Gaming pick reaction misjudged, emails say - The Boston Globe

The newly created state gambling commission badly underestimated public reaction to the fact that Carl ­Stanley McGee, the man tapped to be executive director of the new panel, had been ­arrested in 2007 in a sexual ­assault on a 15-year-old boy, ­internal e-mails show.

The e-mails, obtained by the conservative blog ­RedMassGroup and given to the Globe, show that the commission’s public relations consultant predicted in one e-mail that the allegations “will be no more than a paragraph deep into an otherwise extremely favorable story about Stan.”

In late April, public relations consultant Karen Schwartzman drafted a background summary of the allegations against ­McGee and concluded McGee’s history would probably not pose a problem for the fledging commission, as long as the public relations were “managed.”

Schwartzman could not be reached last night, but ­CommonWealth Magazine quoted her as saying that she did not have complete information at the time she predicted little controversy from the ­McGee appointment.