Former Hogan chief of staff Roy McGrath found in Tennessee
McGrath had been the subject of a 21-day manhunt launched after he failed to show up to federal court in Baltimore. McGrath, 53, was slated to face wire fraud and embezzlement charges stemming from alleged financial improprieties as head of a Maryland quasi-governmental agency beginning March 13 — a day after his last contact with lawyer Joseph Murtha.
McGrath, who’d had a lifelong interest in politics, rose to become one of Hogan’s must trusted advisers until the Baltimore Sun broke news of a nearly quarter-million-dollar severance he received in 2020 upon leaving the Maryland agency to become Hogan’s top aide. The revelation prompted legislative hearings Hogan once labeled a “witch hunt” in a message to McGrath, but it also led to a break between the two men.
The blame for the disintegration of that relationship lands squarely on Hogan in an e-book titled “Betrayed: The True Story of Roy McGrath,” released under mysterious circumstances on Amazon.com the week after his disappearance. The book featured McGrath as a protagonist who “worked hard,” and “had no record of any wrongdoing in his lifetime.”
A person claiming to be the book’s author, listed online as Ryan Cooper, contacted reporters at The Washington Post saying he’d written the book based on a draft produced by McGrath and “half a dozen or so conversations” with him. He declined to provide The Post with information to verify his identity and said he was not in touch with McGrath — and was not McGrath posing as someone else. “I haven’t heard a peep from him, and to make matters worse, that’s what worries me,” the person said. “He is not the kind of guy to just vanish.”
Before McGrath was found, Murtha said he’d last spoken with his client by telephone the day before trial. They’d planned to meet outside the courtroom at 8:45 the next morning. McGrath had planned to testify in his own defense, Murtha said. “More than anything else, I have a concern for his safety.”
McGrath was indicted in 2021 in connection with allegations including that he’d misled officials to obtain the severance package from the Maryland Environmental Service (MES), where he served as executive director.
McGrath has maintained that Hogan approved it. But the governor, who has cooperated with law enforcement and has not been accused of any crime, has repeatedly denied knowledge of it.
“I know you did nothing wrong. I know it is unfair. I will stand with you,” Hogan wrote to his former aide in an undated message after it was publicly revealed that McGrath received the payment. McGrath has said he resigned from the chief of staff job, which he held for less than three months, because of the governor’s pledge to stand by him.
Michael Ricci, a former spokesman for Hogan, who left office in January, has said the governor sent the message before learning more details about how the severance package was obtained. Prosecutors say McGrath falsified a memo in which he said Hogan approved the severance.
“This is devastating my life,” McGrath told Hogan in a private text message in 2020, according to an image obtained by The Washington Post.
Federal and state authorities allege that McGrath enriched himself by “using his positions of trust” as the executive director of MES and the chief of staff for Hogan to cause MES to pay the severance and other expenses. Prosecutors also say McGrath falsified time sheets, recording that he was at work while he took two vacations, including one to Europe in 2019 with his girlfriend, whom he later married.
Hogan was on the prosecution’s witness list for a trial expected to take several weeks. McGrath also faces state charges of theft, misconduct in office and violating Maryland’s wiretap laws by recording private calls with Hogan and other officials without their permission. A state trial is scheduled for this summer.
McGrath, who was born in Greece but grew up in Maryland, entered politics at 18, when he became a member of the Republican Party and later formed a Young Republicans club in Southern Maryland. McGrath knew Hogan as a young congressional candidate in the early 1990s and served on his campaign committee during Hogan’s unsuccessful bid to unseat Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md). At the time, McGrath was head of the Charles County Republican Central Committee.
The two would meet again in 2014 when McGrath, who was then working as vice president of business development and conventions at the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, volunteered and donated to Hogan’s gubernatorial campaign. Shortly after Hogan won, he tapped McGrath as his deputy chief of staff.
In 2016, Hogan appointed McGrath to take the helm at MES, and in 2020 during the pandemic, the governor asked McGrath, whom he called a “leader with a proven track record … and a passionate commitment to public service,” to take one of the most powerful positions in state government as his chief of staff.
To McGrath’s former colleagues in the statehouse, McGrath was a consummate administrator. He was meticulous, strait-laced, the type of person who always played it by the book. In interviews in 2021 with 20 current and former state government and statehouse officials who worked with McGrath as he came up in Maryland politics, almost all told The Post they were caught off guard by the news of his severance package and excesses in spending. They described him as being a straightforward, formal and, at times, stiff colleague who focused on work and did not seem to have outsize political ambitions.
While under investigation, McGrath moved to Florida and bought a house in a gated community with his then-girlfriend. Federal agents executed a search warrant on the home on March 15.
There was no immediate indication Monday night how long McGrath had been in Tennessee, or what caused him to go there.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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