Meet the Mediator of Rhode Island

Shekarchi starts sessions promptly and keeps things cordial in the House of Representatives.

It’s gun day. 

Speaker of the House K. Joseph Shekarchi fortifies himself with a breakfast sandwich and an iced coffee. Gel’s Kitchen 2, on West Shore Road in Warwick, has been his neighborhood joint for years, bustling at 9 a.m. with bacon-scented bonhomie. This June Wednesday is also the last day of the 2025 session of the Rhode Island General Assembly. Before him lay flurries of last-minute pleas to push this bill or that over the finish line, static stretches waiting for the Senate to get its act together, and votes that will creep into tomorrow.

Owners Michael and Angelica Penta have been Shekarchi supporters since he first ran to represent Warwick’s 23rd district in 2012. Angelica Penta is an independent, loathe to mix politics with her homemade hash, but “he’s a good customer. And I like how Joe is for the people,” she says. “Anytime I had business concerns, he would explain things to me. I like that he takes the initiative to talk to people and understand where they’re coming from.”

Today, Second Amendment advocates are very concerned about Representative Jason Knight’s assault weapons ban bill. The legislation would prohibit the manufacture, purchase, sale, transfer and possession of some semiautomatic shotguns, rifles and pistols. Those who already owned them legally could keep them and obtain a voluntary certificate of possession. Law enforcement, active-duty military, and federally licensed firearms dealers would be exempt. The latter could still buy and sell them to other licensed dealers, law enforcement or legal out-of-state customers.

Shekarchi with his beloved rescue dog, Merlin. “When I went door-to-door, people would talk about the dog – not guns or abortion,” he says.

Rhode Island has one of the country’s lowest rates of gun ownership, the third lowest number of gun deaths, and is ranked thirteenth nationally in gun law strength by Everytown for Gun Safety. Nonetheless, Shekarchi is prepared for a barrage of strong suggestions that he shoot this bill down. He drives to his newish law office on Jefferson Boulevard to attend to his real estate practice before heading to Smith Hill. He moved to the brick-and-mirrored glass high-rise in 2021, after a suspected arson fire destroyed the office building his father, Khalil Shekarchi, bought for his three attorney children in 1991, on the condition they practice law separately so business disputes would never come between them.

He lost three decades of client files, and personal mementos — like the collage of the private swearing-in former Governor Bruce Sundlun performed when Shekarchi was first elected. Other moments and people of significance hang around this office: awards, a photo of his longtime partner Kevin Murphy, and another of Shekarchi with President Joe Biden. The largest picture is of Shekarchi and his rescue Merlin, a quirky construction with the legs and short hair of a basset hound, the coloring of a border collie, and ears that jut out from his head and flick up at the tips.

“In my first race, I had three of these billboards all over my district with the dog. When I went door-to-door, people would talk about the dog — not guns or abortion. ‘Oh, you’re the politician with the nice dog,’ and they would show me their dogs. People love dogs. And I’m one of them.”

Shekarchi opens his inbox.

“I’m getting bombarded today with gun emails. Almost all of them are Second Amendment people saying don’t pass Jason Knight’s bill,” he says. “I think they’re going to be disappointed.”

Khalil Joseph Shekarchi has been in politics — off and on — since he was sixteen years old. Now, sixty-two, at the state’s legislative pinnacle, he wields tremendous power over the allocation of state resources, its policies and, by extension, the lives of a million Rhode Islanders. He is now entering his fifth year as Speaker and while it is not a term-limited post, he feels like his time is growing short. He’s presided over the House long enough to have gathered critics, if not enemies. The federal largess that flowed into Rhode Island from the Biden administration to buoy the country after the pandemic has dried up under the Trump administration. This year’s budget was tough. Next year’s will be tougher.

“There were a tremendous amount of needs this year and an even more tremendous amount of asks, and there was very limited revenue. Sometimes I feel like I’m the Speaker of ‘no,’ and you can only say ‘no’ for so long,” Shekarchi says.

This year isn’t quite over yet, and when the 2025 session is gaveled to a close, he will have six months to mull an answer to the question political junkies and journalists have been asking for a year: Will Joe Shekarchi run for governor?

Shekarchi takes Merlin for a turn around Conimicut Point Park just before dinner. The setting sun spreads its honeyed light on the Providence River, softening the edges of whirling turbines northward off Kettle Point. The family has been a part of this summer colony since the 1950s. Waterfront property was not then fashionable. After Hurricane Carol, many waterside cottages were condemned. The Shekarchis bought a modest ranch for $200 and moved it inland.

“I have such a busy life. I come here, and I swear my blood pressure must drop 10 percent,” he says. “It brings back a lot of good memories of my family and my childhood.”

Shekarchi and his younger siblings, John and Mary, grew up in Warwick and Lincoln and spent summers here fishing, playing volleyball or just hanging out with friends and family for big Sunday cookouts. His father Khalil, an Iranian immigrant, was a surgeon who practiced at Pawtucket Memorial Hospital. His mother, Esther, was an Esposito from Federal Hill, whose grandfather Alfredo Sr. brought the family jewelry manufacturing business from Italy to Providence in 1909.

Shekarchi with his late mother, Esther Shekarchi, who passed away in 2007.

At home, Joe was the mature one, the smart one, and the one who took note if you came home after curfew.

“The kids in school worried about the Red Sox game. Joe was interested in presidential politics,” John says. “He was always ahead of everybody. If you went to an event, the kids would be casual and the adults would have a suit on; Joe would dress like an adult.”

“He was interested in real estate and played the stock market at a young age. He was the one you went to for advice,” says Mary Shekarchi, the youngest.

She offers her answer to a dinner party question from twenty years ago: If you did something bad, and were arrested, who would you call? “Joe. He was the one person I know I could count on, would show up, take care of it, and not make you feel bad when you’re at your low point.”

The children were raised in the Catholic Church and educated in the upper grades at Mount Saint Charles Academy in Woonsocket. The Shekarchis believed strongly in education. It lifted Khalil out of impoverished beginnings in the small northwestern city of Khoy, and in 1956 brought him to the United States for his medical residency.

“My father built a special study for us at home. In the summer, we’d go to our beach house and get jobs as lifeguards or whatever, but my father would make us audit classes at CCRI or Johnson & Wales just to get ahead and learn,” recalls John.

Shekarchi with his father, Dr. Khalil Shekarchi, a retired surgeon, during a State House visit in 2017.

Shekarchi’s political education began in high school with teacher Julian Mitchell’s history class, in which the only required reading was The Providence Journal so students could discuss current events. On Saturdays, he soaked up political gossip lunching with Uncle Ray, his mom’s twin brother and Democratic party stalwart, and then-Warwick state Senator Charlie J. Donovan Sr. He was a General Assembly page in high school, and an intern in U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell’s Washington, D.C., office while an undergraduate at Suffolk University. His education continued at Suffolk Law, the vaunted training ground for future Rhode Island politicians.

At twenty-two, he declared his intention to run in the 1984 Democratic primary for Warwick’s District 32 rep, but withdrew. At twenty-three, his bid to be a Warwick delegate in the state’s 1986 Constitutional Convention failed. But he kept learning the folkways of government as an unpaid intern for the Warwick Zoning Board and probate court and as a part-time aide to Providence Mayor Joseph R. Paolino Jr. He studied the chessboard of political advancement working on Frank Flaherty’s 1984 successful Warwick mayoral campaign and on Sundlun’s first gubernatorial run in 1986, which ended in a shellacking by Republican Edward DiPrete.

In the 1990s, he began to apply those lessons. He helped steer Donovan into the Warwick mayor’s office and became his aide. In 1992, he single-handedly scored an upset victory for presidential primary candidate Paul Tsongas in Rhode Island. As Sundlun’s legislative director, he once whipped enough votes to prevent the legislature from overriding the governor’s budget veto — including that of Providence Representative Myrth York, who then was Sundlun’s primary opponent in the governor’s race.

When Sundlun lost to York in 1995, Shekarchi took a break. He was four years out of law school and a lawyer for the Department of Transportation; it was time to hone his legal skills and build a private practice.

“I felt that I had enough relationships that I could always get back in government,” he says.

In 2008, he filed to run for the state Senate, but withdrew. Two years later, U.S. Senator Jack Reed persuaded him to meet with a venture capitalist who wanted to run for state treasurer. They bonded at Gina Raimondo’s kitchen table. They had the same May birthday, the same immigrant background, and managing her campaign “reignited a passion in me, and reminded me of how much I enjoyed politics, public service, getting things done for people,” he says.

In 2012, the perfect opportunity presented itself: His District 23 State Representative Bob Flaherty was retiring. There would be no Democratic primary — just a two-man general election against Republican John Falkowski.

“If I was going to be an elected official, this was my chance,” Shekarchi says. “I stopped my world and I devoted myself 24-7 to that campaign.”

On election night he worried: What if the man who helped to elect so many couldn’t win his own race? Shekarchi bested his opponent with 68 percent of the vote.

Speaker of the House K. Joseph Shekarchi in his office at the State House.

“I was happy and celebrated,” he says. “I went up there and my first year at the State House, I didn’t like it at all.”

Every September, Shekarchi throws a welcome back party for the chamber. This year they gathered on the back patio of Iggy’s Doughboys & Chowder House in Oakland Beach, where the palm trees call to mind islands more tropical than Rhode. Some have obliged the vibe with shorts and Hawaiian shirts. They take their chowder and doughboys at the tables or clump around the cash bar, exchanging hugs and handshakes.

Shekarchi surveys the crowd.

“Democrat, Republican — look how everyone is bonding. We may have ideological differences, but no one cares about that stuff — everybody’s talking about the summer,” he says. “We are all equal.”

The 2025 session saw 2,600 bills introduced and 384 signed into law, among them provisions to ease the housing and the health care crises, and to ban payday loans and the censorship of library materials. Simmering under the chitchat are the rivalries, the conflicts and the disappointments for bills that died or were watered down to the sponsor’s dissatisfaction. The pro-Second Amendment faction is still raw from the assault weapons vote.

Shekarchi understands the frustration of unmet goals. In his first year as an elected official, he felt like his decades of relationships and encyclopedic procedural knowledge were wasted on the back bench. He and fellow freshman Robert E. Craven Sr. (D-North Kingstown) persuaded then-Speaker Nicholas Mattiello to make them committee chairs, Labor and Municipal Government respectively — unheard-of for first-termers.

“Then my life changed up there because when you’re chairman, you get an office, a secretary, a clerk, a lawyer. And you become part of the leadership team that helps craft legislation,” he says. “And I love that.”

Three years later, the caucus elected Shekarchi Majority Leader. In 2021, Mattiello lost his Cranston district in an upset to Republican Barbara Fenton-Fung. He had ascended in 2014 after Speaker Gordon Fox was forced to resign in the wake of an FBI investigation. Fox eventually pled guilty to charges of bribery, wire fraud and filing a false tax return, and Mattiello came in as a reformer. Despite winning three terms as Speaker, his reign was controversial, dogged by accusations of bullying, sexism and exacting harsh retribution.   

Shekarchi respected his predecessor’s “tremendous work ethic. But every Speaker is different,” he says. “I wanted to make my own mark, be more of a consensus Speaker. There was a lot of creative talent in the room. I wanted to tap into them and listen.”

He resolved to change the culture. Shekarchi ensures that the session starts promptly in recognition of part-time legislators’ other obligations. He promoted women, who comprise seven out of sixteen committee chairs. His leadership team includes Majority Whip Katherine Kazarian (D-East Providence, Pawtucket), and Deputy Majority Whip Mia Ackerman (D-Cumberland, Lincoln). Shekarchi flung his office door open. Members describe him as approachable and accessible by phone at all hours.

“He actually tells me to give out his cellphone number to constituents if they have an issue,” says Majority Leader Christopher Blazejewski (D-Providence). “I never met anybody who did that.”

Despite obvious political differences, Minority Leader Michael Chippendale (R-Foster, Glocester, Coventry) says he and Shekarchi find common ground on many issues, and maintain a good relationship based on “respect, not of just one another, but to the body itself and to the institution.”

The Democratic Caucus runs the gamut from Republican-lite to Bernie Sanders-progressive, and “I don’t think it’s an easy job to keep that diversity together,” Representative Brandon Potter (D-Cranston) says. “We have spirited internal debates about what issues should move forward and what shouldn’t. And we’ve been able to evaluate bills on their own merits, not by is this progressive, conservative, or moderate?  It’s: ‘Is this good policy? Does it make sense?’”

Shekarchi is famous for placing himself between the rock in one room and the hard place in the other, and shuttling between legislative opponents, “looking for that crack, that opening in the disagreement, where there is a dialogue and a framework for passing a piece of legislation” says Craven, who once worked with Shekarchi into the early morning hours to reach an accord with municipalities on an evergreen contract bill for teachers, which kept an expired contract in place until a new one was negotiated.

Representative Susan Donovan remembers a lost Father’s Day in 2021, hammering out the Pay Equity Bill, which addressed wage discrimination based on a variety of categories including race, religion and sexual orientation, and expanded employee protections and remedies.

“That bill was a heavy lift, and in the fourth year, he made a point of getting all these people in a room and not leaving until we had a deal. We stayed there all day,” Donovan says. “He just really believed in it and it’s a model for the country. I get phone calls from all over asking me about our pay equity bill.”

Shekarchi expects legislators to do the same.

“The one thing that he told me that I think of every time I walk into the building: ‘This job gives you an opportunity to really sit and listen to people that you might not normally listen to. Find what the opposition is and see if you can negotiate with them,” says Representative Earl Read (D-Coventry, West Warwick and Warwick), a freshman and conservative Democrat. “It’s actually shaped my politics.”

Boston Globe political columnist Dan McGowan, who has been chatting with Shekarchi on and off the record about politics and policy for years, sums his standing in the House: “Of [Fox, Mattiello and Shekarchi], he is the most politically astute, the most genuinely liked, and seemingly the more honest given some of the scandals that those two were involved with — more fun to cover for sure.” 

Shekarchi likes to be liked, and “is tortured” if he fails to bring a rep on to his team, says Craven. But legislative Siberia — where the Speaker freezes you out, strips your perks and pronounces your bills dead on arrival — has largely melted away.

“There are members who have done things that would’ve put them in Siberia for years with another Speaker,” says Representative Megan Cotter (D-Exeter, Richmond, Hopkinton). “Joe won’t forget, but he doesn’t hold a grudge. He forgives and moves on.”

“He truly believes that confrontation is counterproductive in getting things done governmentally,” says Representative Arthur Corvese (D-North Providence), a twenty-seven-year veteran of the House. “That doesn’t mean he’s a pushover. He has his limits and he will put his foot down when someone oversteps them. Sometimes, I wish he put his foot down a little harder and a little more often.”

If Shekarchi has a downside, some members say, it is too much compromise.

“Sometimes his desire for consensus and making sure everyone feels like they have a say can undermine progress on an issue,” says Representative Tina Spears (D-Charlestown, South Kingstown, New Shoreham, Westerly).

But that is the leader’s lot: to stir the cauldron of opinions and ideas into legislation that will hopefully solve more problems than it creates. Shekarchi believes he has amassed a strong record of accomplishments, among them bipartisan budgets, housing and land use reform, and raising reimbursement rates for primary care doctors and nursing home workers.

“People have lost a lot of confidence in government,” he says. “We can do better in communicating. If I run, it’s going to be a positive campaign about what I bring to the table.”

RI Supreme Court Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg swears in Shekarchi as Speaker of the House in January 2023, while his sister, Mary Shekarchi, holds the Bible.

It’s gun day.

Shekarchi arrives at the State House mid-morning. He pops into the House chamber to say a few words to high schoolers attending a mock legislative session. Deputy Communications Director Emily Martineau fusses with his hair to ensure he is camera-ready. Shekarchi is fastidious, but not fancy. His 2017 Toyota Camry is immaculate; his nieces like to tease him about his stodgy suits.

“I’m cheap,” he smiles. “I’m cheap with the taxpayers’ money, and I’m cheap with my campaign money. I have a very conservative lifestyle.”

He retires to his third-floor office to prepare for the marathon. More gun emails. Shekarchi rhythmically squeezes an acid green stress toy as he considers his options. Knight’s bill hasn’t even been voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee yet. The bill may die there, or come back from the Senate floor intact or drastically altered. And if it’s the latter, Shekarchi has to decide if that version is acceptable, unsalvageable or tweakable.

The official oil portrait of Sundlun dominates the far wall, and the advice of his old mentor still remains top of mind: “Never slow down, never stop, keep going forward and do what you think is right, because you’re going to get criticized if you do nothing or you do anything,” Shekarchi says. “I have to decide, what’s the right thing for the state at this moment? Bruce always thought to meet the moment. And politics for me is about meeting the moment.”

At 1:30 p.m. Blazejewski, Kazarian and Ackerman gather in his office to catch the Senate gun bill debate on Capitol TV. But nothing has been decided by 3 p.m. when Shekarchi stands at the rostrum before the red velvet drapes.

“Clerk, please unlock the machine! All members present please record your attendance.”

The House is ready. It has had its debates, and the sixty bills on the calendar have the votes — although that will not deter members from taking eleventh-hour stands to oppose, support or amend a bill.

The Senate convened with 100 bills to consider — including the budget — and so the session proceeds in fits and starts as the House waits for its counterpart to send legislation back for final approval. The assault rifle bill reappears at 8:30 p.m. The Senate has changed key aspects of the House version: possession is permitted and certain types of weapons were dropped.

Still, Knight urges support.

“The Senate bill still works,” Knight says. “It shuts off the spigot and because of the interplay with federal law, also creates the universe of weapons in Rhode Island that is not going to get bigger. If we pass this bill, Rhode Island will be safer from gun violence.”

At 9:30 p.m., it passes 43-28.

The night grinds on, and members begin to assume the bleary aspect of stranded travelers in an airport. In the last twenty-five minutes, the last batch of Senate bills comes over and the machine of government picks up speed. All chatter has died, and the body works together with one purpose: to finish. When these stragglers are finally transmitted to “His excellency, the governor, the honorable Senate and the secretary of state,” Shekarchi bangs the gavel.

“The House is in recess.”

It is 1:40 a.m.

There was talk about a postmortem over drinks, but Shekarchi heads home.

“I do enjoy being the Speaker,” he says. “It’s a great job, and I think I’ve done pretty well at it, by all standards.”

Being governor — becoming governor — presents different dynamics and considerations, which must be weighed logically. Shekarchi sits on a mountain of campaign cash — more than $4.1 million dollars — more than his potential opponents Governor Dan McKee and Helena Foulkes combined.

But money is a smaller part of the equation. The race alone will affect his law practice and shorten his visits with his ninety-nine-year-old father.

“It’s a very personal — not political — decision for me. I’ll talk to key constituency groups in the Democratic primary, and all the people who really matter to me.

“We political people and journalists, when we read the news, we think everybody reads the news, but the reality is nobody reads the news,” he says. “The point is: Am I electable? Is my vision the right vision? There’s a certain amount of society that wants to blow up everything, but what do you get from that?”

The question hangs in the air.

“I want to run if I can be effective, if I can solve problems, if I can get things done.”