Is Governor William F. Weld '66 a tool of big business? His opponents in the upcoming gubernatorial election would have you believe that he is. And if history is a guide, they may be right.

Meet Peter Berlandi, the governor's chief fundraiser, who has helped Weld amass an impressive campaign war-chest of nearly half a million dollars--more than all of his Democratic competitors combined.

Part of the Weld money machine's success is no doubt a result of Weld's standing in the state of Massachusetts: he's popular, he's well-connected, and he's expected to trounce his lesser-known rivals on Election Day.

But there's no denying that Berlandi also deserves much of the credit for bringing in the big bucks. Fundraising, after all, is a game of connections--the more connected you are, the more money you're likely to pull in. And Paul Berlandi is nothing if not well-connected.

Fundraising is also a game of favors--the more money a candidate raises, the more indebted he is to his supporters. This, too, is nothing new.

Taken together, however, the connections almost certainly relied upon by Berlandi in his fundraising efforts for the governor, and the favors almost certainly promised those people in exchange for their dollars, raise serious questions about Weld's accountability. Among them: who's interests is Weld serving--those of his well-heeled corporate patrons, or those of his millions of other constituents? And does serving the former mean selling out the rest?

All this because of one campaign fundraising official? It may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. For behind Berlandi--and it seems reasonable to conclude, behind Weld--is Berlandi's employer, the San Francisco-based Bechtel Corporation.

Berlandi is Bechtel's consultant for the Central Artery project, a massive, federally subsidized highway construction project in Boston that is currently the largest public works undertaking in the country. (The Central Artery may yet prove to be one of the nation's largest public works boon-doggles. To date, it is six years behind schedule and roughly $2 billion over budget, with no immediate end in sight.)

Founded in 1906, Bechtel quickly rose to the top ranks of American engineering contractors. The company's early and lasting prominence in the development of energy and transportation infrastructures was both the cause and the effect of a special, privileged relationship it has maintained with the nation's political leaders.

The list of elite political insiders who have been on the Bechtel payroll is sizable. John McCone, who headed the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, and the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960s, was a Bechtel man. So was George Schultz, the former secretary of state. And so, too, was Caspar W. Weinberger '38, the former secretary of defense who now publishes Forbes Magazine.

The Bechtel story is a significant one. It has larger implications for our political process as a whole, in terms of understanding the relationship between the public and the private domains and personal accountability in our system of government. Consider Bechtel's history:

After amassing considerable wealth during the 1920s by building pipelines for privately held oil and gas companies, Bechtel was hired by the government to build the Hoover Dam, in Boulder, Col. From the beginning, the company's business practices were suspect.

The firm has a history of cozy links to the federal government, and questionable business practices.

As journalist Laton McCartney relates in his 1988 book, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, Bechtel workers were overworked, illegally paid in script, and compelled to live in dangerous, unsanitary conditions. Meanwhile, Bechtel played the corporate interest game, hiring powerful Jobbyists who successfully derailed the efforts of then-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes to initiate an investigation of the firm.

The ties raise serious questions about who's interests Bill Weld is serving.