A former Maryland mayor is facing seven felony counts after prosecutors say he spent eight years quietly draining the dues accounts of two statewide municipal associations he was trusted to protect.
Bennard Cann, 52, served as Mayor of the Town of Morningside from 2016 until 2025. During much of that same stretch, he also held the title of Treasurer for both the Maryland Mayors’ Association and the Prince George’s County Municipal Association.
On October 2, 2026, Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Tara H. Jackson announced that a grand jury had indicted Cann on seven counts. That includes one theft scheme charge valued at $100,000 or more, three theft scheme charges each between $25,000 and $100,000, and three counts of embezzlement and fraudulent misappropriation, according to the State’s Attorney’s announcement.
A Trust Built on Dues Money
The two associations named in the case exist to support Maryland’s municipal governments and the mayors who lead them. Towns and cities pay dues into shared accounts, and a treasurer is supposed to safeguard that money on everyone’s behalf.
Prosecutors allege Cann did the opposite. According to the indictment, the scheme ran from February 2017 through January 2025 — the exact window Cann served as treasurer of both organizations, per the announcement.
Editorial note: the eight-year span of the alleged scheme matching his exact tenure as treasurer is a pattern worth sitting with, even though it is not itself a criminal charge.
How It Came Apart
Cann didn’t come forward on his own. The case traces back to an audit prompted by the Maryland Municipal League, which uncovered financial irregularities in the association accounts — including unauthorized ATM withdrawals, according to reporting from The Baltimore Banner.
Fellow board members flagged the discrepancies. Cann resigned from the treasurer post in mid-2024, then stepped down from the board entirely in February 2025 once the numbers couldn’t be explained away.
As the financial questions surfaced, Cann also withdrew from his 2025 reelection bid for mayor of Morningside, a town of roughly 1,000 residents near Joint Base Andrews, according to The Baltimore Banner.
Where the Case Stands
Cann was served with a criminal summons and released without being held in custody. His initial court appearance is scheduled for October 30, 2026, per the State’s Attorney’s office.
No trial has happened. No plea has been entered. No conviction has been reached. These are allegations laid out in an indictment, and Cann is entitled to contest every one of them in court.
What’s not in dispute is the structure of the case: a single person held the treasurer’s keys to two statewide associations for eight straight years, and it took an outside audit — not internal disclosure — to surface the problem.
Editorial note: whether that reflects a failure of oversight within the associations themselves, or simply the limits of trust-based bookkeeping in small municipal organizations, is a fair question for readers to weigh on their own.
Read the full, sourced case file and share your own verdict at themoraldecayindex.com. Was this eight years of quiet theft hiding in plain sight — or a system that should have caught it a lot sooner? We want to hear what you think.