WHITE NOISE: How the Right-Wing Media Lynch Mob Ignored Donor Ties and Scapegoated Two Black Men

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When Massachusetts selected a team to build Springfield’s new courthouse, the story was quickly packaged as a scandal about Boston.

Mayor Domenic Sarno blasted “Boston power brokers.” Mass Daily News put U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s husband in its headline. Fox News followed. The New York Post reached for the tired “Squad” label. Two losing bidders went to court, turning John Barros, a partner in the winning development team who had since become interim head of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, into evidence that something had gone wrong.

Weeks later when you strip the story back to the actual record, you'll find that Scooby got the wrong villain.

The state chose a proposal that was cheaper than every competitor–saving Massachusetts taxpayers nearly $300 million over 40 years than the next-lowest finalist–among the fastest to deliver, highly ranked for design and accessibility, and led by a developer with extensive experience building government facilities.

CoJo Partners, the Black-owned firm founded by Barros and Conan Harris, was a small part of a team that also included national firms like FD Stonewater, whose business is federal buildings, Suffolk Construction, the largest construction company in Massachusetts, and a courthouse design practice.

The state evaluated the full team. Yet much of the political and media scrutiny centered on two Black men, then migrated to a Black congresswoman who had nothing to do with selecting the project.

Meanwhile, some of the relationships surrounding the people who lost received considerably less attention.

We suspect that you already know why.

Sarno Had Picked His Favorite Years Earlier

The courthouse competition did not begin on a level political field.

In June 2022, three years before the formal RFP was issued, Sarno stood beside Peter Picknelly and city development officials to unveil Picknelly’s North Riverfront vision: housing, retail, a marina, and a new state courthouse on property Picknelly controlled.

Sarno called it “visionary.” He kept promoting it in 2023, 2024, and into the state procurement process.

The advocacy became so conspicuous that Massachusetts Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro raised it publicly before bids were even selected.

“I think there’s a chilling effect on the ability for a competitive process,” Shapiro told the Asset Management Board in January 2025, warning that developers might hesitate to compete when local officials had already embraced a preferred location.

There was another aspect to this relationship as well.

Members of the Picknelly family contributed roughly $8,000 to Sarno during the 2022-23 election cycle, according to Western Mass Politics & Insight. In late 2024, Peter Picknelly hosted a Sarno fundraiser at The Student Prince where the mayor announced plans to seek another term.

By the time Sarno condemned the state for “shunning” local developers, he had spent four years publicly championing the project of a political supporter.

And the state had already studied the riverfront.

In a 2023 DCAMM site assessment, 125 Liberty Street scored 149 points. Two North Riverfront locations around Avocado Street and West Columbus Avenue scored 115 and 120. Among the weaknesses identified were zoning, parking, site visibility, and vehicular access.

The later procurement started fresh, and Picknelly’s Park View South proposal ultimately made the final four. So did 125 Liberty.

Liberty Junction won.

It was approximately $600,000 per month cheaper than its nearest competitor and, according to DCAMM Commissioner Adam Baacke, “one of the strongest, regardless of cost.”

That is a much different story than Boston insiders stealing Springfield’s courthouse. DCAMM ensured that rather than stolen, the taxpayer dollars of Springfield's and other Massachusetts' residents were saved.

The Other People Who Wanted the Deal

Dinesh Patel’s Tower Square team and Jeb Balise’s group sued the state after losing.

Patel was hardly a stranger to Sarno.

Springfield’s own website records the mayor calling him “my friend Dinesh Patel,” while repeatedly celebrating Patel’s investments in Tower Square and the downtown Marriott.

The lawsuit therefore came from developers pursuing the same prize themselves: a government-backed lease lasting at least 40 years.

And while those developers were demanding scrutiny of the winning team’s relationships, Sarno was attacking a result that defeated a project backed by one political supporter and challenged by another developer he publicly called a friend.

Those relationships belong in the courthouse story as much as anything else.

Then Black Success Became the Scandal

This is where the story took a familiar turn.

Black ownership remains extraordinarily rare in American commercial real estate. Brookings found that only 3 percent of Black households own nonresidential commercial property, compared with 8 percent of white households. Among households that do own it, average holdings were about $3,600 for Black families compared with $34,000 for white families.

Into that landscape stepped CoJo, who partnered with experienced national developers and builders on the biggest public real estate project in Springfield in generations.

The team then beat its competitors on cost, schedule, transportation access, government-development experience, and overall value.

And somehow the public narrative became about John Barros and Conan Harris.

Mass Daily’s headline declared: “Rep. Pressley’s husband set to profit in lavish $2 billion Western Mass. courthouse deal.” It introduced Harris through Pressley, calling her an “anti-landlord Congresswoman,” then turned her wealth and political positions into part of a procurement story she did not participate in.

Fox News went national with “Company of ‘Squad’ member’s husband lands $2B contract from blue state.” The New York Post followed with “‘Squad’ Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s hubby still on $2B government contract.”

That was to be expected, dogs always react to the sound of whistles. What was unexpected was how local media covered the story. The Boston Globe spent 2017 documenting the city's reputation on race in a seven-part Spotlight series, and in the wake of the George Floyd murder and subsequent uprising, its editor circulated a memo committing the paper to examining race and equity in its coverage, not only its hiring. That same month it launched a public partnership with GBH and the NAACP Boston branch called "The State of Race." However, six years later, its news coverage of this manufactured crisis–and that of other local newsrooms who claim to prioritize rooting out bias in their reporting–reacted to the same whistle, focusing on the smallest part of this project rather than a documented warning against a sitting mayor with a donor relationship to the bidder he favored. Reporters, columnists, and opinion writers have been focused on a lawsuit rather than the facts.

Note that Barros had joined the MCCA after Liberty Junction submitted its proposal. His attorney said he consulted agency lawyers and the State Ethics Commission, remained passive in the courthouse project, and was advised to file the required disclosure if his team was selected. He followed instructions and filed it July 1. He later removed himself entirely as a result of the white noise.

None of that changed Liberty Junction’s score.

It did not make the competing proposals cheaper.

It did not give Picknelly better transit access.

It did not erase the nearly $300 million difference taxpayers were projected to save.

And it did not give Ayanna Pressley a vote in the selection room.

Yet two Black men succeeding in commercial real estate, one of them married to one of the right-wing lynch mob’s favorite political targets, became easier to scandalize than the network already sitting in plain sight: developers, donors, political friends, favored projects, and the assumption that City Hall, not the state, controlled this contract.

Springfield was told to look east for the fix.

The more revealing story is how Springfield's power brokers crashed out because they thought the fix was in their favor.