Federal prosecutors ask BLM fraudster Monica Cannon-Grant to forfeit more than $220,000

Flint McColgan, Boston Herald on Jan 23, 2026

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BOSTON — The U.S. attorney’s office is requesting that Black Lives Matter charity fraudster Monica Cannon-Grant fork over more than $220,000.

Cannon-Grant, along with her now-deceased husband Clark Grant, were charged with 27 fraud-related offenses in a federal indictment in March 2023. She entered a plea agreement last September in which she pleaded guilty to 18 of those offenses.

“In the written plea agreement, the Defendant stated that she understood that the Court will, upon acceptance of the Defendant’s guilty plea, enter an order of forfeiture as part of the Defendant’s sentence,” prosecutors wrote in the formal request dated Thursday, “and that the order of forfeiture may include assets directly traceable to the Defendant’s offenses ...”

The forfeiture was to be $250,000 based on the plea agreement but also that she could contest that total. Following her guilty plea and a pre-sentence investigation, the government has finalized the total request at $227,063.

In the forfeiture request, prosecutors say this breaks down into $181,037 donated to Cannon-Grant’s charity Violence in Boston and diverted for her own personal use, $33,426 in fraudulently obtained Pandemic Unemployment Assistance benefits, and $12,600 in fraudulently obtained rental assistance funds.

Federal prosecutors first charged Cannon-Grant and her husband Clark Grant in March 2022 with 18 fraud-related counts regarding the misuse of funds donated to the couple’s charity, Violence in Boston.

Clark Grant has since died and the charges against him have been dropped.

Federal prosecutors charged Cannon-Grant with what they deemed three distinct conspiracies: The first is the misuse of donations to the couple’s charity Violence in Boston (VIB) for personal use, the second is the misuse of public funds — including the PUA program — and the third is alleged fraud related to the mortgage on the couple’s Taunton home.

“From 2017 to 2021, Cannon-Grant and Clark Grant, through VIB fundraising, solicited and received over a million dollars in donations and grants from individuals, charitable institutions, and other entities,” the superseding indictment stated.

In all, there have been five attorneys either retained or appointed to represent Cannon-Grant in the massive case, which prosecutors described as including 2.2 terabytes of virtual document evidence and which former defense attorney Keith Halpern described as “substantially more discovery … than in the entire MS-13 case,” in which there were numerous defendants.

Cannon-Grant, arrested in March 2022, was first represented by private attorney Robert Goldstein, then by appointed attorney Halpern starting in September 2022, and then went private again with Christopher Malcolm starting in February of 2023.

After Malcolm was suspended from practicing law in Massachusetts a year ago, Cannon-Grant was appointed two new attorneys, George Vien and Emma Notis-McConarty.

Notis-McConarty on Wednesday requested time to draft a defense sentencing memo for her client. Much of that memo will be redacted in the public version, as Notis-McConarty says it it “and the supporting exhibits contain highly sensitive and personal information, including medical information related to minors, that is not appropriate for public disclosure.”

VIB shut down in July 2022.

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