‘This Administration has given us one scandal after another, one resignation after another, one example of governmental misconduct after another.” That was Michael Dukakis the day Ed Meese resigned, talking about the Reagan Administration. Funny; he could have been talking about his own. Just a few hours earlier, and just a few hundred yards away from where the Duke was delivering his smug tirade, his former chief education advisor and close friend, Gerald Thomas Indelicato, had been arraigned on a variety of corruption charges ranging back to his days in the first Dukakis administration (1974-78). But Dukakis’s people hadn’t noticed Indelicato’s problems (“We don’t micro-manage around here,” the governor’s press secretary explained), so during Dukakis’s second stint in the statehouse (starting in 1982), Indelicato was appointed to the presidency of Bridge water State College (salary: $80,000 a year). The governor took a day off from the campaign trail in May 1987 to personally swear in his old buddy, lauding Indelicato’s ability to create “a sense of community.”
But that was 14 months earlier. Now, that community— Plymouth County—was about to arraign Indelicato on a whole slew of new charges, including forging the names of college trustees to a deed for a Bridgewater State-owned lot where Indelicato wanted to build his presidential dream house. And that Friday, he would be sentenced in federal district court in Boston on yet another series of felonies to which he had already pleaded guilty. (He was sentenced to thirty months and ordered to pay $80,000 to the state in restitution for bogus consulting contracts.)
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