DA Ryan takes transparency to new low
The word of the day is “transparency.”
Just ask the 71-year-old district attorney of Middlesex County, Marian Ryan.
The wrinkly Democrat with the Mo Howard Three Stooges haircut never stops babbling about how “transparent” she and her office are.
Oddly, though, whenever Marian isn’t talking about how transparent she is, she’s desperately trying to stop any transparency about the alleged drunk-driving motor vehicle homicide by one of her top State Police investigators, the second-generation hack state trooper Scott Quigley.
Nothing to see here, folks. At least until after the primary election Sept. 1.
The fatal OUI accident involving one of her troopers happened in December 2023.
Nobody found out about it until January 2026.
That’s a long time to cover up a fatal MV by an allegedly drunk cop in Marian Ryan’s office.
Imagine how long Sgt. Quigley’s alleged .114 BAC could have been kept under the rug if she weren’t so darned “transparent.”
How transparent is she, you ask, when she’s not stonewalling the Quigley homicide investigation?
At the top of the DA’s X feed, this is her proud brag:
“Striving every day to be the most dedicated, most effective, most transparent and most innovative public prosecutor’s office in the United States.”
When she went back to her alma mater Emmanuel College, she told the coeds:
“We have to be willing to examine our own work and be fully transparent.”
She said that in 2024 – the same year Quigley returned to work after killing the guy by crossing a double yellow line after a long liquid afternoon at a local tavern. For killing a poor guy in a disabled-transport van, Quigley received a “warning.” Then he was promoted to sergeant.
It’s all about transparency, you know.
As recently as April Fool’s Day, appropriately enough, Ryan issued a press release touting how something or other was “consistent with District Attorney Ryan’s commitment to full transparency.”
And yet she’s totally stonewalling the release of any information about her pet Quigley’s MV homicide. Of course she has her reasons: the investigation continues. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
She can’t release the audio or the transcripts of her interviews with the hack ex-judge that she paid $20,000. Because the investigation continues.
Her comrades in the State Police refuse to release the other seven – count ‘em, seven! – auto accidents that Quigley was involved in. Repeat after me: the investigation continues.
What Ryan and the other co-conspirators are trying to do is drag feet until she can vanquish her former top ADA, a straight arrow named David Solet, in the Democrat primary.
So it’s continuance after continuance followed by the inevitable form letter: “Sorry we’d like to help you but the investigation continues….”
In addition to her commitment to transparency, Marian Ryan has one other adage that she lives by:
“Do as I say, not as I do.”
Whenever it comes to doing anything about anything other than pointing the finger at somebody else, Ryan is MIA.
Whenever she’s asked why she doesn’t do something, she throws up her liver-spotted hands and whines, “I don’t have the authority.”
Or a cop does something that “the community” objects to. Instead of doing the right thing and telling the “activists” that the cop didn’t do anything wrong, she punts to a “judicial inquest.” That means that some judge is going to have to take the heat from the Monica Cannon-Grant types when he does the right thing.
Or, if the judicial inquest gag isn’t appropriate, she may take a weak, weak case to trial and lets the jury handle the acquittal. Anything so she doesn’t have to accept responsibility for an unpopular decision.
The local pols and cops all have their own alibis for not locking up criminals. They can’t cooperate with ICE because… sanctuary laws. Or the parole board has to let dozens of convicted killers.
But Marian Ryan has taken looking the other way to a whole new level, as proven by the Scott Quigley cover-up, which of course she says is totally not her fault. It never is.
I asked Michael Mahoney, the attorney for the estate of the poor man killed by Ryan’s pal, how long it took him to get even the most basic facts.
“It took me 13 months to even get Quigley’s name out of them,” he said. “And then another seven months to get his blood alcohol level from the hospital.”
Transparency. That’s what it’s all about for Marian Ryan.
Just to give you another example – the Ponzo brothers, the crooked ex-cops from Stoneham who just got out of federal prison after stealing $40 million in state funds from the Mass Saves boondoggle.
The whistleblower who turned in the mega-fraudsters first went to… you guessed it, the Middlesex County DA’s office. He was only turning them in on the embezzlement of $27,000 in police-union funds.
But Marian Ryan’s minions gave it a good leaving alone. So the whistleblower then went to the feds and told them about both the small local grift and the big Mass Saves ripoff.
You can read all about the sequence of events in the feds’ sentencing memo last year on the two crooked cop brothers.
In an amazing coincidence, someone who might have been peripherally embarrassed by the Ponzos’ open and gross thievery just happened to be related to a local Democrat politician. But surely those hack ties could not have possibly played a role in Ryan’s decision to take a pass on a slam-dunk corruption case.
That wouldn’t have been very “transparent,” would it?
Meanwhile, Quigley remains free as a bird, almost three years after killing the guy in the disabled van. And Marian Ryan is saying, hey don’t blame me, I was in the dark about it just like everybody else.
In a letter to the State Police last February, Marian Ryan was very transparent… about claiming she knew nothing for all those 25 months while the guy now indicted was being promoted to sergeant:
“We recently learned… The State Police did not notify this office… was also not notified… nor were we told….”
If I ever get jammed up, I just hope it happens in a county with a prosecutor as transparent as Marian Ryan.
The investigation continues.
