Can Everett's mayor keep settlement from a lawsuit funded by campaign contributions? Past opinions say no.

Boston Globe

10-03-2025

'You can't go around litigating things and profiting from it with your campaign funds,' said Bradley S. Balzer, who wrote the opinion in 2005 when he was the office's deputy director. 'That was the gist of the opinion at the time. You couldn't personally benefit from the use of a campaign fund for any type of legal settlement.'
In that 2005 case, Frank G. Cousins Jr., then the sheriff of Essex County, was advised that if he used campaign contributions for his legal fees, then 'neither you nor your committee may retain any monetary damages that are awarded. Such funds would need to be donated to a charitable or other entity specified in the
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That clause requires money left in inactive campaign finance accounts to be donated to charity, a scholarship fund, a city or town, or the state, so that money raised for campaign purposes is not converted to personal use.
In a second opinion, Cousins sought a few years later, he was told he could use a legal settlement to pay back his campaign for legal fees, but that any excess would have to go to charity.
Whether the earlier opinions
might be applied to DeMaria's situation is unclear. The Office of Campaign and Political Finance generally only takes action if it receives a complaint or if a candidate seeks guidance.
Jason Tait, a spokesman for the office, said he could not comment on DeMaria's situation. But, he added: 'When OCPF is providing guidance on how to resolve issues of settlement, we always go to the law and our past opinions to provide the best and fairest outcome.'
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DeMaria was traveling last week and did not respond to requests for comment from the Globe. George Regan, the public relations representative who announced DeMaria's legal victory in December, would not respond to questions.
The mayor's chief of staff said she could not respond to the newspaper's questions because they do not concern city business.
Last week, the Everett City Council held a special meeting and voted unanimously to ask DeMaria to pay the city back for so-called longevity bonuses that a recent report from Inspector General Jeffrey S. Shapiro found were wrongly awarded and then concealed by the mayor's administration. While councilors said they intended to grant the mayor a $10,000 bonus for every four-year term in office, DeMaria was paid that sum for each year, inflating the total value of the perk from $40,000 to $220,000, the report found.
The inspector general, an independent state office, also called on the council to provide information to the State Ethics Commission to help determine whether DeMaria had violated the state's conflict of interest law.
City Council also called for an audit of the payments and plans further challenges at a meeting on Monday – including a potential no-confidence vote in the mayor. Councilors have also demanded details on how much the city has spent on
the inspector general's investigation and whether the lawyer representing DeMaria's interests at last week's meeting is being paid by taxpayers.
In a prepared statement, the mayor strenuously objected to the inspector general's findings and disputed his interpretation. 'I have worked too hard and too long as a public servant in the City of Everett to stand by while the Inspector General attacks my integrity and the integrity of the members of my Administration,' it said.
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DeMaria filed suit against the Everett Leader Herald in October 2021 after a string of negative stories. The suit alleged that the editor had made up quotes, falsely accused DeMaria of taking kickbacks, and otherwise conspired to undermine the mayor before the November election. The resulting $1.1 million settlement in DeMaria's favor staved off a trial and included a promise to
It's unclear how much the lawsuit cost DeMaria, and whether contributions
from supporters covered all of it. Jeffrey S. Robbins, the attorney who handled the lawsuit, declined to reveal the costs. DeMaria's campaign account paid Robbins's firm, Saul Ewing, legal fees of $627,772, campaign finance records show. The Mayor Carlo DeMaria Jr. Defense Fund raised another $280,286 for the litigation. Legal defense funds are not required to report how much of those funds were paid out, however.
Gemma W. Martin, a consultant for Chick Montana Group, which established the legal defense fund and receives consulting fees from DeMaria's campaign committee, declined to speak to the Globe.
DeMaria's use of a legal defense fund to pay for a lawsuit the mayor himself filed was unusual, though not prohibited by the OCPF. Since 2010, the office has allowed candidates to create such funds to defend against criminal charges or pay costs in civil cases that are 'not primarily personal in nature.' The office has viewed defamation lawsuits as an allowable use of legal defense funds in the past.
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In 2014, gubernatorial candidate Mark Fisher created a legal defense fund to sue the Massachusetts Republican Party, which he alleged had manipulated the convention nominating process to bar him from the primary ballot. He did not end up receiving any contributions in the defense fund, records show, but paid legal fees through his political campaign fund, which he had loaned nearly $400,000 of his own money. When he was awarded a $240,000 settlement from the MassGOP, he repaid his campaign fund – and himself.
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DeMaria consulted the State Ethics Commission about raising money to fund a lawsuit and was advised that he would be limited by the state's conflict of interest law. Unless he created a legal defense fund, he was told, he could only accept donations below $50 and could not use his title as 'mayor' in fund-raising.
Legal defense funds can accept unlimited contributions — unlike campaign funds, which are capped at $1,000 per person — and can collect donations from corporations. The top two contributors to DeMaria's defense fund were Suffolk Construction Co. CEO John Fish, whose company built the $2.4 billion casino in Everett, and J. Derenzo, a subcontractor on the casino project. Each gave his legal fund $50,000.
Geoff Foster, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, a nonpartisan advocacy group that promotes government transparency, said in a prepared statement that DeMaria's settlement raises key questions.
Among them: 'whether a candidate has a legal obligation in this situation to reimburse either or both the candidate's campaign finance committee and legal defense fund?' Foster said. 'And, in any case, does a candidate have the right to keep any funds awarded as a result of the lawsuit personally, or is there a legal obligation to donate those funds?'
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Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at