Here’s one last nail in the coffin to close out this 15-month long John Rogers-Bob DeLeo soap opera.
Adam Reilly rightly laughed off Rogers’s last-minute denunciation of DeLeo’s coronation. The soon to be ex-Majority Leader claimed, on the one hand, that DeLeo was being installed by the DiMasi-Petrolati machine, while on the other, he whined about Sal DiMasi backing out of the deal they’d cut in 2004.
I laughed off Rogers’s statements for a different reason.
Early last year, when the furious succession battle was swirling around Beacon Hill, I spoke to a Beacon Hill source who was very close to Rogers. I asked about the Rogers campaign for the speakership, and DeLeo’s, and the 2004 deal that’s common knowledge around the State House. That’s when Rogers had supposedly suspended his first speakership campaign, allowing DiMasi’s elevation to speaker, in exchange for a guarantee that, when he left, the gavel would pass to Rogers.
The source’s reaction: Nonsense. No deal such ever existed.
Here’s what this source close to Rogers said at the time, and what I’ve verified since DeLeo’s ascension. The only deal that DiMasi and Rogers ever cut was a deal that, when DiMasi eventually left, there would be no hand-picked successor.
Instead, Rogers, who feared that DiMasi would bypass him, secured a commitment that the campaign to succeed DiMasi would be free and open and competitive, with no anointed successors.
Rogers was furious at DeLeo’s machinations over this past year because he felt that, when he responded by lining up his own supporters, and was subsequently singled out for rebuke, he was being put at a competitive disadvantage. Not because he was promised the speakership. But because he was promised a fair fight for the speakership.
And all this stuff last week, about “Talk to Tom Finneran, he was there,” and all the rest? Nothing but a Hail Mary at the closing seconds of an ugly loss.