"South Shore auctioneer gets 4 years in prison for real estate fraud" by Sacha Pfeiffer Globe Staff May 10, 2017
Danny Flynn denies none of it.
He acknowledges swindling unwitting investors, including close friends and Boston College classmates, out of at least $9.5 million in real estate scams, although prosecutors say the true magnitude of his theft is more than $21 million.
He doesn’t dispute using some of the money he stole for personal expenses, such as a $100,000 basement renovation at his Milton home that included a laundry room entertainment system.
“I understand what I did,” said the prominent South Shore auctioneer and real estate professional, reading from a short statement at his sentencing Tuesday in federal court in Boston, “and I’m ashamed to be standing here.”
For his misdeeds, Daniel J. Flynn III, 54, who pleaded guilty to criminal fraud in February, was sentenced to four years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
US District Judge Rya Zobel, who called Flynn’s actions “horrendous,” also barred him from working in real estate after he is freed.
Prior to sentencing, Flynn wrote a letter to Zobel in which he cited numerous factors that led to his criminal activity. Among them: the 2007 collapse of the economy and the resulting burst of the housing bubble; the burden of private school tuition for his five children; “a wife who was accustomed to being a stay-at-home mother”; and the stress of running a business with more than 50 employees.
With his career, marriage, and personal life simultaneously crumbling, “the pressure to keep all the balls in the air felt crushing” and “the weight of these responsibilities was the tipping point that influenced my decisions going forward,” wrote Flynn, who is going through a divorce with his second wife, Margaret Flynn, the mother of his five children.
“Every decision I made was done with the best of intentions for” his children, wrote Flynn, who has been living with a sister in Weymouth since his Milton home was foreclosed on and sold at auction last year. “I regret that I have hurt the people that have trusted me . . . [and] I hope to turn my life around.”
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