‘Is that the look you want to give?’ Suffolk Sheriff Steven Tompkins relies heavily on employees for campaign donations

Current and former employees at the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, as well as their spouses, have accounted for one of every two donations Sheriff Steve Tompkins has taken in recent years.John Tlumacki/Globe Staff

In his 12-plus years as Suffolk County sheriff, Steven W. Tompkins has wielded the weight of his office to get his opponent’s campaign signs removed, land his niece a job, and, prosecutors now allege, extort a cannabis company.

The department has played another role, too: Its workers are integral to stocking Tompkins’s campaign account.

Since starting his second full term in January 2023, Tompkins has relied heavily on donations from those who work for him, and then used huge chunks of what he raised to repay himself nearly $45,000 in loans and cover a bill from a law firm that represented him in a past ethics probe. Outside of monthly payments to a campaign consultant, those accounted for the largest campaign expenses he reported.

Current and former employees at the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, as well as their family members, have accounted for one of every two donations Tompkins has taken in that time frame, according to a Globe analysis of campaign finance data. All told, they’ve contributed nearly $54,000 in that time, the Globe found — making up 51 percent of the cash Tompkins raised from donors.

Tompkins pulled in the donations during a relatively quiet time for campaigning, after his 2022 reelection and years before his seat is back on the ballot in 2028.

Elected officials can legally take contributions from those they oversee. But doing so — and in such large amounts — creates the perception that employees are expected to give and, at its core, employee fund-raising can appear inherently coercive, experts say.

Tompkins’s haul of employee donations also goes far beyond what most other Massachusetts sheriffs collected from their subordinates, and continues a practice that investigators two decades ago said should be banned at the Suffolk County department when it sat under a different cloud of controversy.

Tompkins did not respond to a request for comment, nor did aides in the sheriff’s department. A woman who answered the phone at Tompkins’s office said he was not in on Friday, the deadline for when he was supposed to report to federal court in Boston. He has not said whether he plans to step down from his seat, though he has resigned from the board of trustees at Roxbury Community College.

Federal prosecutors charged Tompkins this month with pressuring a cannabis company to sell him stock before it went public. Prosecutors said he then demanded a refund on his $50,000 as his campaign costs mounted ahead of his 2022 reelection fight.

The cannabis executive identified as “Individual A” in the indictment is longtime Boston lobbyist and political consultant Frank Perullo, now cofounder and president of Ascend Wellness Holdings, the Globe reported.

Tompkins was arrested on Aug. 8 in Florida and is slated to be arraigned in federal court in Boston on Wednesday.

In Massachusetts, cannabis companies applying for annual licenses need to show how their business will have a “positive impact.” For Ascend, the answer ran through Tompkins, with whom they partnered on a program to train and hire people recently released from jail.

This partnership gave Tompkins leverage, according to prosecutors, who said that without his cooperation on the hiring program, company officials feared they would not have their license to operate a shop in downtown Boston renewed.

Tompkins ultimately did get his $50,000 back, which prosecutors said was paid out in five installments, the first of which — for $12,500 — he received in May 2022.

Days later, state records show, Tompkins lent his campaign $20,000, one in a series of loans eventually totaling $67,500 that he gave his campaign over a roughly 14-month span around the election.

Tompkins held off a Democratic primary challenger in the fall of 2022 before running unopposed for a six-year term that November. For all of 2022, he reported raising $197,216, about 30 percent of which was money he personally loaned his campaign. His campaign reported spending $204,434 in that year.

Tompkins has personally recouped most of those loans, paying himself back $44,500 from his campaign account since May 2023. Collectively, the repayments are, by far, his biggest campaign expense since 2023.

He’s also reported making monthly payments to MLM Strategies, totaling nearly $28,000, for consulting costs. The single largest expense was a $15,000 payment he made to the law firm CEK Boston in April 2023, weeks after he admitted to violating state law by creating a no-bid job for his niece. Tompkins previously disclosed paying CEK Boston for legal services for a “state ethics commission case.”

Donations from his employees helped provide the cash for those costs along the way. Tompkins took contributions from members of his executive team, correction officers, and executive assistants at the department, records show, some for as large as the maximum $1,000 and others for as little as $20. All told, he’s raised nearly $106,000 since January 2023, excluding money he loaned his campaign, with employees accounting for a little more than half of that.

Christine Cole, a Boston-based public safety consultant, said that while such contributions aren’t illegal, “is it the kind of look you want to give?”

“When the boss is willing to accept those campaign dollars, it suggests a blind loyalty,” she said.

David Hopkins, a Boston College political science professor, said the high share of employee donations likely reflects a combination of factors, though one possibility is that there’s an expectation to give to their boss’s campaign.

“Which of course would be ethically dubious, one might say,” Hopkins said.

Union officials at AFSCME Local 419, which represents correction officers at the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, did not respond to a request for comment about workers’ donations to Tompkins. Jonathan Corey, president of Local 419 said in a previous statement after Tompkins was indicted that union officials “are committed to withholding assumptions or definitive positions until all relevant details have been thoroughly reviewed.”

Tompkins is far from the only sheriff to lean on donations from his staff. In 2002, a special commission that investigated one of Tompkins’s predecessors said the practice should be banned after it found then-Suffolk County sheriff Richard J. Rouse relied on a similarly high share of employee donations for his campaign, among a litany of other problems it found under his administration.

Tompkins himself faced, and disputed, similar accusations in 2016, when two former employees told the television station Boston 25 that there was a “pay to play” culture inside the agency.

Public employees, including elected officials, are barred from directly soliciting campaign donations from those they oversee. But there’s no prohibition on taking them.

Most of the state’s other 13 elected sheriffs took a smattering of donations from those who identified themselves as department employees; some did not accept any donations from employees.

The only sheriff to rely on a greater share of donations from those under him than Tompkins was Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph D. McDonald, the Globe found.

Since January 2023, McDonald has taken more than $145,000 in donations from those who work, or recently worked, under him, accounting for 64 percent of what the four-term Republican raised in that time.

McDonald said in an interview that he does not solicit donations from his employees, and, given many are unionized, “no matter who the sheriff is, their jobs are secure.”

“The stake they have in it is that they like the way that the agency is run and they support me,” McDonald said. “I would prefer not to take donations from anyone if I can avoid it. . . . There are rules that preclude solicitation of state employees, and I agree with that. The fact that a good number of my employees — union and nonunion — have chosen to support me, I’m very grateful for that."

Democrats and other elected officials, including Governor Maura Healey, have so far declined to call for Tompkins to resign in wake of his federal charges.

McDonald said Friday that he likes Tompkins personally, but would not directly say whether Tompkins should step down. But he did say that “simply having charges like this” would cause what he called “leadership issues” for anyone in elected office.

“If I was in a situation where I felt my ability to lead the agency and serve the community was compromised, I would leave,” he said.

Andrew Ryan of the Globe staff contributed to this report.