually investigated Antonelli, et al, and found wrongdoing and caused him to be like all of us who disobey the law. That is, he was made to admit he did something illegal. He was made to pay a fine.

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2023 Tax Rate Set

Leader Staff

The city’s chief financial officer Eric Demas and its director of the assessor’s office BJ Devereaux came before the city council Monday night to discuss the setting of the new tax rate.

We have to admit, when they were finished describing the city’s convoluted income and assessment picture

for the coming year in great detail, we were slightly confused as to what exactly they were talking about.

That being said, the residential tax rate came in at $11.78.

The commercial tax rate was set at $25.36.

Revealed during the financial discussion before the council Monday night:

The average Everett residential tax bill is about $3,362 a year. This compares well with all surrounding cities and towns, and in fact, Everett’s yearly tax bill for homeowners is lower than all of them by a fairly wide margin.

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Antonelli Fined $6000 For Excessive Donations To Mayor

By Josh Resnek

An investigation into donations made by local businessman Greg Antonelli to the campaign of Mayor Carlo DeMaria reveals Antonelli illegally funneled campaign contributions to the DeMaria campaign through family members.

In a detailed communication received by the Leader Herald from the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance, Antonelli was shown to have asked two relatives to each make $1,000 contributions after he had donated the same maximum sum allowable under campaign finance law.

Antonelli apparently got his sister-in-law and his elderly mother-in-law to make donations from their personal checking accounts and then reimbursed them for the $1,000 contributions, according to a Stephanie Ebbert story in the Boston Globe.

“You subsequently provided cash from your personal account to each family member to reimburse them for the contributions made in their names to the Committee,” OCPF Director William C. Campbell wrote in a letter to Antonelli last week.

In his letter, Campbell said OCPF believes the mayor’s campaign committee did not have any knowledge that the contributions were reimbursed. The committee agreed to disgorge $2,000 from the funds.

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EHS Turkey Bowl Empty

In a football town such as Everett, Thanksgiving Day football is about as desirable as the turkey being served in many households across the nation on the holiday.

This season, Everett football fans and Everett High players and coaches will have to go without the main course and all its fixings as the team could not find an opponent in time for Thanksgiving Day.

Although lamenting the lack of football on the much-anticipated fall holiday, Everett Coach Robert DiLoreto has some plans to celebrate the team and all their success this season.

“It is a very empty feeling for our team, coaches and players to not have a game on Thanksgiving this year because Thanksgiving morning is all about high school football in Massachusetts. We hope to find a new and long lasting rivalry starting next season,” said DiLoreto.

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— Eye on Everett —

THE BLUE SUIT

Private Conversations between the mayor’s favorite blue suit and Josh Resnek, Leader Herald Editor.

Let’s face it, I don’t anyone, no one, who talks to a blue cloth suit. May I ask you, the reader: Do you know of anyone living or dead who talked with a blue cloth suit?

The author of this column, me, Josh Resnek, editor of the Leader Herald, claims the Blue Suit and I share a close relationship, much like best friends or comrades in arms or brothers and alter egos. The Blue Suit because of his very close relationship with the mayor, allegedly tells me many things about the mayor. The Blue Suit insists everything he tells me is true in the weekly column. Such an affirmative assertion of the truth from a cloth suit is as fantastic as me writing about the resurrection of a human being after they had died and then writing about speaking at length with the resurrected party.

The Blue Suit does not like when I talk about the possibility he is not real. The Blue Suit and I have shared many discussions – and some of them difficult – about his paternity – and who his mother and father were, where they came from, what launderette they were cleaned at and where the Blue Suit grew up and on and on.

Suffice to say, the mayor’s Blue Suit and I know one another very well. We discuss matters great and small about Everett’s politics and the mayor’s manifest city hall machinations as if such a thing were possible.

My claims are the same with each Blue Suit column.

We speak with one another.

We eat with one another.

We laugh together.

We argue.

We endlessly speculate about our favorite topic – the mayor.

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