JUDGE: MONICA CANNON-GRANT VIOLATED RELEASE CONDITIONS
Boston activist Monica Cannon-Grant, who along with her late husband was indicted last year on 18-fraud related counts related to their charity Violence in Boston, was found to have violated her release conditions by receiving her father’s financial benefits.
“Because the defendant is a serial fraudster, because the defendant’s prior history as a family fiduciary is marked with red flags, and because the defendant has a history of deceiving financial monitors, the government opposes the defendant’s request,” federal prosecutors wrote in a Feb. 7 motion opposing her request to amend her release conditions to handle her father’s set finances.
Cannon-Grant’s request was filed in federal court in Boston in February, but it along with two response motions from prosecutors were unsealed Friday. At a hearing held then, Magistrate Judge Judith G. Dein found that “there was a clear violation of conditions of release” and ordered that Cannon-Grant no longer have access to her father’s Veterans Affairs and Social Security benefits.
Cannon-Grant’s attorney in his motion, which was dated Feb. 3, said that the benefits totaled approximately $4,300 per month, through checks received on the first and third of each month.
“The VA requested intervention by granting the fiduciary responsibility to a family member,” defense attorney Christopher Malcolm wrote in the motion. “Other family members do not live in the Commonwealth, and the Defendant is the best and only option.”
Prosecutors were vehemently opposed.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Dustin Chao wrote in his Feb. 7 response that the March 14, 2022, indictment of Cannon-Grant and Clark Grant “lay bare brazen fraud schemes perpetrated by the defendant and her husband in which no grift was too big or too small.”
Prosecutors in a June 8 motion laid out evidence that Cannon-Grant applied last October to the V.A. to be her father’s fiduciary against the condition of her release and received her first check for $3,621.95 on Feb. 1, days before her attorney requested the change in her release conditions.
“If people whose fulltime job was to track and verify Cannon-Grant’s expenditures — i.e., VIB bookkeepers and financial officers — could not identify and prevent Cannon-Grant’s fraud, it is difficult to see how Probation, with its scarce resources, can be tasked with tracking and verifying Cannon-Grant’s spending of her father’s pension and retirement benefits on a monthly basis,” prosecutors wrote.