The former chief operating officer (COO) of a COVID-19 testing kit distributor was sentenced to more than six years in federal prison for embezzling more than $1.85 million in company funds.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois, U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey sentenced Dennis W. Haggerty Jr. of Burr Ridge, IL, to six years and five months in federal prison on Thursday. Haggerty pleaded guilty earlier this year to wire fraud.
U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors said that while Haggerty was on pretrial and presentencing release for an earlier fraud scheme, he issued fraudulent payments from the Willowbrook, IL-based company's bank account for services and goods supposedly provided by him or the company's primary vendor, a manufacturer from whom the company purchased COVID-19 testing kits.
However, the services and goods were not provided; the funds that Haggerty claimed were being sent to the test kit manufacturer were instead wired to a bank account that Haggerty controlled. He spent the funds in the account for his personal benefit, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
In addition, Haggerty issued checks drawn from the company's bank account to himself, concealing his fraud by making false and misleading statements on the checks themselves and to the company's president. In total, Haggerty embezzled more than $1.85 million from the company in 2021 and 2022, prosecutors said.
In the previous case, Haggerty pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering charges for swindling hospitals that had paid him millions of dollars for N95 respirator masks, which were in short supply during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Haggerty was sentenced in December 2022 to 57 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $1.9 million in restitution for this previous case. He will serve the two sentences consecutively.
