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Martha Chayet was an executive head hunter for the banking industry when she became Massachusetts co-chair of Bush’s 2000 campaign. Soon thereafter she surfaced with her own investment firm, Private Equity Services. But her principal equity seems to be political. Chayet was a major fundraiser for the campaigns of Massachusetts Governors William Weld (a Pioneer), Paul Cellucci (see James Connolly) and Mitt Romney. President Bush appointed Chayet in 2001 to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. Chayet’s lobbyist husband, Neil Chayet, helped Romney behind the scenes, meeting in early 2002 with White House operatives Karl Rove and Andrew Card to discuss how to find a graceful way for then-Acting Governor Jane Swift to exit the race and leave the GOP primary path open for Romney. Three weeks later Swift announced that she was dropping out of the race and Romney officially announced his candidacy. In 1999, the Boston Globe exposed lucrative, no-bid consulting contracts that the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) awarded to insiders from the Weld and Cellucci administrations. Massport paid Neil Chayet’s Chayet Communications Group, Inc. $700,000 to advise it on whether or not to build a hotel next to a convention center site. Explaining how he earned the money through his “common-sense” advise on a non-existent hotel, Chayet told the Globe, “These are never easy decisions, and our work should not be measured by the fact that they have not gone forward.” Neil Chayet later criticized the insider-contract scandal saying, “Are you only supposed to hire your enemies?” Neil Chayet is a former insurance-defense attorney whose lobby firm specializes in the medical industry and government contracting. Chayet sold part of his company in 2002 to computer consulting company Tier Technologies, which gets about 90 percent of its revenue from government contracts. In 2003 Massport tested Tier’s iris-scanning security technology at Logan International Airport, but rejected if because airport workers found it too invasive. Neil Chayet toyed with idea of challenging U.S. Sen. John Kerry in 2002. Neil Chayet is special counsel to Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo. He lectures on legal issues at the medical school at Harvard, where he moderated a 1966 LSD panel that featured the late Timothy Leary.
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Of Special Interest
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| Profile last updated
Dec 4, 2003
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