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— News and commentary about elsewhere covered by Quincy Quarry News

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Thomas “Steak TIps” Clasby, Jr, former head of the City of Quincy Council on Aging as well as purportedly now former BFF of Quincy Mayor Thomas P. Koch, was sentenced today for variously stealing $133,000 in City of Quincy’s funds via his senior position of trust as the head of the city’s senior services operations.

The federal prosecutor laid out a recap of Clasby’s sordid looting of city funds for his own benefit, ranging from grifting a snow blower to providing financial support to a female not his wife over the course of at least five years as documented. 

Also brazen was his several grifting city funds to buy a total of  153 pounds of bourbon marinated premium steak tips.

Especially appalling, however, was how Clasby openly stole cash from senior fee programming and snack bar proceeds in front of his staff as well as  threatened them to stay silent as he was tight with Mayor Koch and thus protected.

Eventually, however, two long put upon senior service staffers bravely dimed out Steak Tips.

Deep Throat leaking information to the Washington Post in a parking garage
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Unclear, however, even if it is unclear to whom, dimes were dropped, meaning was it to local officials, the Norfolk District Attorney and/or perhaps the feds, much less who dropped them.

Conversely, the defense attorney talked up Clasby’s good deeds and mostly done over the years prior to his misdeeds.  

Defense council further talked up Clasby’s mental and physical health care needs as well as motioned to the over forty people attending the hearing in a showing of support.

Say what?
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Her honor, on the other hand, noted that past goods do not wash away subsequent bad deeds as well as that the sentencing guidelines are the guidelines and which she well knows as she was the federal court system’s commissioner and chair of the United States Sentencing Commission from February 16, 2011 until her term expired on January 3, 2017.

As such, her honor well-knows the book she would be throwing when she would be announcing sentence.

Her honor also underscored how public corruption crime was especially corrosive to the public trust.

I didn’t know nothing
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Her honor also asked if the City of Quincy, the technical victim of Clasby’s crimes and to which the prosecutor stated that Quincy was advised but no one from the city was attending the sentencing hearing, much less was anyone from from City Hall and so available to present a victim’s statement on behalf of seniors and taxpayers who were fleeced by Steak Tips.

Her honor then pronounced a half and half sentence of six months in federal prison followed by six months of house confinement and then years on probation.

Exhibit #3
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Further, Clasby will be tendering $136,000 in restitution as well as lose his city pension benefits which were worth somewhere in the low seven figure range on a net present value basis.

Net/net, Steak Tips is facing hard hits even if not as long and hard time in prison as one might think appropriate. 

In any event, Clasby was ordered to report to a federal prison to be named later on August 19, a day later then originally proposed, as the eighteen is his son’s birthday.

That and so be the third person with close ties to Mayor Koch to serve time in federal prison during her tenure in office. 

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