Al Giordano 1959 - 2023

photo by paul shoul

 

There was sadness throughout the Pioneer Valley this week as news spread of the recent death of the infamous outlaw journalist Al Giordano, who spent a colorful part of his very colorful career here in Western Massachusetts. Born on the very last day of the 1950's, Giordano would have turned 64 in December.

A proud New Yorker, Giordano spent his teen-age years as part of the punk scene surrounding the CBGB nightclub and was an acquaintance of Patti Smith and her band. He arrived in the Pioneer Valley by way of his work as an activist working on getting the Yankee Atomic nuclear reactor in Rowe shut down. A lot of the no-nukes activists he encountered there lived in the Pioneer Valley and he began couch surfing through the scene, especially in the Greenfield area. 

The no-nukes movement dovetailed closely with the general field of environmental activism, which is how Al met and befriended the by then aging 1960's radical Abbie Hoffman, a Worcester native. Al worked with Hoffman on several protest projects, and although Giordano never lost his fondness for punk rock, it was through Hoffman that Al became immersed in the musical culture of the 60's, which transformed Al into a bigtime Deadhead and a fan of all things psychedelic. Al was, however, the only person I ever knew who genuinely disliked the Beatles. He considered their music too pop oriented and dismissed their alleged masterpiece Sgt Pepper as "music for children."

Around this time Giordano encountered the hard-boiled Greenfield politico Charles F. McCarthy, who soon began tutoring Al on Massachusetts politics. McCarthy knew where all the political bodies were buried in Western Mass and wasn't afraid to tell Al (and me) all about it. McCarthy also introduced Al to his friend John Kerry, the future Senator (now "climate czar") who at that time was running for Lieutenant Governor. Based on McCarthy's recommendation, Kerry offered Giordano a job with the campaign as an organizer for $50 a week. 

The Kerry job required Al to spend a lot of time canvassing Springfield neighborhoods and recruiting volunteers. It also gave Al a chance to interact with local activists, who used to discuss Springfield politics with him. The activists told him that the local newspaper was heavily biased in favor of an insider cartel of political power players and that the paper would not report on dissident views or support any reform candidates. Al would later dub the Springfield Newspapers, "Pravda on the Connecticut" after the official propaganda paper of the Soviet Union. 

Giordano concluded that Springfield's political culture had ossified into a privileged club in which no one was held accountable even though the city seemed in relentless decline. Al thought that many in charge of Springfield's top institutions, both political and economic, seemed self-serving. At one point Al described Springfield's political scene as "a parasitic criminal enterprise disguised as the local Democratic Party." 

Giordano was also getting to know, through his recruiting work, some of his future political allies. As Al describes it in his unpublished autobiography: 

 

One of the more interesting characters I met during those months was Springfield attorney and businessman Anthony Ravosa, a conservative political gadfly known for, among other antics, flying a small airplane with a pro-war banner over the University of Massachusetts graduation ceremony during the height of the campus’s anti–Vietnam War protests. With Ravosa I played up Kerry’s decorated service in Vietnam and talked a lot about Italian food – he came on board. 

Ravosa’s office was over a former movie theater on Court Square, across the street from the Springfield Civic Center, where the May convention would be held. At the convention, the theater’s marquee greeted delegates: “The Ravosa Family Welcomes First Lieutenant John Kerry to Springfield.” Ravosa and I made strange bedfellows – he was a conservative, and I was an organizer who had been arrested 21 times for civil disobedience at nuclear facilities – and our alliance raised plenty of eyebrows. 

But that’s exactly what organizing is meant to accomplish: bringing together people who might otherwise hate each other for their differences to work for a common cause. Later, when I had cut my teeth as a reporter for Springfield’s Valley Advocate, Ravosa would become one of my fiercest allies in bringing down corrupt district attorney Matty Ryan.

Tony was the source of many a scoop back in the day. In the late 80s/early 90s I would visit him at least once a week in that storefront office under the marquee where he posted a lot of great political shots across the bow. I learned to arrive around lunchtime as there would usually be salami, provolone and other antipasti to nosh on (and on an Advocate salary one had to know where the free food was for the eatin').

Ravosa also introduced Giordano to others who were working to reform Springfield politics, such as Ravosa's son Anthony Jr., City Councilor Mitch Ogulewicz, education activist Antonette Pepe, radical attorney J. Wesley Miller and activist Eamon O'Sullivan. Arriving on the scene at the same time was Dan Yorke, a New Jersey transplant who, like Al, was appalled by Springfield's insular political culture and the passive, incurious local media that seemed always to be on the side of the bad guys. 

Yorke used his radio (and later TV) show to highlight dissident voices in Springfield, and Al Giordano was his frequent guest. Then, of course, there was also this guy who used a computer to create what was then called "desktop publishing" to produce a politically subversive publication, then called a "zine" which later moved online as a "web-log," later to be called "a blog." You are reading that blog right now.

After Kerry's successful campaign was over, Charlie McCarthy introduced Giordano to people he knew at the Valley Advocate, the local so-called "underground paper." They invited Al to submit something about the no-nukes activities going on in the Valley. When he submitted his first freelance article, the editors were so impressed they immediately offered him a full-time job as a reporter, despite the fact that Giordano was a high school drop-out who had never been to college nor taken a single course in journalism. 

Giordano's political articles for the Advocate were an overnight sensation. I recall walking into City Hall one time just as the latest issue of the Valley Advocate was being delivered and being shocked to see dozens of City Hall employees rushing down the grand staircase to grab the new Advocates that had just been left in the lobby. They, like everyone else in the region, were anxiously awaiting each new issue to see which local political sacred cow Al would be barbecuing that week. 

Al's articles and radio appearances with Dan Yorke soon got him his own radio show on WNNZ, with the irascible Charles F. McCarthy as his unofficial sidekick. They were a highly effective broadcasting duo, with McCarthy's cynical, streetsmart observations balanced by Giordano's optimistic idealism and inspiring calls to arms. The show was anything but orthodox. One time, showing his solidarity with UMass students who had been arrested for streaking, Al claimed to be broadcasting his show in the nude. Of course on the radio there was no way for listeners to tell, but no one doubted that he was. Although primarily an activist and writer, Giordano would continue to host TV and radio formats after leaving WNNZ. It was on one of Al's later broadcasting gigs that I was first introduced as "The Father of the Valley Blogosphere" to which I responded:

"I demand a paternity test!"

A frequent target of Al's attacks was the then local District Attorney Matty Ryan, an entrenched old school prosecutor whom Al accused of favoritism and corruption. Strongly protected by the local political machine, Al's articles brought considerable blowback from the powers that be. One day, after one particularly scathing anti-Ryan piece, Giordano left the Advocate's downtown Springfield office to find all four tires on his car had been slashed. 

Al's articles had limited effect until the Boston Globe, reporting on information provided by a whistle-blower who had first been turned away by the Springfield Newspapers, said that Ryan had a personal friendship with the local mob boss Al Bruno and had even played racquetball with him.

The Globe story, besides being profoundly embarrassing for the Springfield paper, brought a spotlight on Ryan that dovetailed with all the negative reporting Giordano had done which forced Ryan not to seek re-election. In a later interview, Ryan said that he felt he could have overcome the Bruno scandal, but he felt that combined with Al's Advocate reporting there was simply no way he could be re-elected. Giordarno would always consider the fall of Ryan to be one of his greatest journalistic achievements.

Yet that success was soon followed by tragedy. After years of government harassment leading to mounting financial and legal woes, Abbie Hoffman committed suicide. Charlie McCarthy, who was overweight and always chomping on cheap cigars, died suddenly of  a heart attack. And as if losing his two beloved mentors wasn't enough, trouble was brewing at the Valley Advocate as the original hippie founders of the paper decided to cash in and sell out to a corporate newspaper chain. As Al wrote,  

The Advocate brought in a tightly buttoned corporate mercenary to take over the publisher’s tasks from the owners, and she set about daily making my life miserable. I was saved when the Phoenix was looking for a political reporter. I applied for the job and headed to Boston for interviews – calling in sick to work – with then-editor Peter Kadzis, news editor Dan Kennedy and publisher Stephen Mindich. The hiring process lasted weeks, and shortly before the second Phoenix interview the Advocate sought to restructure my contract to pay me less money for more work (something that was unheard of back then but would soon happen to media workers everywhere). 

I defiantly declined and made a deal with its new corporate raider: “I’ll leave quietly in thirty days as long as you embargo that information for the next month.” I figured it could hurt my chances to land at the Phoenix if the folks there heard I’d just been canned by a lesser publication. Then I added, “Oh, and pay my $400 tab at the Green Street Café with free ads. You do that,” I told her, “and I won’t denounce you for the soulless douchebag that you are.”

Fortunately, the Advocate was eventually sold by the corporate owner to Northampton's Daily Hampshire Gazette, where it resides to this day. But by this time Al was long gone, hired by the Boston Phoenix. His journalism had the same electrifying effect in Boston as it had in the Valley and soon he was deep into the highest levels of Massachusetts politics. Al wrote this about an encounter with the Governor:

One day I scheduled an interview with then-governor William Weld, who had been US Attorney in Boston and years prior had weathered a scandal in which an embittered ex-colleague had accused him, then the prosecutor, of having smoked pot. I grilled Weld for about ninety minutes, asking him, as a liberal Republican who supported abortion and gay rights, how he could not take a similar libertarian position on the drug war.

After that encounter, Weld walked down the hallway to his weekly meeting with the legislative leadership, and in front of the others he griped to Senate Republican leader Brian Lees, “You told me to meet with Giordano. He just came into my office all coked up telling me I should legalize drugs!”

Speaker of the House Charlie Flaherty interrupted: “Governor, don’t be ridiculous. Cocaine would be a sedative for Giordano!” Everybody laughed – I know this because most of the people in that meeting called me after it happened to tell me about it.

We missed Al here in the Valley after he departed for Boston, but the truth is the old band of reformers was breaking up anyway. Dan Yorke moved up to a bigger station in Rhode Island, Ravosa Jr. moved to Connecticut as did Mitch Ogulewicz. I eventually moved to the upper Valley to take a job at the University of Massachusetts.

Fortunately, new activists like Bob and Karen Powell and their organization the Citizen Action Network picked up on many of the issues we had championed, as did two new reporters that arrived at the Advocate, Maureen Turner and Tom Vannah. Then in 2001 a miracle happened: An armed squad of FBI agents marched into City Hall and reams of documents were carried away. It was the start of a massive multi-year investigation that would ultimately indict and imprison figures from every level of Springfield politics. 

A day or two after the raid, Al called me and asked if I had seen that morning's Boston Herald. I told him no, so he proceeded to read me an article on the City Hall raid in which an agent from the Springfield FBI office was asked how the agency came to target Springfield. The agent replied that the FBI had been alerted by "things we were hearing about in alternative media." 

Of course the "alternative media" was the Advocate, Yorke's radio and TV shows and my blog. We couldn't have been more delighted to have our struggles to reform Springfield so fully and completely vindicated by none other than the FBI itself. 

Giordano's career in journalism beyond the Pioneer Valley was very interesting to say the least, consisting of such things as the high honor of being named by Rolling Stone magazine, at that time the bible of the underground press, as their "muckracker" of the year. There was also a #metoo scandal that damaged Giordano's prior reputation as a staunch champion for women. Personally, I would rather remember the years that he, myself and others did our best to prove that you can indeed fight City Hall.

Last year Al was diagnosed with lung cancer, a bitter irony because on his radio show he often riled listeners by praising the virtues of tobacco and downplaying the risks. He died last week at home, surrounded by family and friends as a violent thunder storm raged outdoors. Death in a completely placid setting would not have suited Al's style. 

Unlike a lot of liberals, Al was not an atheist. In fact, he used to close each episode of his radio show with the blessing, "Remember that God loves you, yes, She does." Incredibly, WNNZ used to receive complaints from listeners that Al referring to God with a female pronoun was blasphemous. 

But if you ask me, Al's real religion was political activism. He was really good at it, with a knack for pulling together unlikely coalitions. His own passion would inspire those around him to believe that politics could be both noble and adventurous, and that raising hell could be a hell of a good time! Sadly, he was among the last of a vanishing breed. 

Al Giordano - Rest in Power.

This week in Northampton, some jackass did this. 

 

 

 Hard to say which is the more deplorable, the vandalism or the message. 

 

 

Been raining a lot around here, making it impossible to sit in the courtyard of the UMass library. 

 

Springfield's Court Square in 1905.