Mayor's top aide center of E-Mail investigation
by Howie Carr
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Monday, Sep. 21, 2009
Mike Kineavy’s friends call him a Southie street guy. Those who aren’t so enamored describe him as a Southie street tough.
Kineavy even combs his hair, what’s left of it anyway, straight back, in the slicked-down Stevie Lynch working-class style.
Call him a throwback wethead if you will, but one thing you can never call Mike Kineavy - a member of the 02127 chapter of Mensa. When the feds start subpoenaing every e-mail in City Hall, you don’t erase yours, not unless you want the kind of mess that has enveloped your boss on the weekend before the preliminary elections.
Mumbles has been very very good to Kineavy. The 54-year-old Southie street whatever made $147,902.91 last year. That’s a long way from his days on the payroll of Rep. Joe Moakley - and did I mention that his uncle, Roger Kineavy, was Mocha’s top guy in Boston? Another nationwide search.
In his youth, Kineavy was just another coatholding Southie party animal. Now he’s straight, a triathalon guy, his obsessions channeled into riding herd over the City Hall hackerama. During the early Mumbles years, he was the guy in the inner circle who wasn’t from Hyde Park. Soon he was running Neighborhood Services, the political machine grafted onto city government. The Ward 18 guys bitched that under Kineavy, Southie was still getting the jobs, as if Raybo had never taken a flyer to Rome.
Now he’s Mumbles’ trusted chief of “policy and planning,” but this bonehead play with the e-mails puts his patron behind the eight-ball. Ironically, the other guy who’s got a problem over the e-mails, in Southie anyway, is Councilor Mike Flaherty, who blew the whistle on one of his own.
According to Southie sources, that didn’t go over well in “the Town.” The Kineavy-Flaherty tale dates back to 1997, when City Councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen let it be known that she’d be going after Mumbles in 2001. So City Hall decided to take her off the board in the off-year elections in 1999. Mumbles needed a Southie candidate for the Council, and it was Baby Flats who got the nod.
In that 1999 campaign, Kineavy did a lot of the heavy lifting for Flats, with Mumbles’ blessing. As it turns out, Peggy survived to get trounced two years later, and the guy City Hall finished off was sick old Dapper O’Neil, reduced to holding his own signs at intersections, hunched over in his wheelchair, slack-jawed, in a blanket.
According to people in Southie, Baby Flats owed Kineavy, not just for 1999, but for every favor since. Why do you think Flats sent him all those e-mails? And yet how does Flats settle his beef with Kineavy? Like a real man, like in the old days in Southie? No, he dials 911. Truly, the Town is no more.
And now the polls open in 48 hours. Flats is spending a quarter-million this weekend, but let’s face it: He’s run a Tom Reilly campaign. The most amazing fact in this election is that he and Sam Yoon are the same age - 40. I’ll bet Yoon gets carded everywhere, not just at Fenway Park [map]. Flaherty looks like he’s about ready to ask for a senior-citizen discount on his T pass, if he ever rode the T that is.
Mumbles retains his blocs - think city workers, Chinatown and the Russians in Brighton. In a low turnout final, they would easily outnumber Flats’ Local 718 and the angry property owners in the northern half of the city who’ve been screwed over by crappy zoning decisions made to benefit Mumbles’ pals from Hyde Park.
If Yoon sneaks in, who knows how the next six weeks unfold?
Mumbles is lighting a candle this morning for Flats. And so is Kineavy, despite Flats’ stabbing him in the back last week. It wouldn’t hurt for Kineavy to get in a final four years on the city at 150K. At this point, for Mike Kineavy and all the rest of Mumbles’ minions, it’s all about the pension. Indeed.
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