The nutty professor
First the Professor, as technology savant John Donovan insists on being called, said it was his oldest son who had him gunned down outside MIT last December. Now it's the district attorney who's gunning for him.
Somebody is always picking on the poor Professor. Donovan's enablers -- and there is always another as long as he can pay the bills -- are out hawking the story that Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley is pushing the Donovan investigation because she is cozy with Mintz Levin, the Boston law firm that represents Donovan's children against good old dad. They note that the week before Donovan was indicted on a charge of filing a false police report -- staging his own shooting -- Mintz Levin held a fund-raiser for Coakley, who is running for attorney general, that raised $13,000.
``A surprising coincidence," Donovan's lawyer, Barry Klickstein, calls it.
One more cock-and-bull story is more like it. Not surprising at all if you know the Professor.
I have been writing about Donovan, a fascinating character, for a decade. And in one of our earliest conversations he told me a story about how the bullies used to lay in wait for him and his brother as they walked home from school in Lynn. ``If you look out at my life, it's been kids coming out to get me," Donovan told me.
Donovan, master storyteller, made a handsome living wowing top executives who flocked to his seminars to hear his vision of the future of technology. Donovan's problem now, however, is the cops aren't buying his vision of what happened in that MIT parking lot last December when he was wounded by what he says were two masked men. If he insists, he will get his day in court. This is one misdemeanor case Court TV might want to cover. I'd buy a seat to hear Donovan explain the video tape that the police say shows him repositioning a security camera away from the parking lot. Or the ``to-do list" of the crime that police say he scrawled on a menu from the Algonquin Club. Klickstein says Donovan will be vindicated. Donovan declined to comment.
Coakley says suggestions the Mintz fund-raiser influenced the investigation are ``ludicrous." What she won't say, but others will, is that it was a lawyer from a firm that represents Donovan in a long-running fight with his kids -- Turner Smith of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost in New York -- who called Coakley soon after the shooting and asked her to look into the case. Coakley did, and Donovan was indicted. (By the way, Smith and a partner are both Coakley contributors.) The law firm didn't return my call.
The grand jury is hardly the first to find Donovan challenged by the truth. In two decisions, in October and in March, an arbitrator sorting out the Donovan family mess came to the same conclusion. Donovan's testimony, wrote arbitrator John S. Martin Jr., ``is unworthy of belief and was false in all material respects."
The arbitration was in response to a lawsuit by Cambridge Executive Enterprises, Donovan's company, against his children, claiming they had defamed the Professor and damaged the company. The children countered that the suit had really been brought by the father and should be subject to arbitration as previously agreed. Donovan denied he controlled the company or the lawsuit.
The arbitrator ruled otherwise. His ruling that Donovan failed to repay a $4.8 million loan to his son, John Jr. Martin, a retired federal judge, was direct: Donovan ``deliberately lied."
John Donovan was once somebody. His resume ran for five jam-packed pages: teacher, author, entrepreneur, brilliant real estate investor. His fortune grew to $180 million, according to court papers. Today he is a public curiosity, his story more of interest to the National Enquirer than MIT's Technology Review.
How did this happen, Professor? Was it the bullies? Or are your wounds, in fact, self-inflicted?
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902. 
