Prosecutors say she cashed checks to pay for vacations, shopping trips
By Susana Enriquez
Newsday (New York)
Copyright 2007 Newsday, Inc.
MONTAUK, N.Y. — Terri Gaines admitted she took tens of thousands of dollars for years as the secretary/treasurer of the Montauk Fire District because her family was in financial trouble, court records show.
“I do know what I did was wrong but I felt a desperate need to help my children,” she said in a written statement to investigators.
Gaines, 55, of East Hampton, was one of eight arrested yesterday on charges of stealing from their districts.
Prosecutors accused Gaines of taking more than half a million dollars from the Montauk district and spending it on vacations and lingerie. She pleaded not guilty to second-degree grand larceny in East Hampton Town Justice Court and was released on $10,000 bail. She declined to comment.
Gaines worked for the district for 14 years. One of her duties was to pay its bills, which gave her access to checking accounts and credit cards.
In 1999, she enrolled her youngest son in a private school in Vermont, she said in her statement to police in July. When she started to fall behind on the tuition, which she said exceeded $14,000 a year, she started writing district checks to herself, according to the statement.
For the next five years, Gaines kept depositing checks into her own accounts so her husband and children wouldn’t know where the money came from, she told investigators.
“I did this so I could help my other three children who had fallen on hard times financially,” she wrote.
Gaines admitted taking about $50,000 over five years and “tried to do extra work” to reimburse the district. “I never used any of this money to benefit myself,” she said.
Prosecutors presented a different story.
From February 1999 to January 2006, Gaines wrote checks and ran up district credit cards totaling $509,960, said Suffolk prosecutor Tisha Burrows.
“She became treasurer in 1999 and that’s when her party began,” District Attorney Thomas Spota said yesterday.
Gaines spent the money at Victoria’s Secret, Gurney’s Inn in Montauk and on trips to Las Vegas, Italy and casinos in Connecticut, Burrows said.
Gaines’ attorney, James McElhone, of Miller Place, said he would dispute the alleged expenses. “I am confident we will find that many of these checks were reimbursements for using her [credit] card for other people,” McElhone said.
Montauk’s board of fire commissioners opted not to re-appoint Gaines in 2006 because of irregularities in its accounts and expenditures, district chairman John Salmon said in a statement. The district hired a certified public accountant to conduct an audit and referred the findings to the district attorney’s office, the statement said.
Montauk, which serves 3,849 residents, had a $1.66 million budget in 2005.
“These poor people are getting ripped off by this woman,” Spota said.