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April 2, 2012

Ex-treasurer Cahill indicted over lottery ads

MATT MURPHY State House News Service

BOSTON — Former Treasurer Timothy Cahill had been indicted in connection with his use of state Lottery resources to aid his to campaign for governor in 2010, Attorney General Martha Coakley announced Monday.

Cahill, a longtime Democrat who quit the party to run for governor as an independent in 2010, will be charged with public corruption, conspiracy, and procurement fraud charges stemming from a series of Lottery advertisements that appeared to bolster his run for governor, according to a source with knowledge of the indictment.

Attorney Joseph Demeo, who has represented Cahill in the past, was not immediately available to comment, but Cahill's wife, Tina Cahill, immediately took to Twitter to defend her husband.

"A good man is being persecuted for challenging the staus quo. Its not enough to be defeated you need to be destroyed politicly &personally," she wrote on Twitter.

Coakley's office announced in October 2010 that it would investigate whether Cahill's campaign illegally coordinated with the Treasury to run a $1.2 million advertising campaign designed to boost Cahill's image as the Lottery's overseer during his gubernatorial campaign.

Coakley's office said at the time that it had "taken steps to preserve the evidence that we need," but called on the Lottery to suspend the ads until after the election. The Lottery complied immediately, but resumed the ad campaign in November after the election.

The attorney general plans to discuss the grand jury indictments at a 2:30 p.m. press conference in her office at One Ashburton Place.

The ads trumpeted the management of the lottery and drew criticism from former Cahill campaign staffers who defected to the Baker camp.

Questions about the possible coordination between Cahill's treasury staff and his campaign surfaced after Cahill filed a lawsuit against his former campaign advisors, who ditched Cahill's campaign and threw their support behind Republican candidate for governor Charles Baker.

Adam Meldrum, who had been managing Cahill's campaign until he quit, claimed in documents filed in Norfolk Superior Court as part of the lawsuit that Cahill was attempting to silence him from exposing collusion between the campaign and the state Lottery, which is a taxpayer-funded agency.

Cahill strongly denied any collaboration, insisting that the Lottery ad campaign was a routine, annual expense used to drive sales to support local aid for cities and town.

Cahill currently lists his employer as a "registered representative" for Compass Securities Corporation. Though he faded from the spotlight after his third place finish in the 2010 gubernatorial election, he recently began writing a column for a new website www.golocalworcester.com.

Cahill served two four-year terms as state treasurer, one of six statewide state constitutional offices.



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