By Karen Berkowitz
The Pioneer Press Newspapers
HIGHWOOD, Ill. — Defense attorneys for former Highwood fire Deputy Chief Ronald Pieri called an expert Thursday to testify that the criminal charges brought by the Lake County state’s attorney’s office in 2011 were built on faulty assumptions, conjecture and calculation errors.
“There is no economic basis behind any of the prosecutor’s allegations that Mr. Pieri defrauded Highwood,” economist Benjamin Wilner said emphatically during the fourth day of Pieri’s trial.
Charged with official misconduct, theft and false entry, Pieri is accused of defrauding Highwood taxpayers of more than $58,000 by falsifying time records and claiming compensation for hours not worked between January 2006 and December 2010.
Wilner, a consultant with accounting firm Grant Thornton, said the prosecution had jumped to the conclusion that “it must be fraud” if there were discrepancies between the hours claimed on Pieri’s time cards and the shift records found in the Highwood Fire Department’s Firehouse computer software.
The prosecution’s case, he testified, did not take into account other explanations for the disparities, such as trading shifts with other firefighters or time spent on administrative duties. Wilner said Pieri wouldn’t have logged in to the Firehouse system if he was performing administrative duties because he wasn’t available to go out on fire calls.
Other witnesses had testified that Pieri was expected to perform his administrative duties during his regular “red shift.”
“The prosecution is assuming that Mr. Pieri should work for free,” Wilner said.
Wilner said city of Highwood emails showed disagreement and confusion over how Pieri’s employment with the department was to be treated. In July 2007, Pieri became an exempt employee ineligible for overtime pay, but he still worked as a firefighter.
During cross-examination, Lake County Assistant State’s Attorney Scott Turk tried to unravel Wilner’s statement that shift trades accounted for some of the discrepancies. Turk presented the witness with a seven-page report showing there had been none.
Under questioning by Turk, Wilner said he’d discounted the reliability of five years of Firehouse records after finding an entry error showing that the fire chief at the time had worked 1,015 hours in one day.
Defense lawyer Julie Trevarthen asked Wilner, “Why was it appropriate for you to discount all of the Firehouse data based on that 1,015 hours worked in one day?
Wilner replied that he considered it a “material error” that called into question the reliability of the entire database.
“Is it possible that this data error could have been caused by fat fingers?” Turk asked, picking up on the term Wilner had used to describe inputting errors.
Turk offered up a diagram of a numeric keypad showing the close proximity of the 1, 0 and 5.
“When I see numbers change this dramatically, almost 10 years (after the records were created), that calls into question the reliability of the data,” Wilner said during earlier questioning on the witness stand. “If you build a house on a shaky foundation, it is going to fall down. It is like garbage in, garbage out.”
Earlier in the day, Pieri’s defense team asked Lake County Circuit Court Judge Victoria Rossetti to find in favor of her client, saying the state had not come close to proving its case that Pieri had defrauded Highwood. Rossetti denied the request.
The trial is set to resume Friday.
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