Nice job by Walter Brooks!

The strange case of Delahunt's mari-nopoly

For his $250K salary neither former Congressman nor his partners will run operations - "A perversion so absurd it’s practically comical." - Boston Magazine

Article | Politics | February 7, 2014 - 11:45am | By Walter Brooks

Delahunt to add $250,000 to his annual paycheck.

Former Congressman has near marijuana monopoly in three counties

He was a county prosecutor for years and the United States Congressman for Cape Cod, the South Shore and the Islands for almost two decades until he retired amid questions about his handling of the Amy Bishop murder investigation while he was the District Attorney in Norfolk County, and today our former Congressman Bill Delahunt is almost cornering the marijuana market with a whopping 10 percent of all the licenses awarded including ones in Barnstable, Plymouth and Bristol Counties.

This new business venture will pay Delahunt a $1/4 million annual salary. He is slated to be the highest paid chief executive among the twenty state-wide successful dispensary applicants with an annual salary listed as $250,000.

The other firms’ chief executives would be paid about half that amount, according to the Boston Globe’s examination of the applications.

In fact, Delahunt and his four partners have themselves down for a total of $1.1 million in annual pay despite projecting the three dispensaries will lose over twice that amount the first year.

Criticism mounting

Critics of the licensing process, including the Massachusetts Republican Party, questioned the level of transparency, describing it as "politicized and secretive" and alleging that state Public Health Commissioner Cheryl Bartlett who was a contributor of Delahunt's campaigns, is too closely associated with former Congressman Delahunt. Her department just awarded his company, Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts, licenses for dispensaries in Mashpee, Taunton and Plymouth.

According to a lengthy investigation in today's Boston Globe, the former Congressman's marijuana venture omits key details about the business including any details about the person actually running his marijuana dispensaries in Mashpee, Plymouth and Taunton.

Not to be outdone, Boston Magazine weighed in saying, "On its face, this is a perversion so absurd it’s practically comical. It’s so unprecedentedly offensive, it’s hard to find a comparison."

The magazine goes on to say that the very idea of a man who was the District Attorney for Norfolk County, a man whose job it was to arrest and prosecute citizens for the possession and sale of marijuana, now has "three state-issued licenses to deal weed".

The articles point out that William Delahunt and all of the other top executives at Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts won’t be running the company’s cultivation and dispensing operations, a man brought here from California will, but he supplies no information about that man.

Read the recent stories about Delahunt here.

http://www.capecodtoday.com/article/2014/02/07/23984-strange-case-delahunts-mari-nopoly