Former Fitchburg Massachusetts state Senator Dean Tran will spend a year and a half in federal prison for unemployment assistance and tax fraud.
U.S. District Court Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV sentenced Tran to 24 months on fraud charges. He will report to federal prison, which Saylor said he recommends as a location closest to Fitchburg so Tran’s wife and three children can visit, within six weeks and no later than March 21. He also faces other pending cases in both state and federal courts.
Tran was convicted of stealing COVID-19 unemployment assistance benefits while actually being employed as a $ 90-an-hour consultant for a New Hampshire auto parts company. The extra income was further inflated by Tran cheating on his 2020, 2021 and 2022 taxes, prosecutors say.
Tran, who departed the Massachusetts Legislature in 2021, used novel techniques to delay his sentencing and try to skirt the repercussions of his fraud. That included seeking a pardon from President Trump and then pleading for no sentence since he is the “breadwinner” for his family and that he should also be forgiven because his family suffered hardships in Vietnam before coming to America.
The major effects the tactics produced were to delay his sentencing and to add sentence guideline enhancements for obstruction of justice.
Over a two-hour sentencing hearing in federal court in Boston, prosecutor John Mulcahy and defense attorney Michael Walsh traded vastly different views of who former state Sen. Tran, a Fitchburg Republican, is as a person and his values.
Tran assailed the court system, prosecutors and others on Facebook in his own coverage of his trial. It got to the point that the court imposed a gag order out of fear his digital missives could affect the course of justice — an order that, prosecutor Mulcahy argued, Tran ignored, as he regularly ignores rules and laws.
“He’s told not to do something and he doesn’t care, he still does it,” Mulcahy, who argued for a two-year sentence, said. “He doesn’t believe the rules apply to him just like, as in this case, he doesn’t believe the law applies to him.”
Mulcahy said that the case was brought not out of political persecution for a Republican in a blue state, as Tran has argued, but through a bipartisan ethics investigation that found Tran illegally used state resources and employee’s state-paid time to work on his campaign.
Mulcahy further argued that Tran has a long history of blaming anything and everything else for his own wrongdoing, from employees of the Unemployment Assistance office to bad tax advice on Reddit. Further, Mulcahy said, his actions have set a bad example for those around him as his own daughters also sought unemployment benefits while Tran claimed them as dependents.
Mulcahy said that Tran never took responsibility for his actions and has insisted that he wishes to return to public service.
“Public service, your honor, is not consistent with who this defendant is,” Mulcahy said. “Actions speak louder than words.”
On the defense side, Walsh still wouldn’t define his client, who could still appeal, as a criminal. He began his argument by saying, “This is hard to maintain one’s innocence while also making arguments for mitigation.”
“It seemed more like he was careless and slipshod,” Walsh argued about Tran’s financial actions. “If he stumbled he certainly didn’t stumble very much.”
Walsh, who admitted Tran had a “big mouth” on him, defined Tran as the breadwinner of a middle-class family who “goes to church, coaches little league games … in many ways the ideal suburban parent” and as a “pioneer” in providing constituent services during his three years in the state senate.
Judge Saylor had seemed to take offense to Walsh invoking the plot of Les Miserables as a defense of Tran’s actions: “His analogy is that he is the proverbial thief who stole a loaf of bread to feed his family. I don’t accept that argument.”
Walsh walked it back a little: “The desperation of a middle-class family may pale to someone living in a cardboard box on the street” but that it wasn’t nothing.
“All of a sudden he found himself out of work,” Walsh said of when Tran was not reelected to a new term. “When he went into full-time public service he left behind his private career … He justified to the jury, and I think credibly, that he was in a scramble to put food on the table.”
Saylor found little traction in the argument.
“The defendant is a former state senator, he’s a graduate of Brandeis, he’s fluent in two languages. He’s eminently employable. He could easily get a job,” Saylor said, “in fact he did.”