AN ATTEMPT TO bribe Medford’s police chief –- part of a scheme to obtain approvals for a marijuana company that would earn him a six-figure yearly payout – earned former Somerville attorney and alderman Sean O’Donovan a two-year federal prison sentence.
The sentence caps the fall of a longtime power broker who repeatedly sought to leverage his connections in Somerville and Medford, as well as Boston City Hall.
As O’Donovan stood in front of US District Court Judge William Young on Wednesday, Young told him he was swayed from imposing an even harsher sentence after O’Donovan addressed him and a courtroom full of family and friends.
O’Donovan, 56, said he made a “terrible decision” in reaching out to childhood friend Michael Buckley, the brother of Medford Police Chief Jack Buckley.
Prosecutors said O’Donovan offered Mike Buckley $25,000 as part of an effort to have the police chief support the marijuana company, which was unaware of the behind-the-scenes dealings.
Buckley reached out to his brother, who immediately contacted the FBI. Federal agents outfitted Mike Buckley with a recording wire, which caught O’Donovan handing him $2,000 as a down payment. O’Donovan was recorded saying he was seeking an “edge.” He had some incentive: He was due to receive at least $100,000 a year from the marijuana company if the Medford application went through.
“I apologize to you all,” O’Donovan said, turning to face his family in the front row.
Also in the courtroom was Medford Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn, who afterwards decried O’Donovan’s efforts to “manipulate, coerce and bribe” in order to exert influence. “That’s how business was done for decades by some,” she said in a statement posted to X.
O’Donovan served as a Somerville alderman for 13 years before turning his attention fully to lawyering and lobbying. He expanded his territory into Boston and boasted to clients of close ties to its city hall, where Eugene O’Flaherty, his former law partner, had become Mayor Marty Walsh’s corporation counsel.
O’Flaherty attended the sentencing, sitting in the back row, and then embracing O’Donovan after the proceedings.
Federal prosecutors had asked for three and a half years in prison, while O’Donovan’s defense attorney, Martin Weinberg, asked for a year and a day.
Weinberg argued O’Donovan engaged in constitutionally-protected lobbying by offering money to Chief Buckley’s brother, and fell for a “ruse” created by the FBI. “Most lobbying is terribly unappealing,” Weinberg said, suggesting that perfectly legal efforts to sway officials can nonetheless have an unseemly look.
Young fired back that this was a sentencing for a bribery case, not a lobbying case.
Weinberg also provided 55 letters from friends and family pleading for mercy from the judge, including one from former Somerville mayor Joe Curtatone, who, like others, said he had known O’Donovan for decades.
Curtatone, who first met O’Donovan when both were teenagers playing youth hockey, and the others noted that O’Donovan is the primary caregiver for his 93-year-old mother.
Prosecutors said when it came to the Medford police chief, O’Donovan tried to leverage a relationship first formed in childhood for personal gain. “This is a simple case of old school, old-fashioned, smoke-filled backroom bribery,” Jonathan Jacobson, one of the prosecutors, told the judge.
Jacobson added that O’Donovan also abused attorney-client privilege, engaging in deception by lying to the Buckleys and claiming that the marijuana company he worked for was in on the scheme. “Deception is the way that business is done, the way politics works,” O’Donovan told Mike Buckley in one of the government recordings, according to prosecutors.
“Government must be free from that corruption,” Young said in handing down his sentence. But he said that O’Donovan’s comments in court – to him and to his family – showed that he had taken responsibility for “terribly offensive and demeaning” conduct.
O’Donovan is due to report to federal prison at the end of March.