A former Massachusetts State Police Sergeant was sentenced to three years and thousands in restitution in connection with an scheme to steal overtime dating back to 2015, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts announced Wednesday.
Former Sgt. William Robertson, 62, of Westboro, helped facilitate an overtime fraud scheme in the State Police Traffic Programs Section in Framingham from 2015 until it came crumbling down in 2018, stealing hundreds of thousands in federally funded overtime with co-conspirators and later shredding and burning records to cover it up.
The former sergeant was convicted of one count of conspiracy, one count of theft concerning a federal program and four counts of wire fraud in December, the U.S. Attorney’s release said.
Robertson will serve three years in prison and three years of supervised release, U.S. District Court Judge Margaret Guzman ruled Tuesday. Robertson was ordered to pay $142,774 in restitution and forfeit $32,180.
Another co-conspirator former state police Lieutenant Daniel Griffin, 60, of Belmont, was also charged for the scheme and sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervised release in late April. Griffin was ordered to pay over $500,000 in fines and assessments.
Robertson, Griffin and other unnamed troopers would “purposely arrive late to, and leave early from … Overtime shifts on a regular basis” in order to steal overtime that was federally funded by grants to improve traffic safety, the indictment in 2020 read.
When the conspiracy began to come to light in 2017, Griffin, Robertson and the others shredded and burned records and forms to avoid detection, the DA’s office said. When an internal inquiry dug into the missing forms in July 2019, Griffin told superiors the forms were “inadvertently discarded or misplaced” during office moves.
Griffin pleaded guilty to additional charges in November related to spending time he was on the clock as a trooper actually running his private security business, Knight Protection Services. He earned nearly $2 million from the business, hid over $700,000 from the IRS and defrauded his children’s private school of over $175,000 in financial aid, according to the indictment.