Kevin Dorgan ran Everett’s technology department for ten years. On Friday, September 11, he was arrested at his home in Everett and arraigned in Malden District Court on one count of larceny over $1,200. Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan and Police Chief Paul Strong announced the charge the following Monday. Their statement says Dorgan, 58, used the city’s Amazon business account to buy more than $98,000 worth of goods that had nothing to do with his job, and that more than 700 of those items were shipped to his house.
He pleaded not guilty, the Boston Globe reported, citing court records. A judge released him on personal recognizance with two conditions: stay away from Everett City Hall, and have no contact with any current or former city employee. A pretrial conference was set for October 22. No outcome of that date has been reported by the district attorney or any outlet, and the next step in the case comes from the Malden District Court clerk’s office.
What the city found after it fired him
The case started with an eviction of sorts. The city fired Dorgan in March. When employees went through his office and other spaces he had used, according to the district attorney’s statement, they found the rooms “filled with packages, several items were stacked in each office, and a large quantity of the packages were unopened.”
Someone then pulled the Amazon records. A first look at Dorgan’s purchases turned up orders that “appeared to be for personal use only such as electric razors, bedding and clothing items,” the statement says. Investigators widened the review to every order placed on the city account during his tenure. Between 2020 and 2026, among thousands of items bought on the account, they counted more than 700 items valued at more than $98,000 that were delivered to his home address. More than 400 items were “identified as having no link to his employment” and went both to his home and to his office at City Hall. Video games, a Blu-ray DVD player and Apple AirPods are on the list.
The week before the arrest, investigators served a search warrant on a storage unit Dorgan rented. Inside, the statement says, were “hundreds of items matching those shown in the purchase records from the City of Everett Amazon account.”
The investigation is described as active and ongoing, run by the district attorney’s office and Everett police. The statement does not say how the purchases went unnoticed for six years or who approved the invoices. Dorgan’s salary was $114,751 in the city’s fiscal 2026 budget, the Globe reported. He joined the IT department about 2012 and was promoted to director in 2016; before City Hall he worked for himself as a programmer and web designer.
What the council heard in May
The council had already been told that the department he left behind was a mess, though nobody used his name in connection with a crime. On May 20, at the budget hearing for the technology department, interim IT director Neil Ellis introduced himself as the person brought in “to have overview of the department while Mr. Dorgan left.” Ellis, who had worked with Councilor Peter Pietrantonio in Melrose, said he had started a physical inventory and a software inventory and a review of cybersecurity.
“When I came in, I was kind of taken aback by the state of IT in Everett,” Ellis said. “It’s, you know, a good 15 to 20 years. And that includes hardware, software, procedures, how we basically address everything. There’s no policies. There’s no procedure.” The city had suffered three major outages, phones and servers among them, in his first two months. Much of the software running on city servers and desktops was expired or outdated, he said, so the city would have to start paying for licenses it was already using.
Ellis also described how the money had moved. Invoices had not been charged to the budget lines they belonged to. “It seems in the past that things were taken out of all sorts of different places,” he said. “Money was spent at the very end of the year on equipment, seems maybe just to fill out the budget.” Budget Director Margaret Micherda told the council the department was carrying roughly half a million dollars in old encumbrances that the city auditor was still cleaning up.
Council President Stephanie Smith, who chairs the budget review, thanked Ellis and added: “I’ve been saying this for five years now that the IT budget is not, in any way, shape, or form that you could actually read it or understand what was going into it.” EMN’s story on that hearing ran the next morning.
Who runs the department now
On August 3 the council confirmed Norilyz Valentin as director of information technology for a three-year term, on a motion from Councilor Holly Garcia with Valentin in the audience. The city’s website now lists her as chief information officer. Five weeks later, over Labor Day weekend, the city’s network was hit by the cyberattack that closed City Hall for most of September. Mayor Robert Van Campen has given the council only limited detail on that incident, citing the investigation, and neither the city nor the district attorney has connected it to the Dorgan case. The DA’s statement, issued eight days after the attack was discovered, does not mention it.
A charge is an accusation. Dorgan is presumed innocent unless and until he is convicted. Everett MA News will update this story when the court or the district attorney reports what happened on October 22. The district attorney’s statement was also carried in full by the Everett Advocate; Boston.com and Boston 25 reported the arraignment.
