John Donovan began teaching electrical engineering and business at MIT in 1966. “People are first enchanted by John, but then they encounter another, darker side.” (Donovan, through his lawyer, declined to comment for this article a representative of the Donovan siblings did not respond to requests for comment.) “His enthusiasm was infectious, and he made you feel like you were doing something really exciting and important,” Joe Alsop, who studied under Donovan and later founded a business with him before they parted ways, told me. John’s rise began in 1966, when he started teaching electrical engineering and business at MIT. It was a pedigree that would, alongside his entrepreneurial spirit, propel him into Boston’s upper class. But it was John’s academic precociousness that would elevate him out of poverty and into the ranks of Yale University, where he received a master’s degree both in science and engineering, as well as a PhD. John Donovan grew up poor, an Irish kid on the gritty west side of Lynn, Massachusetts, who lived in a tenement apartment on the third floor and fended off bullies in the streets. It was an act of betrayal so deep and depraved that its long-running narrative would climax, in May of this year, with the 80-year-old elder statesman of this once respected family sitting in a prison cell. One of Massachusetts’s wealthiest families, the Donovans turned out to be less like the Kennedy ménage, on whom John tried to model his brood, and rather more like the fictional Roys of Succession, with a cunning business mogul engaging in a sordid feud with his children to keep all the power and riches that he had, ostensibly, earned for them all along. In that moment, John Donovan appeared to be the victim of a family spat that had become violent, but the truth-which has been laid bare in thousands of pages of court documents spanning nearly two decades-was quite the opposite.Įnsnarled in an acrimonious legal battle that has roiled Massachusetts high society, Donovan had set out to frame his eldest son for his attempted assassination. He claimed that his eldest son, James, had used his high-profile job at Goldman Sachs to launder $180 million-and now had sent two Russian assassins to kill him. All John Donovan knew at that moment was that he had a story to tell the dispatcher on the other end of the line. MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images // Getty ImagesĪnd yet Donovan, dialing 911 and placing his cellphone to his ear, didn’t know the depths to which his family name would sink in the coming years, the heights of bitterness to which the rivalry with his children would rise, or the lengths he would go to wrest control of the money that hung over his family like a cloud. John Donovan photographed at his Cambridge office in 2004. It was here, on this fateful night, in a dark parking garage outside Donovan’s Cambridge office, that the Donovan name would morph from a revered cornerstone of the Massachusetts aristocracy into an infamous badge, a tangle of letters best forgotten. It seemed that his entire life had been leading up to this moment: a Bay State legacy bolstered by a professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a prodigious streak of entrepreneurship, and, more recently, the slow crumbling of his family’s dynastic ascent through Yankee upper-crust society.Īs he sat in the front seat of his minivan-the vehicle hit by gunfire, blood pouring out of his abdomen-Donovan was in the midst of a vicious legal battle with his five grown children over the family estate, which included tens of millions of dollars’ worth of property in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Bermuda even more millions of dollars in offshore accounts and the blood-born trust between a father and his children that was supposed to hold the family name together. It was December 16, 2005, and John had a lot on his mind. John Donovan gazed down at his belly: a bullet hole, blood.
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