Grift upon grift upon grift.
The federal case against activist Monica Cannon-Grant, arrested on Tuesday morning, reveals a defendant who clearly wasn’t satisfied with just one self-enrichment scam. If the government is to be believed, Cannon-Grant and her husband, Clark Grant, were bold multitaskers when it came to lining their own pockets.
Among the allegations: They didn’t just defraud donors to Cannon-Grant’s charity, Violence in Boston, using donations for personal use. They also used that nonprofit to deceive a mortgage company, which gave them a loan to buy a $400,000 house. On top of all that, they lied to collect $100,000 in pandemic unemployment benefits they weren’t entitled to.
A footnote in the indictment reveals a couple for whom deception appears to have been as natural, and almost as frequent, as breathing: The government alleges they had an employee falsify a letter to assist them in receiving housing benefits for which they did not qualify, and that they also had the associate fake two negative COVID-19 test result letters so that the couple could attend a Celtics game.
If you weren’t watching closely, Cannon-Grant’s arrest looks like a remarkable fall from grace for an activist who led tens of thousands to a Franklin Park rally to protest the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and who threw herself into feeding those struggling…
