Federally indicted Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins is trying to get evidence tossed from his pot extortion case.
Tompkins, 67, who was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of extortion earlier this year, has also pushed for his charges to get dropped as he denies any wrongdoing.
The sheriff is accused of using his official position to bully executives at a Boston cannabis company regarding his pre-initial public offering investment of $50,000, according to the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office.
Following the IPO, his investment value ballooned to $140,000 but then fell below his initial investment value, according to the indictment. The feds say he used his position to demand his full initial investment back to “help pay for campaign and personal expenses.”
Tompkins has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer filed a motion to dismiss. Then this week, his attorney filed a “motion to suppress” evidence.
His lawyer Martin Weinberg is calling on the court to “suppress all evidence seized pursuant to the search warrants for Mr. Tompkins’s Comcast and Google email accounts.”
“… The affidavits submitted in support of the search warrants fail to establish probable cause to believe that Mr. Tompkins engaged in quid pro quo bribery, i.e., a promise to exchange his official acts for payment,” Weinberg wrote.
“Rather, the alleged facts suggest that the equity interest in Company A received by Mr. Tompkins and subsequent refund of his investment were at most gratuities, beyond the scope of the federal bribery statutes,” he added.
The search warrants called for Comcast and Google to produce all documents from Tompkins’ email accounts without any date restrictions, according to his lawyer.
“… There is no plausible argument that the government had probable cause to obtain the full contents of Mr. Tompkins’s email accounts,” Weinberg added.
“Because the warrants issued based, in part, on recklessly omitted information, and because no reasonable officer could have believed in the validity of a warrant that purported to authorize the search and seizure of Mr. Tompkins’s entire email accounts, the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule does not apply,” he wrote. “The remedy for such general warrants is total, not partial, suppression.”
The feds this week also responded to Tompkins’ motion to dismiss — in which he denied any wrongdoing and argued that even if the allegations were true, they’re insufficient to support the charges.
The U.S. Attorney prosecutors reiterated in their opposition to his dismissal motion that Tompkins engaged in extortion schemes.
“After being initially rebuffed in his requests to buy Company A stock before the IPO, Tompkins increased his pressure on Individual A to sell him Company A stock by reminding Individual A that Tompkins should get Company A stock because Tompkins had helped Company A in its Boston licensing efforts and that Company A would continue to need Tompkins’s help for license renewals,” the feds wrote.
“After increased pressure from Tompkins on Individual A, which caused Individual A to believe and fear that Tompkins would use his official position as Sheriff to jeopardize Company A’s partnership with the SCSD, and thus imperil both (i) the dispensary license for Company A’s cannabis store in Boston, and (ii) the timing of Company A’s IPO, Individual A relented and agreed to Tompkins’s demands for a pre-IPO interest in Company A stock,” the prosecutors added.
Tompkins’ arguments for dismissal are without merit, and the court should deny the motion to dismiss, the feds argued.
“The defendant first argues that the Indictment should be dismissed because it fails to allege quid pro quo bribery. The defendant is wrong,” the prosecutors wrote. “The Indictment clearly and prominently alleges a quid pro quo.”
Tompkins is on a “medical leave,” his lawyer said shortly after Gov. Maura Healey announced the sheriff had agreed to “step away” from his post in late August.
Tompkins earned $215,430 last year, according to state Comptroller records, and has been paid $154,269 so far this year.
