IT consulting bigwig sentenced

JOHN DONOVAN SR., the multimillionaire founder of consultancy Cambridge Technology Partners and a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been sentenced to cleaning horsetrails for having faked his own shooting.

Donovan called police in December of 2005 claiming to have been shot by hit men near the MIT campus. He was taken to a local hospital with a superficial gunshot wound while police searched the area looking for the alleged shooters.

Donovan recovered, but police were suspicious of the circumstances and he was eventually convicted of faking the incident and filing a false police report.

He was involved in bitter litigation over money with his children at the time, and prosecutors alleged that he planned to frame his son for the shooting.

At sentencing, Donovan was ordered to pay a $625 fine and perform 200 hours of community service cleaning horsetrails, along with two years probation. The judge called the episode "nothing short of bizarre" but ignored a prosecutor's objection that the sentence was too lenient.

There's a certain poetic justice here. Donovan's police report was horsesh*t, so he'll be spending 200 hours raking up the stuff. µ

L'INQ
Boston Herald