Raymond E. Gallison: The man who betrayed Bristol

Tom Mooney Patrick Anderson

Published Saturday July 30, 2016 at 6:39 pm

A year ago, he was a celebrated Bristolian. Today, former state Rep. Raymond E. Gallison Jr. is under investigation for claims he arranged meetings for a prostitute and embezzled money.

Raymond E. Gallison Jr., weaing his chief marshal medal, walks at the head of the parade with his wife, Diane, during Bristol's 2015 Fourth of July celebration. A year later, the state lawmaker's fall from grace shocked the town. Courtesy of ABC6 News WLNE-TV

BRISTOL — The town's native son stood in a light-colored suit in the middle of Hope Street — the esteemed chief marshal of one of America’s most celebrated parades — and gushed.

“Hey Ray, how’s your day going?” a television news anchor asked.

“Oh, what a day, this is awesome,” Raymond E. Gallison Jr. effused before the live TV audience. It was July 4th, 2015. “This is huge," the state legislator said. "I can’t describe it, it’s just awesome. I am speechless, I have to tell you.”

One year later on Hope Street, people of Bristol feel betrayed.

Law enforcement officials say they’re investigating claims that Gallison, recipient of one of the town’s highest honors last year, arranged meetings for a prostitute during his tenure as a lawmaker.

The FBI has seized his assets as it investigates possible embezzlement, including more than $181,000 belonging to a dead friend’s estate.

And since Gallison’s abrupt resignation in May, lawmakers have overhauled a state grant program that allowed the former chairman of the powerful House Finance Committee to profit from awards his own committee controlled.

Last Sunday at the intersection of Hope and Church streets, where Gallison stopped his parade march last year to share his joy with a television audience, Paul Mancieri prepared to open his restaurant, Leo’s, for another day.

Ray Gallison seemed to epitomize public service, he said. “People are shocked. They’re upset.” If the allegations are true, “It’s totally disgraceful.”

Secrets

Being named the parade’s chief marshal is an “accolade that most people in Bristol dream about and very few people get,” Ray Lavey, the parade committee’s general chairman, has said.

The Bristol Fourth of July Committee lists on its website every chief marshal since 1826. They have included the wealthy and powerful, Rotarians and town clerks.

When Lavey offered the honor to Gallison in a phone call in December 2014, his acceptance “was instantaneous,” despite the expensive obligation the position carries. Chief marshals must host a gala for hundreds of guests. Gallison would have to keep his selection secret for months.

Rhode Island State Police and FBI investigators are now probing what other secrets Gallison kept and whether they rose to a level of crimes.

In March, those investigators arrived at Gallison’s Bristol house along the shore of Mount Hope Bay where a red, white and blue stripe — identical to the stripe marking the parade’s route through town — led into the driveway. They searched his 2½-story home and seized property.

They would also quietly search his State House office. When word got out, some lawmakers say they began hearing rumors Gallison was wearing a hidden microphone. He wasn’t, law enforcement officials say.

On May 3, days after meeting with House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and his chief of staff at a Newport Creamery in Cranston, Gallison resigned his seat after 16 years on Smith Hill.

In a one-sentence letter to Mattiello, he cited “personal reasons.” Mattiello told reporters afterward that based on his meeting with Gallison he understood the reason was "personal finances or business finances."

Three days later, the FBI seized $992,879 in assets in Gallison’s control, including $181,685 tied to Ray A. Medley, a lifelong bachelor from Barrington who died in 2012. In his will, Medley had named Gallison — “my good friend” — executor of his estate.

But four years after his death, Medley's named beneficiaries said they had not received any proceeds from his estate, valued at more than $400,000. The furniture and other belongings from Medley’s house remained in a Warren storage center.

In June, a probate court judge removed Gallison as Medley’s executor, concluding “good and sufficient cause exists.”

In recent weeks investigators have questioned former State House colleagues about Gallison’s work on various House committees: municipal government, the environment, veterans’ affairs and finance. They want to know if Gallison’s alleged illicit activities resulted in Gallison compromising in any way his legislative duties.

Investigators have also asked about Gallison’s association with a former legislative aide, arrested several times for minor offenses in recent years, including once for which he solicited sex from a prostitute on Craigslist.

The aide, first hired in 2012 by former House Speaker Gordon Fox (now imprisoned for bribe-taking), worked for the House Veterans Affairs Committee, which Gallison chaired.

When Gallison moved over to chair House Finance in 2014, Rep. Jan Malik, D-Barrington, became chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee.

"This is a pretty quiet office and suddenly all these young kids who I didn't recognize were coming in here, talking to the guy," said Malik. "He was on the phone all the time. There was just something about him that wasn't right. I got him fired. In two and a half weeks, he was gone."

Rep. Teresa Tanzi, D-South Kingstown, who served with Gallison on the Finance Committee, said Gallison's resignation shocked many in the State House more than the downfall of Fox whose financial pressures were better known.

"With Gallison, the assumption was that he is living in Bristol, he must have the means to take time off of work” to serve at the State House, Tanzi said.

Various occupations

But Gallison, who is 64, seems to have cobbled together various occupations over the years to make a living.

From 1980 to 2000, he worked intermittently as a state employee, including executive aide to then-Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy, training officer at the Department of Transportation, executive director of the state’s Historic Preservation Commission, and as an employee relations officer at the former state Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals. The work would eventually earn him a state pension of $15,399 a year.

In 1989, Gallison also graduated from the now defunct Southern New England School of Law, and in 2000 — the year he was first elected — he opened a law practice in Fall River. But he was only licensed to practice in Massachusetts.

In 2001, Gallison began working for a new educational nonprofit receiving legislative funding, called the Alternative Educational Programming Inc.

Leo F. DiMaio Jr., a leader of the Talent Development Program at the University of Rhode Island, had started AEP upon retiring from URI. Like Talent Development, AEP would serve disadvantaged minority students hoping to enter college or receive job training.

Gallison served first as a paid consultant and then as AEP's assistant director.

In 2007, he would pay the state Ethics Commission a $6,000 fine for not reporting that AEP had paid him $102,000 in the first three years of his employment.

The Ethics Commission settlement noted that omitting the income for one year could be seen as an oversight. But it said omitting it for three consecutive years, when Gallison was being paid more than $4,000 a month, “weighs heavily toward a finding of intentional nondisclosure.”

Gallison took over running AEP after DiMaio died in 2014 — though DiMaio remained listed on AEP's website as director more than two years after his death.

Since 2003, lawmakers have approved more than $2.2 million in community service grants to AEP, with some of that money going to Gallison's salary. For each of the last few years, AEP’s annual grant totaled $70,875.

After Gallison’s resignation in May, lawmakers overhauled the $11.6-million community service grant program, cutting its awards by more than half for this fiscal year and changing how grants are approved. AEP received nothing.

Low-key, or aloof?

The medal Gallison wore last year as chief marshal of the parade hung prominently in his State House office along with large photos of his two sons, Timothy and Nathan, in their separate police uniforms.

Gallison had introduced them both to the live television audience as he led the 2015 parade, noting both had come off night shifts hours earlier to march beside him in his moment of glory.

So, too, of course, had his wife of 37 years, Diane. Their honeymoon in 1978 marked the only time in decades Gallison had missed the Bristol Fourth of July parade.

His hometown parade and his children were two topics Gallison spoke about frequently, say former House colleagues, many of whom still feel blindsided by his resignation.

By and large, Gallison was popular with fellow lawmakers, but even colleagues who worked closely with him say he could be tough to read or really get to know.

"If I am picking players for a poker tournament, I am picking him first," Finance Committee member Antonio Giarrusso, R-East Greenwich, said about Gallison. "How do you not show any signs of anything that is going on for all that time? ... It's one of those things where you say: 'Oh, God, did he do that?'"

In a building full of big egos and outgoing personalities, Gallison was a comparatively low-key figure, even after rising to one of the most powerful positions in the state.

To those who liked him, that quieter style was refreshing. Others found it a little too aloof.

"He was never pompous or arrogant," said Rep. Thomas Winfield, D-Smithfield. "There is always some jostling and pushing around, but he was never one of those guys. He came in and worked his way up."

Before he served with Gallison on the Finance Committee, Rep. Kenneth Marshall, D-Bristol, served with him on the Bristol Zoning board in the 1990s. Marshall said he had always thought of Gallison as a "tenacious public servant."

Gallison's big issues on Smith Hill included advocating for a new state veterans home in Bristol, fighting against a liquified natural gas terminal in Fall River and opposing tolls on the Sakonnet River Bridge.

As it turned out, arguably his most significant accomplishment as head of House Finance was helping pass this year's bridge repair financing bill that authorizes tolls on commercial trucks.

In what would be the most memorable exchange of a truck toll debate that stretched over several months, Gallison's trademark reserve was cracked by toll opponent Patricia Morgan, a West Warwick Republican and longtime thorn in Gallison's side.

Morgan filed the Ethics Commission complaint that in 2007 led to Gallison paying the $6,000 fine for not disclosing his AEP salary.

As the committee was about to vote on the bill, Gallison ruled Morgan "out of order" for continuing to ask questions.

"You had plenty of time in the hearing to ask questions," Gallison told her.

"No I didn't. You cut me off," she replied as the two began to talk over one another. Gallison asked staff to turn Morgan's microphone off. (It turned out they couldn't.)

"Why, because you have the power?” she said. “We are just supposed to vote like blind mice."

Morgan said of Gallison recently: “I brought this to the attention of state leadership 10 years ago, that he was taking money from taxpayers. ... When leadership allows bad behavior to go unpunished or unchecked, then people think they can start doing anything and in his case he thought he could get away with it for a long time."

A costly honor

As much as Gallison relished the role of chief marshal last year, the appointment cost him. Literally.

Tradition dictates that the chief marshal's reception be held on the Sunday before the Fourth. Hundreds of people are invited, including the governor and congressional members.

Bristol Town Clerk Louis P. Cirillo was the parade’s chief marshal in 2013. He accepted the honor “with the understanding I was to host a reception at rather large expense.”

More than 500 people attended his gathering at the Herreshoff Marine Museum. “I’d rather not say” how much it cost, he said, but it’s true some nominees turn down the position for financial reasons.

Gallison hosted his reception at the 127-acre Mount Hope Farm, one of Bristol’s historic jewels and billed as one of Rhode Island’s last great country estates.

Gallison used $22,280 from his campaign fund to pay for at least some of the reception’s expenses, records show. The bills included $18,420 for Russell Morin Fine Catering, of Attleboro, and $3,860 to the Newport Tent Company.

Gallison told The Journal last year that he had consulted with the state Board of Elections to ensure that the costs were allowable campaign expenses.

'That duplicity'

Ray Gallison has not been charged with any crimes. On Thursday, he came to the door of his house, still decorated in Independence Day colors, but refused to speak to a reporter.

The federal grand jury meeting periodically to review evidence in the case isn’t expected to wrap up for a couple of more months.

But back at the intersection of Hope and Church streets, Gallison’s resignation and the sordid allegations yet to be explained have influenced public opinion, said many residents, most of whom asked not to be named because they've known and admired Gallison for years.

“He came across as a sincere, dedicated public official,” restaurateur Mancieri said. “I heard him give a speech once where he was talking about his wife and family and it almost brought him to tears. I said, ‘Wow, that’s the kind of politician I want.' "

But Mancieri said “a lot of people are upset that he disgraced Bristol and the Fourth of July Committee.”

Richard Gauvin, serving his first year on the parade committee, agreed, as he was leaving Mass across the street.

“There is that duplicity that bothers a lot of people,” said Gauvin.

Town Clerk Cirillo said each year's chief marshal becomes a member of the parade's association of chief marshals.

The association raises money for various causes like scholarships for Miss Fourth of July contestants and monuments to Revolutionary War patriots.

And the association holds an annual luncheon around parade time.

This year, he said, the chief marshal of Bristol’s 2015 Fourth of July Parade, was absent.

— tmooney@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7359

On Twitter: @mooneyprojo

— panderson@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7384

On Twitter: @PatrickAnderso_