Sticky-fingered aide sprung on COVID concerns
Lynch served eight months of a 40-month term at Devens
Lynch had worked in city government for 43 years before resigning before the guilty plea.
The former Boston City Hall aide whose federal bribery conviction set off a broad zoning board scandal is now out of jail after he complained the coronavirus pandemic made life in the big house too dangerous.
John Lynch, who began what was meant to be a 40month term last April, was released early by federal Judge Patti Saris, effective Wednesday. Saris resentenced him to time served in prison plus two years’ supervised home confinement.
Lynch, 68, has been in FMC Devens in Ayer, where he contends a coronavirus uptick puts him at risk due to his age and heart issues.
“Mr. Lynch reports he has maintained an unblemished disciplinary record while incarcerated, and has been disciplinary incident-free,” his lawyer Henry Brennan asserted toward the end of last year.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling’s office pushed back on Lynch’s request, saying that he’s in a different building than where COVID outbreaks have been.
“Lynch has served just a fraction of his 40-month sentence,” prosecutor Dustin Chao wrote in a response Dec. 30. “Shortening Lynch’s sentence to just over a fifth of the original punishment would undercut its deterrent value, even during a time of pandemic. Lynch’s original sentence of 40 months was imposed to reflect the seriousness of his offense — a crime where Lynch, an Assistant Director of Real Estate in Boston, was caught on tape taking naked cash bribes from a wealthy developer in order to line his own pockets.”
Lynch pleaded guilty in September 2019 to taking $50,000 in cash bribes to get a foundering project passed in 2018.
One particularly damning photo — made public in a filing in which the feds said Lynch “got caught with his hand in the cookie jar” — showed Lynch leaning into a car and taking a stack of $100 bills from another person. The scandal reverberated through the administration of Boston Mayor Martin Walsh, leading to the sudden resignation of a zoning board member, a leave of absence for a top adviser and two different independent investigations.
Lynch had worked in city government for 43 years before resigning before the guilty plea.
The city’s retirement board took away his pension after the conviction.