In the summer of 2017, Representative Mark DeSaulnier sat in an empty US Senate hearing room, contemplating how his life had been forever changed in that very space.
Nearly 50 years before in the same room, a self-identified mafia informant testified to a Senate committee that Mark’s father, Edward DeSaulnier, a then-Superior Court judge and former Massachusetts state legislator, had accepted a bribe to arrange a lenient sentence in a fraud case. After subsequent investigations by the Globe’s Spotlight team exposing other misdeeds, the elder DeSaulnier was disbarred and resigned in disgrace.
Last month, the younger DeSaulnier, who represents California, became the top Democrat on the House Ethics Committee, making him responsible for investigating the actions of colleagues for potential corruption. He cited his dad’s example as his motivation.
“LBJ used to always say, ‘I don’t want to be like my papa,’ because his dad … was very strict about following the rules,” DeSaulnier said in a recent interview with the Globe in his office. “I sort of always was like Johnson, but for the opposite reason. … I don’t want to be the person who gets seduced by this and ends up breaking the rules.”
It’s a consequential time to be taking this particular job. The normally press-averse Ethics Committee has released two high-profile reports in as many years. In 2023, it detailed extensive misconduct by former New York Representative George Santos before his expulsion from the House. Late last year, the committee released a damning report on former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz that alleged illicit drug use and paying for sex. The report was released after Gaetz had withdrawn from consideration to be attorney general.
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Charged with upholding ethics, the committee is now facing an even greater challenge, with Washington increasingly polarized and contrition in short supply.
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DeSaulnier said that context is precisely why he is eager to lead on the committee, praising its Republican chair, Mississippi Representative Michael Guest, for keeping it nonpartisan.
“Rules are important, boundaries are important, and the pursuit of virtue in public office is really important,” DeSaulnier said. “That doesn’t mean that everybody is the second coming of Christ or George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, but that we should aspire to this.”
The second youngest of five kids in an Irish and French-Canadian Catholic family, DeSaulnier’s memories are littered with bits of Boston lore. His paternal grandfather owned a Lowell taxi company, and his maternal grandfather was a deputy fire chief there.
DeSaulnier grew up seeing the glamour of having a father in Boston-area politics. He recalls going to classic Boston sporting events with his dad, including seeing the Celtics’ John Havlicek steal the ball against the Philadelphia 76ers in the 1965 NBA playoffs and Bobby Orr score the Stanley Cup-winning goal for the Bruins in 1970. When the Celtics won the championship one year during their dominant run in the 1950s and 1960s, DeSaulnier recalls his father somehow getting them into the locker room at the old Boston Garden. His father seemed to know everyone.
Now, DeSaulnier realizes that much of it was probably connected to the corrupt actions that were his father’s undoing.
“I’m sure it was part of this stuff,” DeSaulnier said. “I know it was, because I would be standing there when he was making bets. And I’m going, ‘This sounds weird.‘”
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It came crashing down on July 22, 1971. DeSaulnier had been staying on his father’s couch in Boston, his parents by then separated, while working a summer job after his freshman year at College of the Holy Cross. That Friday, before a planned weekend trip to Cape Cod, there was a knock at the door from a reporter from the now-defunct Boston Record-American looking for his father, who wasn’t home. Phone calls from reporters from the Globe and Herald followed.
Finally, Jack Borden from WBZ-TV informed the perplexed DeSaulnier that a criminal informant had told a Senate committee that his dad had taken a bribe in exchange for arranging a lenient sentence in a fraud case a decade earlier. Stunned, DeSaulnier eventually left for the Cape without hearing from his dad. He didn’t hear from his father until the following week.
Judge DeSaulnier denied the allegations, calling them “preposterous.” But in early August, the Globe’s Spotlight team broke its first story that made DeSaulnier’s denials more implausible. The Globe reported DeSaulnier had been close personal friends for decades with the bail bondsmen alleged to be the go-betweens on the bribe. In that story and subsequent ones, the Globe revealed other misdeeds, including that DeSaulnier held an active real estate license, contrary to recommended judicial conduct, and that DeSaulnier wrongfully wracked up personal phone charges on a court line, including multiple calls allegedly linked to Mafia gambling junkets.
After investigating, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court disbarred DeSaulnier in January 1972 for “grossly improper” conduct, the court’s first such punishment. DeSaulnier resigned days later. He spent his later years working odd jobs, including a year as a substance abuse adviser to the Patriots. But he also struggled with addiction and gambling problems himself, leaving him destitute, according to his son. He died by suicide in 1989.
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DeSaulnier continued college amid the storm of headlines. He decided that he would follow some family out to California while buying books at the Harvard Coop, when he handed the clerk a credit card bearing their distinctive last name.
“She said, ‘Oh, are you related to the crooked judge?‘” DeSaulnier said, imitating the grimace he made in reaction. “And then she goes, this is classic Boston, ‘I didn’t mean it that way. They’re all crooked.’ … My response was, ‘To tell you the truth, that’s not really very helpful.‘”
DeSaulnier joined family in the San Francisco Bay area and went into the restaurant business. An associate in the local Chamber of Commerce encouraged him to apply to the local planning commission, setting off a career in local politics, originally as a Republican, that culminated in his election to Congress in 2014.
Despite not wanting to follow his father’s example, DeSaulnier said his Jesuit education’s emphasis on service influenced him to pursue it after all. And while he was dedicated to avoiding his father’s failings, they also fueled his work. Representative DeSaulnier has championed legislation supporting mental health and addiction recovery. And when Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries offered DeSaulnier a spot on the Ethics Committee two years ago and the top Democratic spot this year, DeSaulnier readily agreed.
A voracious reader, DeSaulnier cited the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer on how he feels about the strange journey that brought him to his post today.
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“He said, you know, when you get older, you look back on your life … and you go, ‘Oh, it sort of all made sense,‘” DeSaulnier said, contemplatively. “And that’s the way I feel about being on the Ethics Committee. … I wasn’t the architect of this [trajectory], I was the principal in it, but it all sort of made sense.”
Tal Kopan can be reached at tal.kopan@globe.com. Follow her @talkopan.