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Ex-deputies sentenced to jail for charity theft
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FOUND GUILTY: Former Trumbull County deputy sheriffs Anthony Leshnack, left, and Peter Pizzulo wait in common pleas court after entering no-contest pleas to a felony charge of grand theft. In the center is J. Gerald Ingram, who represented Leshnack. A judge found both men guilty Friday. They will be sentenced later.
The men are prohibited from working in law enforcement.
By Ed Runyan
WARREN — Anthony Leshnack, a former sergeant in the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Department, said a gambling problem led him to steal $33,000 from a charitable organization he and a fellow sheriff’s sergeant formed in 2004.
Leshnack was ordered Wednesday to repay the money and spend 90 days in the Geauga County Jail as part of his five-year probation for the thefts.
His co-defendant, Peter Pizzulo, who was lead detective in a high-profile 2006 murder case, was ordered to pay back the $8,500 he stole and spend 30 days in the Geauga County Jail during his five-year probation.
Both men are never allowed to work in law enforcement or security again, ordered to have no further contact with each other and complete 100 hours each of community service.
Both men said they never intended to do anything illegal when they formed the Ohio Narcotics Officers Association.
“I took advice from someone I shouldn’t have,” Pizzulo said, adding that he believes he “did a lot of good for Trumbull County” during his years in law enforcement.
His attorney, Dominic Vitantonio, said Pizzulo, 47, “didn’t have the purse strings over these accounts” and intended to pay back the stolen money but knew it was too late once an investigation began.
An investigation by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation showed that the men used the organization’s money to take trips to Las Vegas as early as 2004 and pay for cell phones, dance lessons and summer camps for other family members, as well as handguns and other items for their personal use.
Leshnack, 41, was chief of the sheriff’s civil division, which serves documents such as subpoenas and criminal paperwork.
Both men resigned in November after Sheriff Thomas Altiere threatened to fire them.
“Neither one of you [is a bad person]. Quite to the contrary, you are both very good people [who] used very poor judgment and most definitely lost your ethical compass to divert these well-intended funds for your personal use,” Judge W. Wyatt McKay of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court told Leshnack and Pizzulo.
Both sergeants worked in Judge McKay’s courtroom — Leshnack as a deputy who escorted prisoners to the courthouse from the Trumbull County Jail and Pizzulo as lead detective in the aggravated-murder trial of Jermaine McKinney in 2006.
“Both defendants have already paid a tremendous price for their ill-gotten gains. You have been summarily dismissed from your chosen career of law enforcement and have relinquished your peace officer certificates,” Judge McKay said.
“You have both been humiliated and suffered from the embarrassment of pleading guilty to a bill of information charging you with grand theft in the very court that processed your charges against others that violated the law.”
Judge McKay said he was sentencing both men to jail for their fourth-degree felony convictions because their conduct was “egregious,” they diverted charitable contributions for their own use, and they used their position as police officers to “gain the trust of those that donated their hard-earned money.”
The men started the organization in 2004 at the urging of Zentel, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based fund-raising company, and Brent Mager of the Pennsylvania Narcotics Officers Association.
Zentel would take 85 percent to 90 percent of the profits, and the narcotics association would use the rest to educate police officers and the public on drug abuse, Leshnack and Pizzulo told investigators from BCI last September.
Among the “questionable” ways Leshnack and Pizzulo spent proceeds from the organization were a trip to Fort Lauderdale to meet with Zentel in which $4,000 of narcotics association’s money was used, BCI said.
There also were monthly charges to an American Express card, trips to Las Vegas in 2004 and 2005, and charges for cell phones used by Leshnack’s wife and stepson and by Pizzulo, his daughter and his father.
Judge McKay allowed Pizzulo to report to the Trumbull County Jail on Oct. 16 to be transported to the Geauga County Jail and Leshnack to report Nov. 7.
Dave Joyce, Geauga County prosecutor, who served as special prosecutor in the case, said Zentel raised about $1 million since 2004, most of it in Ohio.
Very little of the money went to its intended purpose, Joyce said. Leshnack and Pizzulo forfeited about $20,000 of the organization’s proceeds to the trust organization division of the Ohio Attorney General’s office earlier.
That is also where the restitution money will go as Leshnack and Pizzulo pay it back in monthly installments, Judge McKay said.
If Leshnack and Pizzulo fail to abide by the conditions of their probation, each could go to prison for 17 months.
runyan@vindy.com