Westerly woman gets nine months for theft to cover her casino losses

Like the others before her, Beverly Howard took money from her employer with the intent of paying it back.

While working as the director of dining services for East Lyme schools, she was losing big on the slot machines at Foxwoods Resort Casino, and she needed cash. She created false deposit logs to hide the daily theft of funds from school kitchens over a three-year period.

And like the others, the amount of money she stole grew to an amount she could never repay - $335,000. At Howard's sentencing Wednesday in New London Superior Court, Judge Susan B. Handy described it as "a snowball going down the hill, and eventually it turned into an avalanche."

The 53-year-old Westerly resident kissed her family members goodbye, apologized for her crimes, and began a nine-month prison sentence. She is a convicted felon, having pleaded guilty to first-degree larceny.

"Unfortunately, I have had a dozen Ms. Howards in front of me over, I would say, the past three or four years," Handy said.

They are people who have lived "stellar lives" until they became addicted to gambling and began stealing from their employers to cover their losses. The judge said Howard appeared to be "a good mother, a good citizen and, until recently, a good employee."

"You are a good person," the judge said. "Unfortunately, you did an extraordinarily bad thing. You violated the trust of people who had employed you for 16 years."

Handy acknowledged Howard does not have the means to repay Chartwells Dining Services but ordered her to make "full restitution" should she come into a windfall. The judge also ordered Howard, who will begin five years of probation upon her release from prison, to pay $100 a month to the company for five years "as a token gesture of good faith."

Under a plea agreement, Howard faced up to 16 months in prison. Her attorneys, Carmine J. Giuliano and Salvatore Ritacco, had the right to argue for a lesser sentence.

Prosecutor Lawrence J. Tytla, who has handled many of the embezzlement cases, said their impact "goes out like ripples from a stone being thrown in a pond." Other employees at Chartwells lost their jobs as a result of Howard's thefts, and the crime will impact her family and friends, perhaps for the rest of their lives, he said.

Howard lost $381,406 at Foxwoods between 2006 and 2009, Tytla said, noting that she would have actually gambled with "a multiple of that amount" since the slot machines pay out a percentage of the cash that is fed to them.

Ritacco, a longtime friend of Howard, said she called him last year to tell him of the thefts and ask his advice. Ritacco, who felt he was too close to Howard to handle the case alone, contacted Giuliano, who advised her to report the crime to her employer immediately.

"She wanted this over," Giuliano said. "She wanted to take responsibility."

Howard was fired in September 2009. She said she hopes some of the information she provided about the thefts helps her former employer to prevent further incidents. She said what she did was "absolutely wrong, and I have no excuse for it."

"You do think in your mind you'll put it back," she said. "You call it borrowing, you can call it whatever you want, but I stole."

She said she is most sorry for hurting her immediate supervisors, who trusted her.

At the end of the hearing, Howard hugged her attorneys goodbye, waved to her family and walked toward the courthouse lockup to begin her sentence.

k.florin@theday.com