"Drug charges for former legislator Stephen Doran" by Matt Rocheleau | Globe Correspondent, May 23, 2013
Former state representative Stephen W. Doran was held Wednesday on $10,000 bail after he was charged with drug trafficking in allegedly receiving a package containing more than 400 grams of methamphetamine at a Jamaica Plain school where he worked as a tutor, authorities said.
The package was mailed to Doran, 57, at Match Charter Public Middle School on Forest Hills Street, said the Suffolk district attorney’s office.
Around 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, State Police pulled over the vehicle Doran was driving just after he left the school.
Authorities had received information that Doran might receive a package with a large amount of methamphetamine, said Jake Wark, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office.
Inside the package, police found two baggies containing 480 grams of a crystalline substance believed to be methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant, authorities said.
Authorities said they found another 38 grams of the same substance, about $10,000 in cash, a digital scale, and other drug-distribution paraphernalia inside his home on Dix Street in Dorchester. Prosecutors estimated the total street value of the drugs at $50,000.
Michael Larsson, chief operating officer of Match Charter, said Doran will no longer work at the school. Larsson said the school had performed a criminal background check on Doran, as it does with all tutors, and Doran had passed.
Between 1980 and 1994, Doran, a Democrat, served seven terms representing the 15th Middlesex House District, which includes Lexington.
In perhaps his highest-profile role in the Legislature, Doran was chairman of the House Ethics Committee when it voted in 1991 to relieve Representative Kevin Fitzgerald of his post as majority whip. The State Ethics Commission had found that Fitzgerald violated conflict-of-interest laws by accepting a bequest of about $200,000 from Mary Guzelian, a sometimes homeless woman.
At his arraignment Wednesday in West Roxbury District Court, Doran was charged with trafficking methamphetamine and with violating the state’s drug laws in a school zone. A plea of not guilty was automatically entered on Doran’s behalf, Wark said. The judge ordered Doran held on $10,000 cash bail, and he is due back in court June 24. If convicted, Doran could be sentenced to eight to 20 years in prison.
Doran’s attorneys, Vincent A. Murray Jr. and Joseph Daniel Eisenstadt, did not respond to messages left at their offices Wednesday.
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