A. David Mazzone

A. David Mazzone (June 3, 1928 – October 25, 2004) was a lawyer, Massachusetts assistant district attorney, assistant United States attorney, Massachusetts Superior court judge. He served for twenty-six years as a Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

"He will forever be remembered by the people of Massachusetts for his landmark rulings that led to the cleanup of Boston Harbor," United States Senator Edward M. Kennedy said to the Boston Globe shortly after Mazzone's death in October 2004.

He was born Armando David Mazzone in Everett, Massachusetts, to immigrant parents. He was a star tight end on the Everett High School football team, where he won all-scholastic honors, and he later played tight end on the Harvard College team. After graduating from Harvard in 1950, he became a supervisor at Inland Steel Corp., a steel mill in East Chicago, Indiana. He served in the United States Army for two years during the Korean War, then returned to the steel mill and enrolled at DePaul University Law School. After law school, he opened a small law office in Chicago, but soon returned to Massachusetts, where he spent two years as an Assistant District Attorney of Middlesex County and four years as an Assistant United States Attorney under Arthur W. Garrity Jr. In 1965, Mazzone and three other Assistant U.S. attorneys, resigned to open their own law firm, Moulton, Looney and Mazzone. He remained in private practice until his appointment to the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by Governor Michael Dukakis in 1974. In 1977, was nominated to the federal bench by President Jimmy Carter, and he was sworn in during March, 1978.

In the early 1980s, the Conservation Law Foundation and the City of Quincy, Massachusetts sued the regional Metropolitan District Commission, saying that it violated clean water statutes because its antiquated sewage treatment plant on Deer Island was dumping hundreds of tons of black sludge into the harbor daily. The United States Environmental Protection Agency later joined the suit. Judge Mazzone ruled the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (which was the successor to the Municipal District Commission's operations of the Boston regional water and sewage systems), was in "chronic, flagrant violation" of federal law, and ordered it to set deadlines for a cleanup. He oversaw the case himself, rather than appointing a special master as judges often do in long-running cases.

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