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This Month in Corruption: Ex-Manager of Two Towns Pleads Guilty to Variety of Crimes

On Thursday, July 20, Andrew Bisignani pleaded guilty in Essex Superior Court to procurement fraud, destroying public records, municipal bid-rigging and other crimes related to his service, from January 1, 2009 to June 30, 2014, as the town manager first in Saugus and then in Nahant, communities north of Boston.   Judge Timothy Feeley sentenced Bisignani, age 70, to two years of probation, including six months of home confinement to begin after the federal home confinement sentence he’s currently serving is completed in January, 2018.  Judge Feeley also hit Bisignani with a $60,000 fine. 

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.  

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