Massachusetts won't prosecute men in hoax bomb scare

By Svea Herbst

BOSTON (Reuters) - Massachusetts will not prosecute two men who planted blinking electronic signs in a "guerrilla" advertising campaign that sparked a terrorism scare in central Boston, the state's attorney general said on Friday.

In return for public apologies and 140 hours of community service, prosecutors dropped criminal charges in a case state Attorney General Martha Coakley said her office would have lost.

The men were charged with placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct. "That charge would not have been successful," Coakley said.

She said there was no evidence Sean Stevens, 28, and Peter Berdovsky, 27, intended to cause panic on January 31 when police mistook the small battery-powered electronic billboards for possible bombs.

At the peak of the alert, authorities mobilized emergency crews, federal agents, bomb squads, hundreds of police and the U.S. Coast Guard as traffic came to a halt. Roads, bridges and part of the Charles River were closed.

Stevens and Berdovsky worked for a New York marketing company hired by Turner Broadcasting System Inc., a unit of Time Warner Inc., which apologized and reimbursed the city and state $2 million.

The billboards, erected in nine other U.S. cities without incident, consisted of blinking lights to promote "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a show on Turner's Cartoon Network.

Berdovsky and Stevens, who infuriated authorities by talking only about 1970s hairstyles at a news conference after their arrest, delivered a somber apology on Friday.

"I deeply regret that this incident caused such anguish and disruption to so many people," Berdovsky said in Charlestown District Court.