Longtime Boston community activist Monica Cannon-Grant is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday in connection with a federal fraud case after she agreed to a plea deal last year.
Cannon-Grant pleaded guilty in September of 2025 to 18 of the 27 counts in a scheme that federal prosecutors said involved her and her late husband pocketing thousands of dollars in donations to their nonprofit. She admitted to wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, mail fraud, filing false tax returns and failing to file tax returns, prosecutors said. She’s due for sentencing on Jan. 29.
She is scheduled to be sentenced at 2:30 p.m. in federal court in Boston. Prosecutors have recommended a sentence of 18 months in prison and money forfeiture.
Cannon-Grant and her late husband Clark Grant were indicted by a federal grand jury in 2022 on 18 counts for diverting funds from their Violence in Boston nonprofit for personal expenses and collecting about $100,000 in illegal unemployment benefits, among other charges.
A subsequent superseding indictment a year later charged them with 27 counts. The new charges centered on alleged schemes to use pandemic assistance funds from the Boston Resiliency Fund for purposes not disclosed to the city, including for their own personal benefit, and to fraudulently obtain rental assistance payments from Boston’s Office of Housing Stability.
Clark Grant died in a motorcycle crash in Easton in March of 2023.
Monica Cannon-Grant, a figurehead in Boston’s activism community, and her husband are accused of spending their nonprofit’s funds on themselves.
Federal prosecutors said the couple received nearly $54,000 in pandemic relief funds and then allegedly withdrew approximately $30,000 in cash from the Violence in Boston bank account — some of which they allegedly kept. Cannon-Grant and Grant also allegedly used some of the nonprofit’s funds to pay their auto loan and auto insurance bills.
The prominent local activists were also accused of conspiring to defraud both Boston’s Office of Housing Stability — by concealing thousands of dollars of household income in order to obtain $12,600 in rental assistance from the City of Boston — and the state’s Department of Unemployment Assistance — by submitting a forged employment document so that another family member could receive nearly $44,000 in unemployment assistance.
Federal prosecutors said the total amount of fraudulent unemployment assistance received by the Grants and their co-conspirators was approximately $145,269.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office also alleged that Cannon-Grant filed false tax returns for 2017 and 2018 and that she failed to file tax returns for 2019 and 2020, failing to report tens of thousands of dollars that she received from Violence in Boston and an entity with which she contracted to provide consulting services.
Violence in Boston was created to raise money to reduce violence, raise social awareness and support community, but founder Monica Cannon-Grant has now been indicted on fraud charges.
Cannon-Grant’s activism, including the organization of a rally in the city in 2020 to protest the killing of George Floyd and other Black people by police, earned her numerous awards, such as The Boston Globe Magazine’s Bostonian of the Year award and a Boston Celtics Heroes Among Us award, both in 2020.
Violence in Boston was founded in 2017 with the goal of reducing violence, raising social awareness and aiding community causes in Boston. Cannon-Grant was the organization’s CEO and founder. Her husband was a founding director and was also a full-time employee for a commuter services company until recently.
According to a pinned post on the nonprofit’s Facebook page, Violence in Boston shut down and suspended all programs as of July 6, 2022.
Marc Fortier
Source link