The shelter had been open a couple of years, and one thing we could count on were lots of volunteers coming to help us serve Thanksgiving dinner.
Seemed that whole families camethe dad, mom and the kidsand they would roll up their sleeves and wash dishes, clean, serve food and it never ceased to amaze me.
It was about a month before Thanksgiving and the mess sergeant came to me and said that we were going to be about thirty-five turkeys short of our goal.
We usually fed about five hundred vets on Thanksgiving, as vets from other shelters came to Court Street because the meal was served on china, not paper, and you drank from a glass, not a paper cup, and you ate with real forks and knives, not crummy plastic.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“I’m positive. We need to get more turkeys.”
In front of the shelter, thousands of people walked every day to get to their jobs. Most were bankers and lawyers and professionals, so I went down to the office of RR&L and said,
“I need a sandwichboard sign. The sign needs to say this: ‘PLEASE HELP. WE ARE SHORT TURKEYS
THIS THANKSGIVING. PLEASE DONATE A TURKEY AND FEED HOMELESS VETERANS.’”
I said I needed two of these signs, with the same message on both sides and I wanted them placed on either end of the sidewalk in front of the shelter.
Everyone thought I was nuts, but they did what I asked and the carpenters had the signs built quickly and the painters went to work.
The next day, before sun up, the signs were placed outside and I waited to see the reaction.
Starting at around 7:30 people came into the shelter and said, here, here’s twenty bucks, buy a turkey; and others would write a check for $25 or $50 and say, buy a turkey.
The next day, the wheels came off the bus.
We had maybe forty turkeys brought in by donors.
“Holy crap,” said the mess sergeant. ”We’ve met our quota and the signs did the work.”
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I thought, well, let’s leave the signs up for a little while longer, and holy craptwenty, thirty, and sometimes forty turkeys would be dropped off every day.
We had so many turkeys we had to call a cold storage warehouse that had huge freezers and ask how much it would cost to store some turkeys.
The manager of the storage was a vet and said, I can give you three pallets where you can put your boxes or crates and as long as I don’t need the space, its free, my donation.
From the time the signs went up until Thanksgiving, we collected well over six hundred turkeys.
We had a terrific Thanksgivingand every single Sunday night, all year long, the homeless vets enjoyed a turkey dinner.
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Chapter 14: The EPA Raids Court Street
We had been open maybe three years and because of Congressman Joe Moakley’s tireless efforts we had an earmarked grant that allowed us to renovate the shelter with $4.2
million, and at the same time we had a HUD grant to build some single-room occupancy units (SROs); we were going to have a rooming house of fifty-nine units at the shelter.
This meant construction and construction teams working at the shelter.
It was a dream come true with a ton of headaches.
There were workers, trucks, deliveries, and noise that you couldn’t imagine. The architect, Rich Griffin, was onsite almost everyday and the construction company was headed up by a guy called Joe Albanese and between the two of them, the old, decrepit infrastructure was changed right in front of my eyes.
We had a guy who was the clerk of the works, Tim Mchale, who I remember as a character and a half. This guy was a minstrel who played guitar and sang with a group of holy rollers. This led to many a town meeting with a “Kumbaya” singalong that cheered up the vets week after week while this work was being done.
The shelter had additional floors that needed work, and we had no budget to do that work, but one day RR&L came to me and said, you know, we’d save a ton of money if we did our own in-house construction demolition and we used the vets who are in the building to tear down the walls. We can bring those floors to a shelled state and it will be less money when we do the construction.
It also will keep the guys busyat the time, we had maybe three hundred vets who came to our lunch every day. I said, fineorganize it and let me know what you need.
After a week, a plan was hatched and Lori Rubin and Tempie Thompson even got Congressman Joe Kennedy to come by and swing a sledgehammer to show our idea of
“veterans helping veterans.”
This demo de-construction went on for months.
We had dumpster after dumpster filled and hauled away, and soon, the dream that RR&L had brought to me was showing promise.
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You could walk through one of the shelled upper floors and look from end to end and see nothing. It was ready to be constructed into something and that was the plan.
One morning I arrived at the shelter and I saw all kinds of police and what looked like unmarked cars parked in the street.
Jesus, I wonder what’s going on in the neighborhood, I thought.
I went into the building and went to my office and started on the overnight reports.
After thirty minutes or so, I saw a stack of mail on my desk and at the top of this stack was the newest issue of Playboy.
Now, I could say that I subscribed only to read the articles. No one would believe me anyway, so yes, I actually did peek at the naked girls from time to time.
I was sitting at my desk leafing through this new Playboy when the door to my office flew open without any warning or knock.
In walked a woman in a blue jacket and right behind her was a guy wearing the identical blue jacket. The woman looked at me and said, “You Ken Smith?”
Just then the guy behind her put a round into a shotgunthe sound was unmistakableand I looked and saw as he turned to look at the door he just came through that on his jacket it said FEDERAL AGENT. I thought, holy shit, what the hell is this?
“Please move away from your desk,” said the woman.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“We’re federal agents,” she said.
“Federal agents of what?”
“We’re federal agents of the EPA.”
“The EPAthey give you guys guns?”
This woman then moved her jacket and she had a gun too.
“Move away from the desk,” she demanded. “You’re in a lot of trouble, Mr. Smith.”
“Trouble for what?”
“If you cooperate and tell us everything, without lying, I’ll see what I can do to make sure you don’t go to prison.”
“Holy shit, did you just say prison to me?”
“You’re in a lot of trouble.”
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Now, I’m no lawyer, but I had friends who were lawyers, and I said, “Am I under arrest?”
She said that if I impeded this search warrant, I very well could be. She was now sitting at my desk, going through papers, and now others came into the room.
One guy came and asked for my computer password.
“Dickhead.”
“What, what did you call me?” he said.
“The password is ‘dickhead,’” and I smiled.
Now, come to find out, there were maybe seventy-five agents going through the whole shelter. They had vets downstairs filling out statements and they took away the radio I used and she said I couldn’t answer or use the phone and I was getting pissed.
“Am I under arrest?” I said.
When no one answered I started to leave my office.
“Where you going?” the bosslady said.
“I’m leaving.”
“I’m not done talking to you.”
“OKam I under arrest? Yes or no.”
“Do you want to be?”
“Stop answering my question with a question. I have witnesses here. Am I under arrest, yes or no?”
“No,” she said, “but you could be.”
I left the office and went to the elevator and went down to the first floor.
There was complete confusion as I saw other federal agents, all wearing blue jackets that said FEDERAL AGENT and some with shotguns like the guy in my office.
RR&L came right up to me,
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“You got me. Something about the environment I would imaginethis is the EPA,” I said.
“Holy shit,” he said.
Just thenby a complete coincidencea lawyer friend of Saint Howard came into the shelter with another lawyer. They were going to ask for a tour.
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I had seen this guy before, and asked, “Are you a lawyer?”
“Yes, I am. My name’s Tom Sobel.”
Well, timing is everything. “Mr. Sobel, can you help me figure out what the hell the EPA is doing here, scaring the living shit out of hundreds of homeless veterans?”
“EPA, federal agents, here, now?” He looked around and said, “Do you know who’s in charge of them?”
“Yeah, some woman is in my office with a guy with a shotgun and I would assume she is.”
“Show me,” he said.
I took him to my office, and by now, agents were wheeling out file cabinets, they had taken phones, computers, all of our financial records, and when I got to my office the bosslady was there still sifting through stuff on my desk.
“Who are you?” she said to Tom Sobel.
“I’m a lawyer. Do you have a warrant for this search?”
She looked at Tom and then at me and then went to a folder on my conference table and took out some forms.
“I tried to give this to him when I entered into this office but he was belligerent.”
“Belligerent? That’s bullshit; you told me I was going to go prison if I didn’t do as you said.”
“I never said that,” she said.
Tom was reading the documents and said, “Where does it say you can hold people here against their will?”
She looked kind of funny and said, “We’re not holding anyone.”
Tom said, “I was just downstairs and you had people told they couldn’t leave and they were being forced to fill out statements.”
“They’re doing that voluntarily,” she said.
I then saw Tom turn to the guy with him and say something about going back to the office with the paperwork that the EPA lady had given him and they were going to file an immediate motion with federal court alleging all the bad shit that this woman and the EPA agents were doing.
“I’ll get an order stopping this and will be back,” he said to me, and left the building.
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“So, you have lawyer friends. You’re going to need them,” sneered the bosslady.
I told everyone I saw to have the staff assemble the vets, including any staff on the first floor, for an emergency town meeting.
Once I got to the first floor I could see agents sitting with vets and someone said,
“Attention on deck!”
“I have been told by our lawyers that you do not have to speak to any of these federal agents,” I said. “You do not have to show them any identification. You do not have to write any statements for them unless you want to. If you want to, then do itotherwise, listen up. You are about to be handed a blank piece of paper”I had paper and pens handed out ”and you are to write down every single thing that has happened over the past thirty minutes from the time these people came into the shelter to this very minute. You are to date this paper, put the time on this paper and have your buddy sitting next to you sign this paper as your witness.
“I want you to write down anything that you were told, and anything you were asked for.”
Just then the bosslady came into the room and gave me a look that could kill.
“Now, this includes staff and I want you to write down anything and everything that you know they have touched or taken.”
The bosslady’s face looked like she was smelling shit. “Tell them that this place is a danger to their lives,” she spat.
“This lady says this place is a danger to your lives,” I mimicked and then said,
“Remember, you are United States military veterans. All I want to hear is ‘aye aye sir!’”
The place erupted with “Aye aye sir!”
And the federal agents who were talking to vets seemed to know the gig was up. We weren’t going to take this attack lying down.
In about an hour, the EPA bosslady said, “Here is the list of things we took that were sanctioned in the search warrant and I need you to sign here.”
“I’m not signing anything,” I said.
“Well, that’s a huge mistake because you need to sign right here,” and she pulled out her pen.
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“I’m not signing anything! Arrest me,” I said.
“Don’t push your luck, Smith. We know what you’ve been doing and we’re going to prove it and you and your minions are going to jail.”
The room was as quiet as a tomb.
“Well, then if that’s what you need to do, then that’s what you need to do,” I said. I sat down and like everyone else I started to write down what had happened from the time I walked into the shelter that morning.
Tom came back in about an hour and said, “Let’s go to your office. This is serious and I want some answers right now.”
We went to my office where all the files, all the pictureseverything that was not nailed downhad been taken.
“What did you do with the asbestos?” he said.
“What asbestos?”
“The asbestos that was disturbed when you did the demolition.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
Now, without radios or phones (the EPA had taken them), I sent a runner to get RR&L.
“This is Tom, our lawyer,” I said. “He’s asking me about the asbestos that was taken from the floors we did demo on, and I have no clue what the hell he’s talking about.”
“That’s bullshit,” said RR&L. “We didn’t take any asbestos from anywhere, its still there; we never touched it, ever.” RR&L was a licensed plumber. He continued, “I know what asbestos is and I have seen it wrapped on pipes for the heating system, but we never touched anything, I swear.”
“Show me,” said Tom.
RR&L, Tom and I then went floor by floor with RR&L showing him, here, here and here is asbestos and you can see, we never touched anything.
“Did you get permits for the deconstruction?” asked Tom.
“Yes,” said RR&L, “and the EPA took them, along with all of our tools and our files. They even took my personal calendarmy black book in my back pocket.”
“Did you give it to them or did they take it?” said Tom.
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“They took it, and they searched me and made me empty all my pockets and they did the same to everyone on my staff.”
I then told Tom that we had had every single person in the shelter, staff and client, fill out a statement and then had that statement witnessed.
He told me that was a good thing and to get those statements to his office right away.
Now I was pissed.
It was obvious to me that some developer who lost out on the building was using the EPA to find a way to shut down the shelter.
“What do we do?” I asked Tom.
‘Well, the EPA went to the architect’s and the builder’s offices this morning too and did the same thing that they did here. They went in loaded for bear and right now they have thousands of documents that I don’t have, and they are trying to assemble a case that will attempt to show you have had veterans remove asbestos and somehow they will attempt to show you were responsible.”
“Do I call the media?” Calling the media had been a reliable default strategy in past crises.
“Nope. You don’t say a word to anyone without clearing it through me, you got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you don’t have anyone else saying anything either, got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll have an environmental company here within the hour doing air quality tests and nobody is to ask them anything, show them anything, or interfere with them in any way, you got that too?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, they have disrupted this operation and I have an emergency meeting at federal court in an hour and I will try to make some sense out of all this, in the meantime, you don’t go to the floors where you showed me the asbestos and you try to get this place back in some order.”
“Yes, sir.”
For weeks thereafter, every single Monday-Wednesday-Friday morning from eight to nine o’clock, I would sit in this lawyer’s office and answer questions, one after another.
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Did you do this? No.
Did you do that? No.
And on and on and on and on.
Then one day Tom said, “They have convened a grand jury. You may be required to testify.”
“Sure,” I said, “Let me know the time and the place. I’ll tell the truth and let a jury hear about what dicks the agents had been when they came in and attacked us.”
“No you won’t. You will answer ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ And you will remember the questions you were asked.”
Weeks turned into months and operations returned to normal. One day, Tom called and said come to my office right awaythe US attorney wants to speak to us.
I went to the law firm that I had been going to for months, and Tom was sitting with a pile of paper. This stack of paper had to be five feet tall.
“Do you know how much money this firm has spent defending this case?” Tom asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“Well over a million dollars.”
I was floored. Where was I going to get that kind of money?
“I’ll do another fundraiser,” I said, “and I will pay back every dime.”
“That’s not important, but you and I will be walking over to the US attorney’s office soon and you are to keep you mouth shut and let me do the talking, you got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
Now, what was strange was that Tom was younger than me, and yet I knew he was a crackerjack lawyer. He had filed a lawsuit against all the major tobacco companies on behalf of the state of Massachusetts and he was in line to make millions. Personally and for the firm.
We walked the few blocks to the US attorney’s office and I could see that the place was humming. We were led into a conference room that held about twenty-five people all sitting around a huge conference table. One of the people was the bosslady from the EPA assault team. She did not look at me.
Tom and I were placed directly across from the US attorney.
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The meeting started with the US attorney telling Tom some legal mumbo jumbo and then he said, “We are not going to pursue this case any longer.”
My ears perked up.
Did he say he isn’t going to pursue this case any longer?
The US attorney then went on to say that there would be no media, no grandstanding on either side, and that paperwork would be drawn up that would kill the investigation and we would all go our separate ways.
He then looked at me and said, “Are you satisfied, Mr. Smith?”
“I’m not,” was my answer. I thought Tom was going to slap me.
“And why is that?” said the US attorney.
“I want an apology and I want my Playboy back.”
As soon as I said that, Tom said “Excuse us for a moment please” and grabbed by arm and dragged me outside the room.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” he said.
“What?” I said. “They did this, not me, and I want my Playboy back.”
“I will buy you a fucking case of Playboys and we are going back in that room and you’re going to shut your mouth, got that?”
“Yes sir,” I said, and we walked back in.
When we had gone back in and resumed our seats, the US attorney turned to me and said, “Mr. Smith, Ms. D has something to say to you.”
To my amazement the EPA bosslady looked at me. There was a moment of silence. Her lips quivered and she took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled through clenched teeth.
Nobody could have heard it.
“Can you speak up?” I said.
“I said I’m sorry,” she nearly shouted.
The US attorney told Tom that all of our property would be returned.
The next day, a big truck showed up and unloaded all of our stuff at the front door.
Weeks later, at Tom’s house on the North Shore, we had a laugh at the way the meeting went.
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“You know, you almost cost me my job. The chairman of my firm said to let you guys sink if I thought you were guilty at any time,” he said. “But after seeing what you guys do, and speaking to those that they said were guilty, I knew that the right thing to do was to jam this case up their ass.”
“Thanks,” I said, and a friendship was born.
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Chapter 15: Conference Room Shootout at Brown Rudnick Not long after the building had been successfully leased by the Vietnam Veterans Workshop, and not long after Howard “The Dragon Slayer” Levine had secured all of the needed permits and legal stuff, he called me and said he wanted to have a heart-to-heart discussion about the organization.
I went to his office near South Station, on the eighteenth floor of a large building, and waited in the reception area till his secretary, Joyce, came to get me.
Howard will be meeting you in Conference Room B, she said.
I went into this room and holy cowI was hypnotized. The view was just spectacular.
Presently Howard came into the room with another lawyer.
We were seated and Howard said, “Ken, I want you to just listen carefully and don’t say anything until I’m done. Over the past three months, the corporate lawyers here at the firm have reviewed the original articles of incorporation and the bylaws, and we have some serious suggestions that we want you to consider. As the president of the organization, I thought it prudent to bring these suggestions to you, but first there is the matter of who is the corporate counsel for the charity. Now, legally, right now, Danny is the corporate counsel and we have nothing against him or what he has done, but for us to make the changes we will discuss, and for you to decide that those changes need to happen; weour firmwould have to be the lawyers of record.”
Now, I trusted Howardbut I wondered what the hell