Copyright 2006 Boston Herald Inc.
Ex-captain gets $1.5M
By LAUREL J. SWEET
The Boston Herald
BOSTON, Mass. — His superiors called him crazy, but yesterday an ostracized Boston cop had the last laugh when a jury awarded him $1.5 million for blowing the whistle on an alleged overtime scandal that went away when he was fired in 2002.
“In a lot of ways, the cover-up was worse than the corruption,” Michael Reilly, attorney for former Capt. William Broderick, 55, said of the Boston Police Department. “They swept it under the rug and got rid of the guy who brought it to light.”
Lawyers for the city and former Commissioner Paul Evans maintained yesterday there was no malfeasance by the department. They will fight the verdict.
“This is the rare case where we think they (jurors) got it wrong,” said Bill Sinnott, the city’s corporation counsel.
The eight-person federal jury’s verdict in Broderick’s wrongful-termination case was unanimous. It is the city, not Evans, left to hang financially.
The son of Mayor Thomas M. Menino was one of several high-profile cops who, Broderick testified, was trying to scam, or had succeeded in scamming, the city out of overtime for no-show court appearances.
But Sinnott said Evans’ real concern was that Broderick “went through a period where he exhibited bizarre behavior,” including being verbally abusive and drawing his firearm on a van carrying civilian investigators for the Suffolk District Attorney’s Office.
Broderick said he feared the van was trying to run him down for being a whistleblower. It was driven by the brother-in-law of police Superintendent Robert Dunford, but a report on the incident listed the driver’s identity as “unknown.”
Reilly said the city raised psychological-fitness questions in “a deliberate strategy” to discredit Broderick. Broderick, he said, hoped the jury’s finding “sent the message to other honest cops in Boston that you can stand up to (those in charge).”