“I’d rather have me making a lot of these decisions than others.”Īt 73, Crosby has a round, meaty head topped with sprouts of closely cropped gray hair. I like having an impact,” he told the press. “The odds of him being 100 percent successful-whatever the definition of success-are pretty long.” But Crosby, a man supremely confident in his own abilities, was game.

(When has the casino industry ever been squeaky clean?) “It’s about as impossible as any position I’ve seen in public service,” former Lieutenant Governor Donald Dwight said at the time. Still, the casino law’s and the new commission’s insistences on Boy Scout standards struck some as quixotic. This, after all, was Massachusetts, where Puritans first landed on Plymouth Rock, not some seedy back-alley canton like New Jersey or Nevada. “He knew politics,” says former state Senate President Stan Rosenberg, “and he had a very solid reputation for integrity.”įrom the start, Crosby’s mandate as MGC chair had been clear: Build a multibillion-dollar casino industry free of the faintest whiff of criminality or corruption. In 2011, after signing a law that essentially created a local casino industry, then-Governor Deval Patrick promptly appointed Crosby as chairman of the newly formed gaming commission.

Over time, he earned a reputation as an honest pragmatist respected on both sides of the political aisle. A centrist Republican and longtime public servant, he climbed his way to becoming state budget chief and then a dean at UMass Boston. Now, charges of incompetence, favoritism, and outright rule-breaking echoed throughout the state’s corridors of power.Ĭrosby’s rise to prominence had been slow yet impressive. Ever since, Crosby and his commission had been under siege for granting Wynn a casino license in the first place. It started when Steve Wynn, the billionaire septuagenarian whom Crosby’s commission had hand-selected to build a five-star casino on the banks of the Mystic River, was accused of sexual misconduct. On a gray rainy day last September, Massachusetts Gaming Commission chairman Steve Crosby sat down to write his resignation letter, already deeply mired in scandal. Ethan Miller/Getty (building) Bloomberg/getty (Wynn).

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