Tony Francis, the former CEO of the Edgar P. Benjamin Healthcare Center, will serve six months in prison for mishandling federal funds directed to the Mission Hill nursing home.

His sentence, which will include three years of supervised release and payment of more than $43,600 in restitution to the nursing home, was handed down by Judge Indira Talwani in a May 20 hearing at the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts.

At the hearing, supporters of the nursing home and Francis and his attorneys gave dueling accounts of Francis and his time leading the facility. Francis and his team described him as a well-educated man with a long career in health care, who started work at a young age to support his family. His misapplication of the funds, they said, came from a work environment where he lacked the public relations team and support.

Meanwhile, staff and supporters of the Edgar Benjamin described allegations of a broader range of financial mismanagement and wrongdoing, which largely fell outside of the focus of the criminal charges, while asking Talwani to impose the maximum sentence. Francis’ leadership at the facility, they said, put residents at risk, left staff without pay and has pushed the nursing home into a sale with an out-of-state operator.

In remarks to the court, Francis apologized for his misuse of the funds.

“I accept full responsibility for my actions,” he said. “I deeply regret my lapses in judgment.”

Last week’s sentencing comes after Francis pleaded guilty in a Feb. 25 hearing to charges of intentionally misappropriating federal relief funds aimed to support the facility during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a plea agreement signed on Feb. 5, Francis also admitted to using a $159,900 loan awarded to the facility through the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, a federal program aimed at supporting small businesses and nonprofits to respond after disasters, to attempt to purchase a defunct nursing home in Connecticut, a move he described as a bid to increase the Edgar Benjamin’s leverage as it worked with suppliers. He later used funds from the nursing home to make payments on a personal loan and apologized for pursuing the deal without getting official approval from the center’s board.

Talwani rejected that claim, pointing out that the signed plea agreement described the deal to purchase the Connecticut facility as one he was entering himself, not on behalf of the Edgar Benjamin. “It may be that to go buy a nursing home is a good investment strategy, but it wasn’t the Benjamin’s investment strategy,” she said.

In court, Francis said he had talked with members of the board, including then-chair Royal Bolling Jr., about the potential purchase. Bolling, in an interview with the Banner, said he remembered Francis floating the idea of the purchase of the Connecticut facility in his official capacity, but that he was “99% sure” they happened before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the funds were given to the Edgar Benjamin. Ultimately, Bolling said that Francis was supposed to get more specifics and the conversation died.

The Mission Hill facility’s financial troubles go back several years. It’s why, in 2024, Francis, who was then also the administrator, announced plans to close the nursing home amid “insurmountable financial challenges.”

The closure plan and allegations of financial mismanagement on the part of Francis spurred community pushback, which ultimately led to a court-appointed receivership that pushed Francis out of his position.

At the hearing, Talwani acknowledged that the facility had a history of financial challenges and the precarity of nursing homes but said she wasn’t sentencing Francis “on allegedly running the Benjamin into the ground.” She emphasized the outsized impact of “swindling” money from a nonprofit nursing home like the Edgar Benjamin.

The criminal charges were part of a broader array of allegations of financial wrongdoing levied at Francis in a civil lawsuit filed in March 2025 by the Edgar Benjamin through its court-appointed receiver, Joseph Feaster. That suit alleged that Francis stole and embezzled more than $3 million from the facility over his decade in its top role.

Francis has long denied the allegations in the civil suit, a position he restated at the sentencing hearing.

Talwani made clear that her decision on Francis’ sentence was based only on the two charges of misapplication of federal funds.

“I think we need to be very clear here,” Talwani said before announcing Francis’ sentence. “There was a lot of talk about other things. This is not about the other things.”

Even so, the civil suit often seemed not far from Talwani’s mind. Throughout the hearing, and again when announcing Francis’ sentence, she reminded all the parties in the courtroom — some of whom wanted the judge to impose the maximum sentence of 10 years — that because the sentencing only applied to the charges in the plea deal, anything else in the civil suit, or separate possible criminal charges, were still on the table.

One concern for Talwani came following an emergency motion Francis filed in March in Suffolk Superior Court as part of the civil proceedings. In that motion, Francis asked the court to remove a lien placed on his home in Needham Heights as a method to ensure he would be able to pay damages if he lost the suit. In his emergency motion, he pointed to the plea agreement and suggested that because of the criminal charges and the $43,600 in restitution, the $1.5 million real estate attachment on his home was excessive.

The Suffolk Superior Court rejected Francis’ motion and said that neither the federal charges nor his guilty plea impact his potential civil liability.

Talwani was careful to draw the same line and said that she didn’t want Francis to “twist” the federal court’s decision in a bid to avoid responsibility in the civil suit.

“What I’m doing here is not sentence for any other alleged misconduct nor is it a discounting of any other alleged misconduct,” Talwani said.

The court allowed Francis to self-report to prison for his sentence in mid-July.

Sale of Edgar Benjamin still pending

Parallel to the criminal charges faced by Francis, the ongoing receivership that has tangled the facility for more than two years had its day in court. At a status conference on May 13 at the Suffolk County Superior Courthouse, attorneys representing the receivership as well as staff from the attorney general’s office met to discuss the facility’s pending sale to Allaire Health Services, a for-profit longterm-care operator.

First announced in July 2025, the closure date for the sale has been a moving target since. At the status conference, the receivership asked for an extension through June 13, by which time they said they expect to finalize the details.

At issue is a “cash flow waterfall” document tracking the proceeds from the pending sale, which Timothy Fraser, an attorney for the receivership, said the teams were working daily to nail down and was “very close to final.”

The sale of the property and its operations to Allaire is expected to bring $6.5 million. Much of those funds will be used to pay debts currently owed by the facility.

As a nonprofit organization, under state law, any remaining funds from the sale must be directed to other charitable efforts to help populations like those served by the Edgar Benjamin. At the status conference, Fraser said the dispersal of those residual funds will be handled by a charitable receivership, ending a debate that has lingered for months.

Throughout the sale process, Superior Court Justice Christopher Belezos had encouraged the receivership to seek an alternative to another receivership, but at the status conference ultimately endorsed a new receivership, cautioning that it should not be as long-lived as the facility’s current receivership.

“I can tell you, the charitable receivership won’t last 26 months,” he said.

That receivership will be launched through a petition by the attorney general’s office in Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court following the closure of the sale. The question of who will lead that receivership remains open, but the receivership said it would encourage the court to appoint Feaster for the role, given his experience working with the facility and all the “tentacles that this receivership has.”

“To have someone step in now, they’d have to relearn the whole entire process that we’ve been working on since April 2024,” Fraser said. “It just doesn’t make any sense to do that at this point.”