THE BAD PROFESSOR

John Donovan taught at MIT advised U.S. presidents, and was the patriarch of a Kennedyesque clan until a bizarre series of self-inflected wounds landed him behind bars.

-  IAN FRISCH

John Donovan gazed down at his belly: a bullet hole, blood. It was December 16, 2005, and John had a lot on his mind. 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.

As 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 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.

And 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. All John Donovan knew at that moment was that he had a story to tell the dispatcher on the other end of the line. 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.