The former CEO of a New Hampshire addiction rehab center has been federally charged with directing a harassment campaign against journalists and their families in response to negative coverage.
A Federal grand jury indicted Eric Spofford, 40, of Salem, N.H., and Miami, Fla., on several interstate stalking-related charges.
In March 2022, New Hampshire Public Radio published an article detailing allegations of sexual misconduct and abusive leadership against Spofford, who was a co-founder and former chief executive officer of the for-profit drug and alcohol treatment company Granite Recovery Centers.
Spofford himself isn’t accused of participating in the harassment campaign against the reporter and her editor — as well as their family members — in retaliation for the report, but instead tapping his close friend Eric Labarge to do the work for him.
In turn, Labarge enlisted Tucker Cockerline, Keenan Saniatan and Michael Waselchuck to carry out the campaign. Federal prosecutors say that Spofford paid Labarge $20,000 in cash as well as the victims’ addresses and specific ways he wanted them harassed.
The first reported instances happened in April of 2022, with Cockerline throwing a brick through the reporter’s former house in Hanover, N.H., on April 24, 2022. He also spraypainted a four-letter derogatory word beginning with “C” in large, red letters on the front door of the home.
That same day, Saniatan did the same to the editor’s home in Concord, N.H., and the reporter’s parent’s home in Hampstead, N.H.
The campaign continued the next month first when Cockerline spraypainted that same C-word in large red letters on one of the garage doors of the reporter’s parent’s home and then hours later when Waselchuck targeted the reporter’s new address in Melrose. There, he threw a brick through the window so that she would come out and see the message spray-painted in red on the side of her home: “This is just the beginning.”
The Middlesex District Attorney’s office issued a press release following that attack and released a SimpliSafe home surveillance recording of the frightening incident of the man throwing the brick. As authorities continued to investigate, they found this was an interstate campaign and federal authorities took the case over.
Labarge, Cockerline, Saniatan and Waselchuck already went through the legal system for their dirty work starting in 2023, when they were charged, and 2024, when they were sentenced, as the Herald has covered.
Cockerline was the first to be sentenced when he was slammed with two years and three months in federal prison for his role in August 2024. Waselchuck was sentenced next that September with a year and nine months in prison. Labarge was sentenced that November to three years and 10 months and the following month Saniatan was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
Courtesy / U.S. District Court
A man later identified as Keenan Saniatan is seen in surveillance video around the time he vandalized the Hampstead, New Hampshire, home of the parents of an NHPR journalist. (Courtesy / U.S. District Court)
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