After nearly two weeks of testimony from about a dozen witnesses, federal prosecutors have rested their case in the trial of two Boston City Hall officials charged with extortion.
City tourism and entertainment director Kenneth Brissette and Intergovernmental Affairs director Timothy Sullivan are accused of extorting the Boston Calling music festival into hiring union labor it didn’t want or need in 2014. Prosecutors allege that the defendants used their power and positions to make the festival’s executives, worried at the time about outstanding permits for their next festival, feel they had no choice but to agree to hire union members.
On Friday, prosecutors called their final witnesses, including Boston Calling co-founder Mike Snow, who testified to a meeting with the defendants at their request just days before the festival was to open on City Hall Plaza.
At the meeting, Snow testified, the defendants stepped up requests that they hire members of Boston’s Local 11 stagehands union, which was preparing to picket the festival.
Snow did not want to hire union stagehands for that concert, he said. But he felt he was “stuck,” he testified – and believed that saying no would put the festival at risk of not receiving a crucial entertainment license that had not yet been approved.
Snow’s testimony largely echoed previous testimony of Boston Calling CEO Brian Appel, who attended the same meeting.
Both testified to feeling intense pressure from the defendants and feeling that their business’ survival was on the line.
But while both testified as witnesses for the prosecution, both offered testimony that seemed at times to deflate the prosecution’s own narrative.
Snow, like Appel, testified that there had been no threats, no mention explicitly or implied of repercussions by the defendants. Snow did not feel, he said, that Brissette or Sullivan intended to harm him or his business – testimony that mirrors Appel’s recollection of the episode.
And neither defendant, Snow acknowledged, had any ostensible role in the approval or issuance of the permits the festival was desperate to nail down.
Jurors also heard testimony from an FBI agent testified to a flurry of phone calls and text messages, leading up to and following that meeting, between Sullivan Brissette, Brian Appel, and Colleen Glynn, business manager for the IATSE Local 11 stagehands union.
But that evidence didn’t include the contents of those calls -- and lawyers for the defense don’t contest that their clients were involved in discussions around the Local 11 union’s dispute with Boston Calling.
The defense argues Brissette and Sullivan were merely doing their jobs in trying to broker a mutually satisfactory resolution to an escalating situation and avoid an ugly union picket on City Hall Plaza.
