Massachusetts desperately needs Elon Musk

Where does Massachusetts go to get our own Elon Musk and our Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)?

Every day you learn about horrific new examples of waste, fraud and abuse in state government, so today let’s talk about a program called Mass Steals, I mean, Mass Saves.

Officially, it’s called Mass Saves, but a more accurate name might be Mass Steals, because it turns out it’s been used as a giant grift by two common street thugs from Stoneham who stole $43 million… and not a single person in state government noticed.

Not. A. Single. One.

There’s two reasons to be talking about Mass Steals today. Number one, natural-gas prices are spiraling through the roof at least in part because Mass Saves grabs so much money from rate-payers – a 25% increase approved by Gov. Maura Healey just last October.

A couple of days ago, this newspaper ran a headline: “Mass gas companies say support of clean energy contributing to soaring utility rates.”

There’s a missing word there. The soaring utility rates are in fact caused somewhat by support of clean energy GRIFTS.

The racket that’s been unraveled – by the feds of course – will finally wrap up this afternoon, when Joe Ponzo is sentenced in federal court for stealing $7 million.

Joe Ponzo is an obscure former Stoneham police officer, not a celebrity crooked cop like Zip Connolly or Michael Proctor.

But it turns out, Joe Ponzo stole more money than all the dozens of embezzlers from Troop E of the State Police, as well as the six bent G-men from the Boston FBI office who accepted hundreds of thousands in blood-stained cash from Mob serial killers and cocaine dealers.

Ponzo robbed more than the MSP and the FBI – combined!

And Joe was the junior partner in the Mass Steals racket. His brother Chris had his own racketeering enterprise that took $36 million from Mass Steals.

You’ve heard of the infamous Ponzi scheme, hatched in the North End of Boston more than a century ago. Now a few miles north in Stoneham, you have the Ponzo scheme.

In their sentencing memos for the Ponzo brothers, the feds refer to Mass Saves as a “public-private partnership.” What that has always meant is that something public is about to go into some private pockets.

The monthly payment to Mass Steals is assessed on your monthly bill as an “energy-efficiency fee.” Instead of saving the planet, your money was going to the Ponzos, and the hacks they were bribing. This conspiracy went on for almost 10 years.

And to repeat, nobody in Massachusetts law enforcement noticed anything amiss.

The only way the scheme fell apart was when another Stoneham cop went to the feds. He knew that his fellow officer Joe Ponzo was embezzling from the local town police union funds and he was fed up with it.

The G-men were intrigued enough to check out Joe Ponzo’s bank account. According to the sentencing memo, they quickly discovered that the statute of limitations had expired on Joe’s municipal thievery. But the feds noticed something else about Mr. and Mrs. Ponzo’s checking account.

“Their bank account looked like it had hit the Mass Save lottery.”

The Mass Save surcharge on your utility bill, the feds noted, “can add up to hundreds of dollars per year.”

Hundreds of dollars per year. And the Ponzo scheme would still be ongoing if one cop hadn’t gotten angry about what in comparison to the Mass Steals scheme was a nickel-and-dime con.

The sentencing memo describes what the rate payers of Massachusetts, with the connivance of Democrats in state government, got in return for their outrageously padded utility bills.

“They got a crooked cop who, for years, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in return for millions of dollars in lucrative and inflated contracts under the Mass Save program.”

On a cop’s salary, he had a million-dollar home in Stoneham, an $830,000 waterfront condo in Marco Island FL and a lakefront condo in Laconia NH.

His brother, Christopher, who worked out the original scam, did even better stealing from the Commonwealth’s “public-private partnership.”

According to the feds, Chris Ponzo used his $36 million from Massachusetts ratepayers to buy “multiple properties, vehicles, a boat, a Cessna airplane and his own aircraft hangar. Yet in his words, he was ‘strained.’”

Maybe it was the commuting that got to Chris Ponzo. He had to drive to Revere to a check-cashing company to get bribe money for the payroll patriots rubber-stamping his phony-baloney “upgrades.”

In 2016, Chris Ponzo cashed checks worth $371,339, for bribes. In addition to the cash, he gave the hack a $25,875 John Deere tractor.

In his sentencing memo, Chris Ponzo claimed he wasn’t bribing anyone, he was merely “incentivizing” the hacks. He was engaged in “voluntary business relationships” to develop “high remunerative business propositions.”

His company made $36 million off Mass Save from 2013-22. Earlier this month, he got 27 months. Twenty-seven months for $36 million. Pretty good monthly paycheck, no?

Chris pointed out his many charitable gifts made “out of the goodness of his own heart.”

To which the feds responded:

“That generosity evidently did not extend to the ratepayers of Massachusetts who fund the Mass Save program. Christopher Ponzo saw what he considered a slush fund of money ripe for raiding.”

When Ponzo was bouncing Ponzi out of the local fraud record books, the state attorney general was Maura Healey.

To reiterate, Maura saw nothing. Ditto, the State Police, the district attorneys, the state auditor, the inspector general and the “watchdog” legislative committees.

Nobody saw nothing. Until a local cop walked into the federal courthouse.

I know we’re all looking forward to Tom Homan bringing hell to Boston to confront the Democrats about their unwavering support of savage illegal alien rapists and other violent criminals.

But damn, I think we need Elon Musk around here at least as much as we need Tom Homan. And if Elon can’t make it himself, maybe he can send one of his minions.

How about Big Balls?

Think about it this way. If two townie thugs could steal $40 million from Mass Save, consider how much must be going out the back door of Maura Healey’s $2.5-billion foreign freeloader flophouse grift.

Paging Elon Musk….