According to a press release from the office of the Essex County
District Attorney, had the case against him gone to trial,
evidence would have been introduced “that would have proven that, during his
tenure as Town Manager of Saugus and Nahant, Mr. Bisignani orchestrated a
misleading scheme that violated many procurement laws pertaining to the
expenditure of municipal funds.”
In addition, the press release said, “Bisignani attempted to
conceal his wrongdoing by altering and destroying documents that an Essex
County Grand Jury had subpoenaed from the Town of Nahant. During the period of
the grand jury investigation and service of the subpoena, Bisignani met with
one Selectman for the Town of Nahant and discussed whether Bisignani would
continue to be employed as Town Administrator.
During the meeting, Bisignani concealed a tape recorder in the room and
secretly recorded the meeting.”
The release continued: “The scheme orchestrated
by Bisignani…entailed the hiring of choice vendors without, effectively, any
public procurement process. Through the
scheme, Bisignani directed the Town of Saugus to pay invoices for projects that
were never advertised, not subject to any public bidding, and were identified
as so-called ‘emergency’ procurements that were not approved by the Department
of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM). The invoices approved by Bisignani (1)
disclosed only a portion of a project’s cost, (2) designated foreseeable
projects as ‘emergency’ work, and (3) did not include payment of prevailing
wages. Bisignani also caused payments
for these ‘split invoices’ to be spread out, further concealing the true cost
of the projects, and obscuring the necessity that those projects be subject to
public bidding and advertising.
Additionally, Bisignani’s purposeful failure to comply with procurement
laws caused the Town of Saugus to hire a vendor during a period that the vendor
had been barred from providing services to municipalities by the Department of
Industrial Accidents. Moreover, Bisignani
also approved multiple payments by the Town of Saugus to vendors for the same
services.”
Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett emphasized: “This scheme charged in this case did
not just create an unfair playing field, but an almost entirely secret playing
field where hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds were spent without
any procurement process or transparency.
The effective administration of government depends upon a basic trust
that persons with authority over public funds comply with the law. Mr. Bisignani not only betrayed that trust…but
he also thwarted investigators, secretly recorded one of the elected officials
to whom he answered, and destroyed Town records in order to conceal his crimes.”
According to a report in “Wicked Local, North of Boston,”
Bisignani’s attorney, Tracy Miner, told Judge Feeley that her client accepted
responsibility for his actions. She
stressed that Bisignani never benefited personally from the scheme and pointed
out that there were no allegations that the work that took place in both towns
did not need to be done.
Addressing the court, Bisignani said, in part, “I was not
charged with, nor did I plead guilty to, any act of personal gain…My hope is
that the citizens of the communities I have served know that I always acted in
what I believed to be their best interests; and that they will judge me on the
totality of my public service and on my accomplishments attendant thereto.”Back in February of this year, Bisignani was sentenced in U.S. District Court, Boston, to one year of probation in connection with failing to report more than $375,000 of his income on his federal tax returns from 2010 to 2013.
