Maximum Mike Goes to Washington

Sullivan has always been known as a comer. Born into a big, working-class Irish-Catholic family in Holbrook, he started out at Gillette as a stock clerk, and worked his way up the corporate hierarchy for 16 years, earning degrees from BC and Suffolk Law. He ran for state rep in 1990 and served five years on Beacon Hill before being appointed DA for Plymouth County, where he first honed the kind of no-mercy style—refusing plea bargains, seeking the maximum punishment for nearly every offense—that is catnip for Republican voters who don’t know the difference between being tough on criminals and being tough on crime. Along the way, Sullivan picked up the nickname “Maximum Mike.” He’s a churchgoing, Mark Twain–reading family man often described as “good to have a beer with.” And that’s helped his steady rise, since voters will happily stomach all manner of poor judgment and bad policy when a fella is thought of as “good to have a beer with.” In 2001, taking what by then seemed the inevitable next step up the ladder, Sullivan was appointed U.S. attorney by newly elected President Bush.

A big complaint that critics have about Sullivan’s tenure as U.S. attorney centers on a couple of dubious patronage hires he’s made out of Plymouth County, which have fostered the perception that Sullivan has used his old stomping grounds as an Arabian Horse Association for the office. “He’s done a lot of harm in his hiring decisions,” says a former staffer. The most oft-cited example is Kenneth Shine. A criminal-defense lawyer from Plymouth County with no prosecutorial experience, Shine arrived at the office this spring, brought in by Sullivan after a debilitating hiring freeze brought on by federal budget constraints. Besides Shine’s relative obscurity at the time—“I’d never heard of him,” says a source close to the office, “and I kind of know everyone in the criminal-defense bar in Massachusetts”—several people believe he was not put through the normal rigorous hiring process. Sullivan insists Shine was hired properly, adding, “I would suggest that Shine has tried more cases than most people that we hire out of the District Attorney’s Office.” But suffice it to say that after the crippling attrition, Shine was hardly the cavalry everyone had been hoping for.

So, why Shine? One reason might be that, according to the Dukes County Registry of Deeds, Shine co-owns a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard with Sullivan. It’s further worth noting that the other part-owner of that property is Sullivan’s longtime friend District Court Judge James McGovern, also of Plymouth County. If that name rings a bell, it’s because early in Sullivan’s tenure, he created an assistant U.S. attorney/senior policy adviser job for McGovern, who worked at the office from 2002 to 2006 before returning to the bench.

Around the office, the Maison de Patronage is a rather bitterly held open secret; many staffers asked me some variation of “Did anybody tell you about the house?” At the same time, several people I spoke with stressed that some of Sullivan’s Plymouth County hires have turned out well. But that just underscores the problem with clumsy patronage: You bring in certain people because of their connections, and it taints those who made it on their own merits.