Ray maker

Mayor Mariano shares his consulting tricks

by Walter Crockett

Billy Bulger Sr. hasn't talked to Ray Mariano since our mayor kicked Billy Jr.'s ass.

When the elder Bulger parachuted gently down from the state senate presidency into the less powerful but more lucrative presidency of the University of Massachusetts several years ago, he had planned to bequeath his South Boston senate seat to his namesake.

But along came the mayor of Worcester to mastermind the campaign of upstart Steven Lynch, a state representative with just 14 months' experience. Billy Jr. outspent Lynch three to one, but with Ray in his corner Lynch whupped him good.

Today both Bulgers are cozy with Lynch, but last time Mariano saw the old man -- on the podium at Assumption College graduation -- Whitey's brother turned away with a tight-lipped scowl. Better not send your kids to UMass, Ray. Payback is a bitch.

Yes, payback is a bitch. That's what Mariano's political enemies used to say about him. The feisty mayor, who was an even feistier city councilor (and before that a positively fractious school-committee member), has a reputation for quietly evening the score with those who cross him in public life. But these days more than a few of Mariano's former adversaries are ready to pay him to work for them.

With an unbeaten record in special elections, a string of successful state senate and state rep campaigns near and far, and a handful of high-profile Boston victories under his belt, Mariano has emerged in recent years as perhaps the top political consultant in the minor leagues of state politics. In recent years his consulting has helped win victories for Democratic state senators Robert Antonioni of Leominster, Marian Walsh of Boston, Richard Moore of Uxbridge, and Brian Joyce of Milton, among others.

"My best clients are the ones that I campaigned against," say Mariano. "All the guys on the Bulger campaign ran for office later and hired me."

"Ray is a product of and a student of urban politics and understands the dynamics of urban politics as well as anyone in this state -- and his client list reflects that," says political analyst Lou DiNatale, a fellow at the McCormack Institute. "He's actually cornered the market in a certain kind of field -- urban, Democratic, moderate-to-conservative on the political scale, tend to be ethnic Irish or Italian, in a crowded field. . . . But he operates at a very low level. Winning state senate, state rep, city council, mayoral races -- this is not what makes a consultant. The real business is statewide and national races. The real business has to do with television and mass communications."

It's true that the big consulting money isn't in the small races. Moore says he paid Mariano & Wright about $6000 to help him jump from a state rep seat in Uxbridge to a state senate seat that stretches all the way west to Southbridge. Mariano says he does about five or six campaigns per season (and turns down twice as many). But that kind of extra money added to his $20,000-a-year mayoral salary isn't going to put his three kids (aged nine, 12, and 13) through college -- especially if they don't get scholarships at UMass.

Mariano, who split with partner Richard Wright last year and formed the Mariano Group, says he does only about one-third of his company's business with political campaigns. The rest is in marketing and promotional efforts for private corporations. The most current news story is a 1988 Business Digest piece that put Mariano & Wright's billings at almost $2.5 million that year, but who knows what it is today? Ray's certainly not saying.

The mayor's enemies -- and he has made a few -- have long suggested that his consulting gives Mariano the opportunity to put the squeeze on companies and politicians who do business in Worcester. "Hire us and you'll get the contract" -- or "Hire me and you'll get my endorsement" -- is how this scenario goes.

Mariano has long replied that he constantly checks with the city law department for possible conflicts of interest, and that he actually loses business by working so hard at staying beyond reproach. In fact, nobody has ever pinned a consulting impropriety on Mariano, though many have tried.

So why does he stay in the minors when according to his own calculations he's batting .850 on the consulting field? He'll tell you it's the same reason he hasn't run for statewide office yet and will never run for congress: his family comes first.

Back in the '70s, Mariano worked for presidential candidates George McGovern and Henry "Scoop" Jackson. He traveled to Idaho for the successful re-election campaign of US Sen. Frank Church and to Texas to help elect Dolph Briscoe governor. He'll never forget standing in the home of a national political consultant named Wally Clinton (no relation to Bill).

"I remember going to the door to leave his house," Mariano says, "and his little girl, four or five years old, she ran to the door and she stood there. And she was hitting him and yelling, `Don't you leave me again, Daddy.' I didn't want to have a life like that."

So Mariano came home. He ran for school committee unsuccessfully in 1975 but hasn't lost since -- 11 victorious campaigns in 21 years. Along the way he got married, had three kids, and started consulting again but not out-of-state. Mariano's campaign philosophy is pretty simple: do the polling, understand the numbers, sell the candidate, work like a maniac, and don't go negative.

"My ideal candidate," he says, "is somebody who believes passionately in why they're running for that office. Someone who is passionate about the issues that confront that office. Someone who is a tireless worker."

How much does he want them to work? "All the time. They don't sleep. Seven-and-a-half days a week for however long it takes."

And what's this about not going negative? Could this really be coming out of the mouth of Mr. Payback?

"My philosophy is that it always should be the very last resort to go negative," Mariano insists. "There are formulas in the political trade magazines: in this situation you start negative and finish positive -- or positive-negative-positive. There are timing patterns, complex strategies. I don't buy any of it. My own strategy is a very simple one: you start positive and you stay positive. If you don't have a ton of money, you shouldn't waste any of it talking about someone else."

When he first ran for mayor in 1993, the Telegram & Gazette, which despised him at the time, rated all the candidates and gave Mariano a D. The paper scored him 0.8 on a scale of 0 to 5 for political integrity though failed to explain why. Mariano says he almost came out swinging, but he bit his lip and stuck to the issues. "I said, "We're going to put our hands by our sides." And he won big.

"You never hit a man whose hands are by his sides," Mariano says. Any candidate who breaks that rule, he believes, is sure to lose public support. Antonioni and Lynch also testify that Mariano counseled them to avoid negative campaigns.

"We never mentioned our opponent," says Lynch of his campaign against Bulger Jr. "That was Ray's read of the race. I must say I was green as the grass. Ray brings a wealth of experience and, I think, astute political judgement. I was a bit overwhelmed by the size of the district and Ray was very instrumental in getting us to do some very accurate polling to focus on the areas we needed help."

One thing Mariano didn't know was just how local politics is in Southie. "Ray was assigning people to various polling places," Lynch says. "He sent one of the ladies from D Street up to the library on Broadway, and she said, "Oh no, I can't go up there. I'm a D Street person, and I'm going to work the polls at D Street.' And Ray said, `What do you mean, it's two blocks away.' And she said, `Yeah, but you don't get it. I'm with the D Street crowd and these are the people I know.'"

The upshot of it all is that Mariano is now in with the D Street crowd, too. He trained Lynch's campaign workers and made a lifelong friend of Lynch. And if Ray decides to run for lieutenant governor -- as he's hinted he may in 2002 when his kids are bigger -- he'll already have a base in South Boston and in Uxbridge, Southbridge, Milton, Leominster, Dorchester, and dozens of other communities he's run campaigns in.

Then all those years in the minor leagues just might pay off big-time.