The gulf between the city’s interests and those of the mayor came into sharp focus last month when Inspector General Jeffrey S. Shapiro issued a report finding DeMaria had used his position to orchestrate a city ordinance that gave him sizable bonuses, then concealed the scale of those payments.
Though councilors approved the mayor’s “longevity” bonuses, a majority of the members told the inspector general they understood they were voting for a $10,000 bonus for each of DeMaria’s terms. Instead, the mayor’s administration interpreted the wording to award DeMaria $40,000 extra per year, and it hid the inflated payments in obscure line items in the budget, the inspector general found.
Shapiro recommended that the council seek to recover $180,000 in excessive payments to DeMaria, conduct an audit, and refer any further details to the ethics commission for investigation into a potential violation of the conflict of interest law.
Councilors are going even further than the inspector general requested, however, by raising the prospect of another potential conflict in the legal payments the city made during the investigation. Legal spending is a matter of concern for the council and “will be addressed in both the state ethics letter and to the IG,” said Christopher Petrini, an attorney City Councilors recently hired to advise them.
The mayor, who kicked off his reelection campaign Thursday night before hundreds of supporters at Anthony’s function hall in Malden, has refused to pay back the bonuses, blamed politics for the controversy, and maintained that he “did nothing wrong.”
“We did everything right,” DeMaria said in a defiant and defensive 20-minute speech. He was not available to answer questions for this story, according to the city’s director of communications, Keith Sonia.
The six-term mayor has seldom faced such sustained pressure from local politicians, but his critics in the community have long accused him of blurring lines and conflating the city’s interests with his own. At a recent public meeting, one resident questioned whether it was a conflict of interest for his campaign’s public relations consultant to simultaneously serve in a similar role for the city of Everett. Public relations veteran George Regan charges the city of Everett $550 an hour, invoices show.
In an interview, when asked about the public perception, Regan suggested that representing the city and representing the mayor were one and the same.
“Every time the mayor takes a hit, so does the city,” Regan said. “The mayor’s the city. The city’s the mayor.”
Regan’s firm won a bid to represent Everett in 2017, when the scrappy industrial city was just beginning a Cinderella story. Suffolk Construction, which Regan also represents, had begun building the $2.6 billion Encore casino resort, which expanded the city’s appeal to other development. In 2020, the city paid Regan Communications $105,000 — originally through a coronavirus relief fund, until the state deemed it ineligible — to create a website to promote the city for development and economic recovery.
Since 2020, records show, Regan Communications has been paid $225,675 by the city and $21,000 by DeMaria’s campaign.
In 2021 and 2022, Regan’s firm was paid $30,000 by the city, mostly for “crisis communications.” At the time, the mayor had just begun to face criticism about the extent of his longevity bonuses; he was suing a local newspaper, the Everett Leader Herald, for defamation; and he was accused of race and sex discrimination by Everett’s school superintendent.
In 2023, when DeMaria was not up for reelection, Regan’s firm was paid about $21,000 from the mayor’s campaign, as well as $40,675 from the city for activities including “continuous research and strategy in an effort to change the image of the City of Everett after all of the negative publicity.” Invoices show Regan also billed the city for meeting with the mayor’s attorney in his defamation lawsuit against the Leader Herald; and boosting readership of a different local newspaper, the Advocate.
Last year, records show, Regan was paid $50,000 by the city of Everett and just $2,500 from the mayor’s campaign. Regan orchestrated the mayor’s media victory lap in December, arranging a press conference to trumpet his lawsuit’s success over the Leader Herald, whose owner and editor agreed to cease publication and pay DeMaria $1.1 million. (Questions have since been raised about whether DeMaria can keep the settlement money, since the lawsuit was funded by campaign contributions and a legal defense fund.)
Last year, Regan Communications initially billed the city about $175,000 and then slashed the price, citing “professional discounts,” invoices reveal. Regan declined to explain why or to answer other questions about his payments from the city of Everett.
Everett City Councilor Robert Van Campen called the Regan payments “the type of situation where there should be some public review of whether or not that is a proper expenditure of public money. I would argue it isn’t. Public funds should be used for a public purpose.”
Councilors are asking the same question about the outside law firms the city hired during the course of the inspector general’s investigation.
White-collar criminal defense lawyer John Pappalardo, who has represented DeMaria in the past, told the City Council at a March 4 special meeting that he had been involved with the investigation since March 2022.
That was news to councilors, who had been unaware of the investigation until the inspector general’s report was issued Feb. 27 and who believed Pappalardo was representing the city on other matters. City Councilors were aware that his firm had been involved in a 2022 investigation into racial discrimination in Everett by the former US Attorney, but that case was closed in 2023.
Councilor Stephanie Smith, who chairs the city’s Ways and Means committee and reviews the city’s payments, said she never saw an invoice from Pappalardo’s firm that indicated he was working with the inspector general.
“Every invoice that I’ve received pertains to another matter for his law firm,” Smith said at a subsequent meeting. “So I’m confused as to who’s paying for him.”
Councilors demanded that past legal invoices be presented at the next meeting, scheduled for Monday.
Invoices obtained by the Globe show that Pappalardo’s firm, Greenberg Traurig, has charged the city a total of $1.3 million for all legal services since the start of the investigation. However, the city solicitor provided councilors copies that had no detailed billings and redacted subject lines, making it impossible to differentiate what portion was billed for the inspector general’s probe.
Invoices for the law firm of attorney Young Paik, who spoke on behalf of the mayor and the chief financial officer at the March 4 council meeting, were slightly more detailed, showing he and a colleague billed the city $33,110 to represent the mayor and $6,620 to represent the CFO so far this year. His firm was also paid $44,517 over the prior two years for unspecified legal services. With details redacted, it was unclear whether this additional work was on their behalf.
Paik also represented two city councilors who were interviewed in the investigation, the city solicitor noted in a memo.
Neither Paik nor Pappalardo returned repeated phone calls from the Globe.
City Council also plans to ask the mayor’s administration to “immediately cease and desist” spending public funds to challenge the inspector general’s findings.
“The mayor’s in an adverse position to the city, and he’s using city funds to fight the best interests of the city,” said City Council President Stephanie Martins. “It’s incredibly disappointing the mayor is draining city resources to fight to maintain that stance.”
John Hilliard of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at Stephanie.Ebbert@globe.com.
