A former Massachusetts State Police lieutenant will spend five years in federal prison and pay fines and assessments just short of $508,000 for his part in the agency overtime fraud scandal.
U.S. District Court Judge Margaret R. Guzman sentenced Daniel Griffin, 60, of Belmont, to five years in prison and three years of supervised release and also ordered that he pay $507,963 in restitution, fines and special assessments.
Griffin was convicted Dec. 12 of one count of conspiracy, one count of theft concerning a federal program and four counts of fraud. The month before, Griffin copped to four additional counts of wire fraud and 11 counts of filing false tax returns.
The first set of those charges is related to him actually running his private security business, Knight Protection Services, while claiming MSP hours, according to court records. The second is related to lying about his income to rip off the private school his children attended at least from 2016 to 2019.
Griffin was a part of the MSP’s Traffic Programs Section at MSP headquarters in Framingham, where federal prosecutors describe a culture rife with fraud. Griffin and a co-conspirator, ex-MSP Sgt. William Robertson, and other, unnamed troopers fraudulently claimed hours they didn’t actually work and the leadership — Griffin and Robertson — covering it up on the paperwork side.
According to the indictment filed in December 2020, the pair “and their coconspirators would purposely arrive late to, and leave early from … Overtime shifts on a regular basis.” The scheme, which dated back to 2015, included having the whole crew register the same false hours worked at their pay stations.
When the scheme to defraud the state of massive amounts of money to pay overtime they didn’t actually work, Griffin and Robertson worked to cover up their deeds by shredding key records and forms, the indictment states.
Robertson was convicted of his own charges of conspiracy and theft and is slated to be sentenced on April 30.
