CAPTION: Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky at their arraignment at Charlestown District Court last Thursday.

Charlestown was at the center of a story that made international headlines last week when a publicity stunt allegedly orchestrated by two residents drew the Sullivan Square MBTA station to a halt and cost the City of Boston an estimated $1 million after it was mistaken for a bomb threat.
Sean Stevens, 28, of Charlestown and Peter Berdovsky, 27, both pled not guilty in Charlestown District Court last Thursday to one misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct and one felony charge of placing a hoax device, which carries of maximum sentence of five years in prison. Friends and relatives posted $2,500 bail each for the two suspects, who are both due back in court for a March 7 pretrial hearing.
While Berdovsky’s residence was listed as Arlington, the attorney representing him during the arraignment, Michael Rich, said in court that the native of Belarus who came to the U.S. as an exchange student divided his time between Rich’s Arlington home and Stevens’ Charlestown loft.
The bizarre series of events was sparked off at around 8 a.m. the previous morning when an MBTA worker reported a suspicious looking device attached to a steel girder below Interstate 93 at Sullivan Station. Instead of a bomb, however, the device turned out to be a battery-powered panel depicting a character from the Cartoon Network series “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” making an obscene gesture.
Stevens and Berdovsky were reportedly contracted by the New York-based marketing firm Interference, Inc. and paid $300 each to place a number of signs throughout Boston as a promotion for an upcoming “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” feature film. Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting Systems, which owns the Cartoon Network, has since admitted that it hired the Interference Inc. to carry out the marketing blitz in Boston and has apologized for the campaign.
Both Stevens and Berdovsky were arrested on Jan. 31 and jailed overnight.
At the arraignment, Young people showed their support for the two suspects by holding signs outside the courthouse and packing the courthouse during the arraignment, including between 18 and 20 individuals who met each other via the Web site LiveJournal.com.
George O’Connor, a 33-year-old freelance copywriter from Malden, said LiveJournal.com was abuzz with the news of the terror scare, which many of its users perceived as an overreaction on the city’s part.
“There definitely seemed to be a tipping point where the situation didn’t merit the attention it was receiving,” O’Connor said. “There was an opportunity to deconstruct the situation, but I think [the city] felt a need to just their reaction.”
Another LiveJournal user, Jason Palm, an unemployed 23-year-old from Somerville, echoed O’Connor’s sentiments, saying that while the city needed to take the situation seriously, both elected officials and the media had blown it out of proportion.
“This needs to stop being publicized as a hoax,” Palm said. “You can’t fault the actions of the police and how they handled it, but I fault the way it’s being handled now, with Mayor Menino and Gov. Patrick finding people to blame.”
At a press conference following the arraignment, Stevens and Berdovsky launched into a rambling, barely coherent discourse about various hairstyles that was reportedly another publicity stunt aimed at promoting another Cartoon Network series, the upcoming “Perfect Hair Forever.”
And according to published reports released this week, the seemingly unrepentant duo were captured by transit police photos as they filmed the police response to the Sullivan Square MBTA station and the subsequent detonation of the device found there on Jan.31.
Berdovsky apparently had a change of heart following the arraignment, however. In a statement released to Associate Press through Price, Lobel, Glovsky & Tye, the Boston law firm now representing him, Berdovsky, said, “I regret that this incident has created such anguish and disruption for the residents and law enforcement officers of this city. I certainly never intended to do anything to frighten this community, which has welcomed and nurtured me for 10 years.”
Meanwhile, Turner Broadcasting System and Interference Inc. announced last week they would pay $2 million in damages — $1 million to cities and state agencies for their emergency response and an additional $1million for “goodwill funding.” Of this, Boston is slated to receive $484,590.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who referred to the marketing campaign as a “nitwit technique [that] has no place in our city,” seemed pleased with the settlement.
“I am happy this entire ordeal has been put to bed with this latest agreement,” Mayor Menino stated. “I hope that the guerilla marketing industry learned something from this event.”

The state’s Executive Office of Environmental Affairs agreed Tuesday to reopen the public comment period for a proposed facility on the Charlestown-Everett line that would handle catch-basin refuse.
This comes in response to a Jan. 23 letter sent to the EOEA by Adorno, Yoss Fitzhugh, Parker & Alvaro, the Boston law firm representing the City of Everett. The letter maintains that the current site location for the facility is fundamentally different from the site at Columbia Point in Dorchester that was proposed in 2002, as well as a site at 200-400 Frontage Road in South Boston that was proposed in 2005.
In September 2006, the Boston Water and Sewer Commission filed a second Notice of Project Change that would relocate the facility to 180 Alford St. in Charlestown. The three-story 34,250 square foot facility is where cleanings from catch-basins located throughout the City of Boston would be dewatered. Trucks would transport roughly 150 tons of material — 2 percent of which would contain sewage — to the facility each day. It is expected to be operational by September 2008, a BWSC representative said in December.
According to attorney Michael Parker of Adorno, Yoss Fitzhugh, Parker & Alvaro, the Alford Street site is located in the vicinity of tidelands and the Mystic River watershed, unlike the previous two locations proposed for the facility. Parker also said that the City of Everett, which would be substantially impacted by the Alford Street facility, didn’t receive notification of the second Notice of Project Change.
As a result of this week’s agreement, the public can submit written comments regarding the proposed Alford Street facility until Feb. 26. All correspondence should be sent to the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, Attn: Deerin Babb-Brott, Director, MEPA, 100 Cambridge St., Suite 900, Boston, MA 02114.

A harbor seal spotted last weekend in the Navy Yard.

Guerilla advertising’s trials and tribulations

Life in Boston was turned upside down for much of a day last week for hundreds of thousands of residents and for commuters on the expressway and Storrow Drive and for police, firefighters and bomb squads who sped from one location to another waiting for bombs to explode, which turned out to be an advertising prank.
If we learned anything from this ill-conceived guerilla advertising effort, it is that we are all tending to take some aspects of the potential for violence against us at the hands of terrorists too seriously. The guerilla advertising consisted of battery-powered posters placed strategically where thousands of passersby could see them. Not those who placed them, nor those who paid to have the placed, nor those who created the advertisements with batteries apparently thought they were of such a powerful concoction that they could bring to a near halt, the comings and goings of the citizens in a great American city.
Unbelievably enough, they did.
Turner Broadcasting has agreed to pay $2 million to the City of Boston and to a consortium of agencies that contributed resources to control the havoc caused by the advertising last week. S1 million is for out-of-pocket expenses. The other $1 million is for the purpose of supporting homeland security efforts.
The facts concerning this imbroglio are thus: The guerilla advertising highlighting a television cartoon worked beyond all expectations in Boston, and our reaction to advertising mixed inevitably with our paranoia almost shut down the city, while the media highlighted the potential terrorist bomb disaster as though Boston was facing Armageddon. The growing hysteria spread far beyond what should have been allowed.
We do not condone the guerilla advertising or the direct results of it that resulted from it in Boston. We note, however, that the same advertising appeared in quite a number of cities across the nation without producing the Boston shock effect. Complain, as we do, about an obvious over-eaction, what would the results have been if the advertising were bombs and they went off one after another without the kind of response we have come to expect?
We applaud the brave men and women who took on the guerilla advertising as if it were the real thing — time bombs ready to explode. By all appearances, we are ready for the real thing.
Ironically, it is likely a matter of time –—of intent, of chance and of fate -—before we are visited again by the real thing, as we were on Sept. 11.
Better to be prepared and to overreact than not to react at all.

A storm not forgotten

This week marks the 29th anniversary of the Great Blizzard of 1978. Those of us who experienced the blizzard can recall it with clarity after all these years. It was, and will always be for us, the mother of all storms, the most powerful winter meteorological event of the last century in New England — a storm never to be surpassed in our lifetime.
Charlestown was buried. The streets were impassable for weeks. Some drifts piled up to the second floor of older homes.
When the storm lifted, and Charlestown residents came outside, a great camaraderie came to pass among the people here. People helped one another. There was a common belief that we all needed to work together to overcome the effects of the storm. We wonder what happened to all that good feeling?