Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Martineau, CVS + Blue Cross & Blue Shield

The details surrounding former House majority leader Gerard Martineau's plea agreement lend fresh relevance to part of a story that I wrote more than a year ago. While my focus at the time was former Senator John Celona's starring role in the trial of officials from Roger Williams Medical Center, this hit on still-unresolved questions in the ongoing Operation Dollar Bill investigation:

Celona’s testimony has again made clear just how easy it is to focus on scattered instances of legislative corruption in Rhode Island. It’s only fair to wonder, though, about the guys who played a role in doing the corrupting, and about why the private sector isn’t being held to the same standards as the public sector.

Celona got jammed up in late 2003, when the Providence Journal’s Katherine Gregg revealed that CVS, the Woonsocket-based drugstore giant, had made significant and undisclosed payments to the senator, the chairman of a Senate committee overseeing health-care legislation.

This revelation was significant. In a state where the ProJo has long played an outsized role by exposing the mighty — and sometimes prosaic — lapses of predominantly Irish-American and Italian-American legislators, recent years have shown how some of the state’s most powerful private sector entities, including CVS and Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, have figured in the action.

It’s no coincidence that lawyers for the companies and individuals that remain under investigation are attending the US District Court trial of former Roger Williams president Robert Urciuoli and two colleagues.

While the outcome of the ongoing probe of State House influence-peddling remains uncertain, the Roger Williams case shows how federal investigators are starting to address questions about the private sector’s responsibility. And the top question remains just how far this investigation will go.