Growing up in Needham, Jeffrey Shapiro remembers his father bringing home the late edition of the Boston Globe with its headlines about the UMass Boston corruption scandal that led to the conviction of two state senators and the creation of a state inspector general.
Decades later, Shapiro now holds the job, the fifth in the history of the inspector general’s office. He recently marked this third-year anniversary, and made some headlines of his own, from taking aim at Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria, alleging that he took bonus payments and sought to hide them from the public, and the broken structure of the troubled Cannabis Control Commission that state lawmakers, after some prodding, are finally getting around to reforming. Shapiro also took a run at Phil Eng’s MBTA, arguing the transit agency must make fare collection more of a priority.
The throughline of all three is a review of logistics and noting what wasn’t working. “I always liked logistics,” Shapiro, 58, told me after sitting down for lunch inside Capitol Coffee, a Beacon Hill haunt. “How do things run? How do you work on it? So even in campaigns, when I did them, it was all about sort of understanding numbers. How many people really turn out? Where do they come from?”
He applied for the job when it opened up in 2022, when he was working for the state comptroller, Glenn Cunha, his predecessor as inspector general, hit his limit of two five-year terms. The governor, attorney general and auditor approved the appointment.
But Shapiro’s first job was in politics. While in college, he managed the campaign of a Somerville-Medford lawmaker, Vincent Ciampa, and followed him to the State House as an aide. He went on to manage Marty Meehan’s 1992 run for Congress, and joined him for a brief stint as a Washington, D.C. staffer.
He was quick to add that his political days are behind him. The “ups and downs” of campaign life had become less attractive as he became older, and family obligations took precedence. He finished law school while working at the Middlesex district attorney’s office by day. Logistics became his focus as he made his way through the ranks, and he ended up working in administration and finance matters.
That passion for logistics and details appears to come from his parents. Fred, his father, was an interior space planner. Newsrooms were his specialty, and he helped plan out the Boston Globe’s former newsroom on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester, a short walk from UMass Boston. His father’s firm also handled retail stores and restaurants, like Legal Seafoods and the Harvard Coop.
His mother Judy held down a variety of jobs, including working for the IRS. She also volunteered for a local cable station show for almost 30 years. “Since we were based in Needham, and Channel 5 was nearby, she was somebody who was tenacious in that she would get guests that were going to be on any of the shows on Channel 5,” he said.
Inside Capitol Coffee, I ordered a hot dog and a peach tea, having already filled up on cold brew coffee earlier. Shapiro ordered a tuna melt on wheat, with a side of chips. “My wife will be glad I didn’t get the fries. She won’t love the chips,” he said, taking a sip of his black coffee. His communications aide, Carrie Kimball, had an egg sandwich.
“It’s a good place to get a vibe of the government complex, and it’s nearby,” he said. “I’m somebody that I don’t always get out too often.” (That said, he keeps a busy meet-and-greet schedule: He was in Franklin County days earlier, meeting with town administrators in Deerfield and other local municipalities. The day after our lunch he planned to meet with the chancellor of UMass Amherst.)
As I noticed the House chairwoman and a lobbyist who sat a few feet away from us, I half-joked to him that as a reporter, I’m jealous of the subpoena power that comes with his office. It’s a “powerful tool,” he acknowledged. “We also have the ability, through approval from the Inspector General’s Council, to bring people into a deposition.”
But while some of his colleagues elsewhere in the country have a law enforcement bent, Shapiro notes his agency is investigatory, focused on fraud, waste and abuse of public resources and assets. “We’re not a fishing company, so we really do have lots of controls,” he said. “We’re careful how we use the powers that are bestowed upon us. And as you can imagine, there are far more things that come to our attention as hotline tips. I think we get probably 2,500 tips a year that we’ve got to sort through. We also have the ability in our statute to proactively look for things.”
As part of that, he is proud of building up a data team. “I really do want us to use data as a tool to help us look at where we should be looking, because I think there are many areas that there isn’t a constituency to call a tip line, but it’s either new spending or lots of spending, or there are anomalies,” he said.
“‘Who do I work for?’ I get that question all the time, because I’m appointed, but then it’s independent,” he added. “ ‘Do you work for the governor? Do you work for the attorney general?’ I work for the people of Massachusetts.”