BEVERLY — A former Andover man was sentenced yesterday to serve six months in jail, pay restitution and perform community service, after pleading guilty to his role in a bribery and kickback scheme involving a vice president at Beverly Hospital.
Brian R. Lemay, 54, who now lives in Candia, N.H., ran an HVAC contracting business that worked on a $50 million renovation and expansion project at the hospital.
But in order to do that, prosecutors say, Lemay and other contractors had to pay to play — in this case, submitting inflated bills for various contracts at the hospital and then kicking back the overage to former Vice President Paul Galzerano.
Lemay, who pleaded guilty in August to felony larceny and commercial bribery, kicked back $270,000 over a three-year period, between 2003 and 2006, to Galzerano, by using the extra money paid by the hospital to pay Galzerano's personal credit card bills and the mortgage on his Groveland home, prosecutors in Attorney General Martha Coakley's office say.
The contract for Lemay's firm, Mechanical Construction Services, was worth millions, said Harry Pierre, a spokesman for the attorney general.
Under the terms of Lemay's plea agreement, accepted yesterday by Judge John Lu, Lemay was sentenced to two years in jail but will have to serve only six months of that sentence.
He'll spend three years on probation, the first six months of that under a curfew, and will be required to perform 250 hours of community service in a health care setting, a request made specifically by hospital administrators, prosecutor Lee Hettinger said yesterday.
He'll also be responsible for paying $216,847 in restitution to the hospital, $10,000 immediately after his release, another $70,000 by the end of 2011 and the balance by the end of 2012.
Prosecutors had hoped to keep Lemay on house arrest for the first six months of his probation, but since his indictment he has moved to southern New Hampshire, and the electronic monitoring equipment required to put someone on house arrest won't work across state lines, a probation officer explained to the judge yesterday.
Lemay, dressed in a black shirt and black pants, was taken into custody in the courtroom yesterday and placed in handcuffs and shackles. He'll serve his time at Middleton Jail.
Galzerano, who briefly disappeared last fall, has had a warrant against him lifted and is due back in court on March 11.
Two co-defendants, Alfred Consolo, 52, of Methuen, who ran a commercial contracting company that also worked on the hospital project, and John Kane, 51, of Hanover, who ran a landscaping and paving company that allegedly did work on Galzerano's home and billed the hospital for it, are due back in court next month.
Courts reporter Julie Manganis may be reached at 978-338-2521 or at jmanganis@salemnews.com.
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