Richard Vitale, the friend and financial advisor to former House speaker Sal DiMasi, admitted last October that he illegally lobbied on Beacon Hill without registering as a lobbyist. He was placed on probation for two years and ordered to pay $92,000 in fines, becoming essentially a footnote in the much broader scandal that engulfed the former speaker and sent him to prison.

Attorney General Martha Coakley’s statement of the Vitale case, basically her version of what happened, was suppressed by the judge during the legal proceedings. But under the state’s Public Records Law, CommonWealth recently obtained the document from Coakley’s office.  It paints a disturbing portrait of the way legislation is crafted on Beacon Hill and the ability of someone like Vitale to parlay a “Friend of Sal” relationship into a lucrative business generating fees of $5,000 a month. 

Many of the details included in Coakley’s statement of the case surfaced initially in 2009 when Superior Court Judge Frank Gaziano issued a 40-page ruling denying Vitale’s bid to dismiss the charges against him. What’s interesting about Coakley’s version of events is what it reveals about Beacon Hill. It tells the story of how a group of Massachusetts ticket brokers sought to do away with a 1924 state law that limits markups on the resale of tickets to $2 above face value. The ticket brokers didn’t simply make their case to lawmakers; they traded on the personal relationships of a “hired gun.”

The case statement details how Vitale represented himself as someone who could win the passage of legislation sought by his ticket broker clients, led by James Holzman of Ace Ticket. But he was also careful to say he wasn’t technically lobbying, even though a $20,000 contingency fee depended on his success in getting the legislation approved. The statement documents meetings Vitale had with key lawmakers, including DiMasi, Rep. Thomas Petrolati of Ludlow, and Speaker Robert DeLeo of Winthrop, who at the time was chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

The ticket brokers’ bill eventually passed the House, after DeLeo’s Ways and Means Committee made some changes sought by Holzman. Over in the Senate, however, the bill languished and Holzman became anxious. In February 2008, according to Coakley’s statement of the case, Holzman sent a long email to Vitale in which he said the failure to pass the legislation had cost him many lucrative business opportunities.

“It has been three long years of me being in a situation where I’ve waited patiently for the results that I have fully entrusted you with, and that you have assured me will happen,” Holzman said. “In this entire project the results [sic] is that you and I together are ‘Heroes or Zeroes.’  Together let’s be heroes.”

The bill died in the Senate and the state’s anti-scalping law remained on the books, but Holzman and the state’s other ticket brokers have since acted as if their bill was approved. They mark up the prices of the tickets they resell to whatever the market will bear. The Boston Red Sox and other sports teams have dived into the lucrative ticket reselling business, and even the Boston Globe, which broke the story about Vitale’s illegal lobbying, is now partnering with Holzman and reselling tickets through its Boston.com website.

Full disclosure: Before I became a contributing writer for CommonWealth, I was an advocate for a number of consumer causes, including preserving, strengthening, and enforcing the state’s ticket scalping law.  I played a role in both of the lawsuits against ticket brokers that prompted Holzman and the other ticket brokers to hire Vitale in an effort to do away with the 1924 law. After I gave up consumer advocacy, I never wrote about ticket scalping for CommonWealth or any other publication because of my past involvement.