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Five former leaders of Pennsylvania’s corrections officers’ union have been charged with theft after police say they stole union funds by using credit cards for personal expenses and conspiring to conceal their actions.
The men were charged in a Harrisburg court last month following a financial crimes investigation led by the Pennsylvania State Police, which investigators said was prompted by the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association’s own audit of questionable credit card purchases.
The fraudulent transactions made between 2015 and 2019 include dozens of iTunes charges, thousands of dollars spent at wineries and vineyards, and a string of expenses at luxury venues in Las Vegas, according to an affidavit filed by state police.
Investigators said the five former union leaders used union credit cards — issued to them for official business purposes only — to make personal expenditures, submitted intentionally vague expense reports, and attempted to block other union leaders and members from inquiring further.
The five men charged are former union President Jason Bloom, for unlawful transactions totaling $8,286.48; former President Roy Pinto for $2,030.50; former Executive Vice President Tim Walsh for $5,834.58; former Western Region Vice President Larry Blackwell for $2,488.02; and former Eastern Region Vice President Robert Storm for $4,422.13.
The Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association is the bargaining unit which represents guards at Pennsylvania’s state prisons. Bloom has been suspended without pay from his state prison job, and the other four men are no longer employed by the Commonwealth, according to the a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.
None of the men charged are involved with the union any longer, according to the current leadership.
“The executive board initiated its own forensic audit of PSCOA office finances and turned all findings over to the state police,” current union President John Eckenrode said in an emailed statement. “We continue to work with the state police and district attorney’s office to ensure justice is served. Due to the ongoing legal process, we won’t have any further comment.”
According to the affidavit, the matter was investigated by a state police organized crime detective and a Fayette County financial crimes expert, who initiated their work in April of 2021 after it was learned that the union had hired a firm to do forensic accounting in response to complaints that that “previous union members were using their business credit cards for personal purchases and financial gain.”
The accounting firm issued its final report to the union in August of 2022, which was also shared with the police investigators who then performed additional inquiries and interviews, according to the affidavit.
The union’s former treasurer told investigators that “on more than one occasion he questioned credit card expenses and related that he was told by [Bloom] that his job was to just pay the bills,” according to the investigators’ affidavit.
The treasurer also “related that the defendants would not submit the receipts for their transactions and put a very broad description within their voucher system,” according to the affidavit, and continued to do so even after the an auditing firm told them in 2016 that their reporting was not up to IRS standards.
This was done “to further personal transactions and financial gain” despite the fact that the defendants’ actions were “placing the PSCOA under significant risk of having their tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS,” police investigators wrote in the affidavit.
The investigation also indicated that the defendants “conspired with each other as the crimes were being conducted,” the affidavit states, typically traveling as a group at the time the unlawful expenses were incurred. They attempted to hide these activities by combining illegal purchases with legitimate business costs “such that the personal nature of the unlawful expenses would not be detected,” investigators wrote.
The former treasurer was quoted at an October 2018 board meeting as saying that the PSCOA had spent over $400,000 on Visa charges and that “half of the stuff on there, I don’t even know what it is,” according to the affidavit.
Over 150 transactions are listed in the affidavit, the most recent of which are dozens of iTunes charges made by Bloom, ranging from $19.07 to $127.19 apiece. Bloom, along with Walsh, Blackwell, and Storm, also made large purchases — sometimes over a thousand dollars per transaction — at vineyards and wine stores in 2018, according to the list provided to the court.
Pinto and Walsh also made similarly large purchases using PSCOA funds at Dick’s Sporting Goods stores in Florida in 2015 and 2016, according to the affidavit.
Further, the listing in the affidavit also features a string of purchases by Walsh on his PSCOA credit card in Las Vegas, including a $1,085.72 expense at Caesar’s Hotel & Casino and two transactions at Caesar’s Place totaling $1,168.12.
All five men are facing similar sets of charges, including felony counts, relating to theft by deception and the misuse of institutional funds. All of the men are scheduled for a preliminary hearing before Magisterial District Judge Barbara Pianka on Aug. 23.
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