This morning’s arrest of state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson on extortion and wire fraud charges looks like the final chapter in a pitiful tale whose installments have come with almost predictable regularity over a period stretching more than a decade. Though she’s entitled to her day in court, the charges that Wilkerson took payments as part of scheme to secure a liquor license for a Roxbury development add a contemptible element of venality to a biography that now reads more like a rap sheet.
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Executive Editor, CommonWealth
About Michael Jonas
Michael Jonas has worked in journalism in Massachusetts since the early 1980s. Before joining the CommonWealth staff in early 2001, he was a contributing writer for the magazine for two years. His cover story in CommonWealth's Fall 1999 issue on Boston youth outreach workers was selected for a PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
Michael got his start in journalism at the Dorchester Community News, a community newspaper serving Boston's largest neighborhood, where he covered a range of urban issues. Since the late 1980s, he has been a regular contributor to the Boston Globe. For 15 years he wrote a weekly column on local politics for the Boston Sunday Globe's City Weekly section.
Michael has also worked in broadcast journalism. In 1989, he was a co-producer for "The AIDS Quarterly," a national PBS series produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, and in the early 1990s, he worked as a producer for "Our Times," a weekly magazine program on WHDH-TV (Ch. 7) in Boston.
Michael lives in Dorchester with his wife and their two daughters.
About Michael Jonas
Michael Jonas has worked in journalism in Massachusetts since the early 1980s. Before joining the CommonWealth staff in early 2001, he was a contributing writer for the magazine for two years. His cover story in CommonWealth's Fall 1999 issue on Boston youth outreach workers was selected for a PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
Michael got his start in journalism at the Dorchester Community News, a community newspaper serving Boston's largest neighborhood, where he covered a range of urban issues. Since the late 1980s, he has been a regular contributor to the Boston Globe. For 15 years he wrote a weekly column on local politics for the Boston Sunday Globe's City Weekly section.
Michael has also worked in broadcast journalism. In 1989, he was a co-producer for "The AIDS Quarterly," a national PBS series produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, and in the early 1990s, he worked as a producer for "Our Times," a weekly magazine program on WHDH-TV (Ch. 7) in Boston.
Michael lives in Dorchester with his wife and their two daughters.
There was the failure to file federal income tax returns for four years in the 1990s, a guilty plea for which earned her six months home confinement and 30 days in a halfway house when she violated the terms of the sentence. There was the start of foreclosure proceedings against her, multiple violations of state campaign finance laws, an Ethics Commission ruling against her, and questions about the veracity of statements she gave under oath in a hearing regarding a stabbing death for which a nephew was convicted of manslaughter.
Through it all, Wilkerson projected a strange calm. Arrogance and paranoia, many would call it. Wilkerson has often dismissed charges against her as the handiwork of enemies, while claiming that she’s held to a different standard than other public officials. Her recklessness and hubris have always been striking. What now also seems clear is that she has a self-destructive streak so immutable that whatever gifts for political leadership Wilkerson once had were overtaken by defects so deep that they appear to be clinically pathological.
With today’s developments, Wilkerson, whose public career has long resembled a car careening wildly out of control, appears to have finally crashed into the wall. A full decade ago, in a
Globe story following Wilkerson’s 1998 halfway house confinement related to her tax conviction, Janis Pryor, a political consultant who worked on Wilkerson’s first state Senate campaign in 1992, spoke for many when she expressed bafflement at what had already become of her once promising career. "This woman was the bright, shining hope. You can’t imagine how many of us have sat around and said, `What the hell happened?’ "
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