By The Briefcase Team | Monday, June 29, 2026 | 5 min read

Good morning. Today we are going to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which is a sentence almost nobody has ever said voluntarily. We are going because the Boston Globe's Spotlight Team, yes, that Spotlight Team, the one with the Oscar, just dropped a housing-fraud story so layered it has its own croissant. The real estate trade press has covered it so far with the urgency of a sloth crossing a six-lane highway. We are going to fix that. Coffee up. Bring snacks. There are bedbugs in this one.

This is a real story. We are not making it up. We checked.

Massachusetts has a quasi-public agency called MassHousing. Think Fannie Mae if Fannie Mae had a Dunkin' loyalty card. It moves more than $100 million in grants a year, sells billions in bonds, and has roughly the public profile of a regional power utility. Nobody thinks about it until the lights go out.

In 2023, MassHousing launched something called the Gateway Housing Rehabilitation Program. The mission, and we are quoting the program brochure here with our eyebrow raised, was to fix up blighted small-multifamily buildings in struggling mill towns by funding "emerging" developers from underserved backgrounds. Honorable goal. Twenty-six Gateway Cities. $2.3 million in the pilot. Pittsfield, Worcester, the kind of places where a triple-decker still costs what it actually costs to build a triple-decker.

The MassHousing executive in charge of picking the winners was a man named Tony Richards II. Vice President of Strategic Community Investments. Salary: $255,000. Title length to actual-words-doing-things ratio: regrettable.

On December 23, 2022, three days before Christmas, Tony Richards bought himself a present in the form of a house in West Roxbury. He paid $785,000 for it. The original asking price had been $989,000, which means Tony Richards negotiated himself a $204,000 holiday discount. Not bad. Treat yourself.

The two men who sold him that house are named Gary Acquah and Reggie Woods. They played football together at Holy Cross. They both have MBAs from Cornell. They run a small development firm called Flex Investments, which is apparently named on the principle that if you say a word enough times it stops meaning anything.

Seven weeks later, MassHousing announced the Gateway grant program. Tony Richards was put in charge. Four of the first seven grants Tony Richards awarded went to Gary Acquah and Reggie Woods. Total: $1.4 million. More than half of the entire pilot's budget. The remaining grantees, who we assume are nice people, split the leftover pizza.

Richards filed no written conflict-of-interest disclosure. He later told the agency, eighteen months later, that he had simply not realized the men he was giving $1.4 million to were the same men he had bought his house from six months earlier. Just slipped his mind. Happens to all of us. You meet so many people at closing.

Now. Brace yourself. Because this is the part where the story stops being a sitcom and becomes a procedural.

The Spotlight Team did the thing real journalists do, which is pick up the phone and call the subcontractors listed on the invoices Acquah and Woods submitted to the state for payment.

They reached 13 subcontractors. Nine of them flatly denied doing the work. Two more said the invoices were inaccurate. Only two confirmed they did the job and got paid. That is a hit rate of 15%, which would get you fired from a call center.

The state paid nearly $580,000 against those invoices. Money that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts allocated to fix peeling paint and rickety stairs and a "possible bedbug infestation" (the inspector's words, not ours, although now they are ours too).

The receipts have the literary quality of a third-grader's homework. To wit:

The agency's chief legal officer, Colin McNiece, initially told the Globe that Richards's failure to file a disclosure was "basically moot" because the grants were already awarded. Two outside ethics experts disagreed strongly. Thomas Susman put the obvious counterpoint plainly: "As soon as he recognized having had a commercial transaction with the grantees, that was the time to recuse and disclose." This is the legal equivalent of saying "you cannot un-spill the milk, but you should probably still mention you spilled it."

When the Globe requested emails from the period of the home sale, MassHousing officials urged the paper to drop the request. The Globe, charmingly, did not. The emails revealed that Acquah was corresponding with Richards about pre-development capital meetings less than three weeks after the house closing. We are no forensic accountants, but "less than three weeks" is generally not enough time to forget a person.

After Spotlight presented its findings, MassHousing announced it would hire an outside firm to audit the matter. The agency has temporarily moved grant oversight to its legal department, which is corporate-governance for "we have grounded the car keys." Richards remains in his $255,000 position. He has not been suspended, demoted, or asked to write "I will read closing documents" on the chalkboard 500 times.

The Worcester triple-decker, by the way, was sold at foreclosure auction in late March. Most of the 13 units that were supposed to be fixed up are still in rough shape. The lone tenant in Worcester, 76-year-old Stephen Jenkins, described the renovations as "some half-ass" work performed by "sidewalk Willies." Mr. Jenkins, if you are reading, we want to put you on our masthead.

Every state has a MassHousing. The federal LIHTC pipeline, the HOME program, state housing trust funds, the new ROAD to Housing Act waiting on the President's desk: all of it moves through quasi-public agencies with grant officers who pick winners, audit themselves, and occasionally find themselves on the buying side of houses owned by the winners.

The Gateway pilot is small. $2.3 million is rounding error in housing finance. But the structure that let one VP direct half of a pilot to his recent house sellers, file no disclosure, and keep his job after the conflict surfaced is the same structure moving hundreds of billions of housing dollars across America every year. And the only line of defense currently working is "an investigative newspaper happens to be looking."

We are big believers in markets, deregulation, and getting more housing built. We are also believers in the radical proposition that when the state spends $580,000 on subcontractors who never lifted a hammer, somebody at the state should notice before the audit committee meets the Pulitzer committee.

We will be watching the outside audit. We will let you know when the trade press finally catches up. We are not holding our breath.