The way Dick Quintal tells it, Select Board candidate and former Plymouth police officer Scott Vecchi went to Quintal’s produce business recently with a proposition: If Quintal helped him get back on the force, Vecchi would drop out of the race.
Quintal, an incumbent up for re-election in May, would face one less competitor, and Vecchi could return to the department where he worked for more than 25 years. He left in 2023 with a $283,000 payout and a record of more than 30 civilian and internal complaints. Vecchi denies any wrongdoing and blames Police Chief Dana Flynn for sabotaging his career.
He also holds a grudge.
In an unsuccessful bid for a Select Board seat last year, Vecchi spoke of “the toxic environment that exists at the Plymouth Police Department, the lack of leadership.”
Now he’s running again, part of a five-candidate field that in additi0n to himself and Quintal includes former Select Board member Betty Cavacco, incumbent Kevin Canty, and newcomer Stevie Keith. Canty and Quintal’s terms are expiring, meaning two seats are up for grabs
It’s no secret there is a lack of harmony on the current board, whose members sometimes struggle to maintain a veneer of cordiality during meetings.
Chair David Golden’s political ambitions – he’s seeking the Republican nomination for state representative while serving as chair – further complicate the dynamics.
But Quintal’s allegation that Vecchi tried to strike a backroom political deal adds an element that threatens to turn this year’s Select Board race into an all-out street fight.
During a conversation earlier this month, Quintal told me Vecchi “came to my work here and said he wanted to meet with me. So I did, just like I did with Stevie Keith and some others. He said to me, if I got him a job back in the police department doing details, he wouldn’t run.”
That sounded like a classic “quid quo pro” arrangement to me. If true.
“It’s certainly improper,” Quintal told me. “It was a short meeting. I said, ‘You do what you gotta do…If you need your hours back, you need to go see Chief Flynn.’”
Vecchi recalls the meeting differently.
“I sat down out of respect for Dickie Quintal and discussed the race and my issues with Dana Flynn purposely torpedoing multiple job offers and interfering with my attempts at recertification under POST,” he wrote me in a text.
POST, a state website for the Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, documents misconduct by police officers in the name of transparency. Vecchi said that to work in law enforcement in Massachusetts, even as a college campus officer, he needs POST recertification. Flynn, he claims, is blocking it.
At the time of his meeting with Quintal, Vecchi said, he had not decided “whether to turn in my signatures” to make his candidacy official. That’s because one potential job offer would have required him to “move out of town.”
“I never attempted to extort anything [from Quintal],” he wrote “and made it very clear that I was talking to him because of my respect for him and his service to the town over the years.”
Vecchi called Quintal’s allegation “a very desperate attempt to smear me as I gain traction in this race,” adding that it was “suspiciously timed to having just received notification from the town clerk’s office that my signatures have been verified and I am on the ballot.”
“I had thought our conversation was ‘off the record’ and between men,” he said. “I am very disappointed in Dickie attempting to turn this into a news story.”
Flynn, who clearly has no desire to insert himself into a political feud, told me in an email that the department’s “interactions with potential employers and the MA POST Commission as it pertains to Scott Vecchi are consistent with the separation agreement between Mr. Vecchi and the Town of Plymouth.”
In other words, the department only supplies official information “that is required/requested by POST pertaining to his time employed” by the Plymouth Police Department, Flynn said.
Meantime, Vecchi is also taking on Quintal’s de facto running mate, Cavacco. In an unusual but not unprecedented move, she and Quintal are running as a team and holding joint campaign events, apparently in an attempt to take down Canty. (More on that at a later date.)
In a March 10 Facebook post, Vecchi published what looks like an AI-generated photo depicting Cavacco behind bars, dressed in prison garb.
It’s not the first time Vecchi has resorted to Facebook memes as a way to lash out at people. For example, during his tenure on the local force, he posted an image of a rat wearing a police hat after a fellow officer complained about his behavior. The accompanying text read: “When you run to Admin when you have a conflict with another Officer.”
In the March 10 post, Vecchi referred to Cavacco as “Betty the Crook,” and wrote that “Plymouth cannot afford any more of her corrupt behavior.” He included accusations about Open Meeting Law violations and “the $11 million budget deficit which was never adequately explained the last time she was on the Select Board,” between 2018 and 2023.
There was also this charge: Cavacco “conspired” with Flynn and other members of the police department “to violate Civil Service law and distributed a slander packet to the Select Board and others about me…When this didn’t work she berated and intimidated [then] town Manager [Melissa Arrighi] until she stopped my promotion to Captain. This eventually caused the town to have to pay a large settlement in the lawsuit that followed…The town cannot afford another disastrous Betty and Dicky Select Board.”
Those are, as the saying goes, fightin’ words. Don’t be surprised if legal letters start sailing across town like tree limbs did during this week’s windstorm.
“I have no issues being accountable for my time in office, but accurate facts are necessary,” Cavacco wrote in an email. “I don’t know where he gets his information regarding an 11-million-dollar deficit, nor do I know what corruption he’s referring to, again facts matter. He seems hyper focused on only me and this is a 5-candidate race.”
While this kind of incendiary back and forth is sadly the norm in today’s political climate – and makes for lively column fodder – it doesn’t help bolster residents’ faith in town government. Select Board candidates and members are squabbling, its chair has one eye on Beacon Hill partway through his first term, and the town’s finances look precarious.
As Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local.”
And sometimes it’s just plain loco.
Mark Pothier can be reached at mark@plymouthindependent.org.