Fed Judge Wolf won't let the State cops off easy

Lifted from the Globe

By Kevin Cullen,May 6, 2019, 7:38 p.m.

57 (Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff)

Federal prosecutors seemed surprised last week when Judge Mark Wolf suggested they had gone too easy on state troopers accused of using an elaborate scheme to collect overtime pay for hours which they didn’t work.

But if they were surprised, they shouldn’t have been. Wolf, an iconoclastic figure on the federal bench, is not afraid to rock the boat and challenge the conventional wisdom, especially when it comes to matters of public corruption.

In an order filed Monday, Wolf said federal prosecutors needed to reconsider widening the scope of their investigation, saying that before he could sentence Trooper Daren DeJong, who pleaded guilty to his role in the overtime scheme, “the court must determine whether there is jointly undertaken criminal activity, including but not limited to an uncharged conspiracy. . . .” And, as to DeJong specifically, “the court must decide whether ‘the remaining charge adequately reflects the seriousness of the actual offense,’ ” Wolf wrote.

Wolf suggested that DeJong could blow the investigation into the OT scheme wide open, that what took place was not merely improper payroll padding but racketeering.

“It is in the interest of justice to provide DeJong and the government time to confer concerning DeJong’s publicly expressed willingness to seek to substantially assist the government in the investigation or prosecution of one or more other individuals,” Wolf wrote.

Wolf’s interest would have been piqued, I’m guessing, by a line in DeJong’s plea for leniency that his lawyers filed. DeJong’s lawyers wrote that although he did not cooperate with federal prosecutors, he agreed to cooperate with Attorney General Maura Healey’s Public Corruption Unit “after observing that many of those within the State Police command-structure who helped foster the culture in which the misconduct developed had yet to be prosecuted.”

That line suggested there was far more coordination to the overtime scheme than previously acknowledged, i.e., a conspiracy.