Bookkeeper who embezzled nearly $1M faces prison time
A Windsor bookkeeper who embezzled $958,000 from her employers could spend the next three years in a federal penitentiary. Nada Khalaf, 59, wrote cheques to herself while working at MOS Enterprises and Kapital Produce in Leamington between 2012 and 2015. She defrauded those sister companies of $273,000. After she was charged, Khalaf ’s former employer, Service Mold and Aerospace, started looking carefully into its books and discovered she had taken $685,000 between 2008 and 2012 during her tenure there. Court this week heard Khalaf was a regular at Caesars Windsor and had racked up nearly $1 million in losses. Unlike other embezzlers who steal for greed, her motivation was a gambling addiction, her lawyer, Robert DiPietro said Tuesday.
DiPietro asked the court to consider house arrest for Khalaf. Court heard Monday that Khalaf takes care of her husband, who has Stage 4 prostate cancer. Their 24-year-old son, who struggled with mental illness, committed suicide 1½ months ago. Khalaf pleaded guilty earlier this year to all three charges she faced — two counts of fraud and one count of passing forged documents.
“When they came to her, she readily admitted what she’d done,” DiPietro said.
The Crown has said, because of the amount of money taken and over such a length of time, Khalaf must do real jail time. Assistant Crown attorney Scott Kerwin asked for a sentence of 2½ to three years.
Khalaf, who has no prior criminal record, will be sentenced at a date yet to be set. Embezzlement cases locally have included small and large frauds, some resulting in jail sentences and others, house arrest. Laura McGowan was sentenced in 2014 to 90 days in jail to be served on weekends for stealing nearly $63,000 from the practice of a family doctor where she worked. She previously worked at Windsor Disposal services where she embezzled $19,000 and at a Dollar Tree where she was caught on camera taking money from the till. For her earlier crimes, she received sentences that did not result in a criminal record. Also in 2014, gambling addict Alphonse Schleinhauf was sentenced to three months on house arrest for selling a backhoe, loader and scissor lift that belonged to his employer, Hertz Equipment Rental. He paid the company back — $86,000 — before his sentencing date.
In 2012, bookkeeper Anna DiBartolomeo received a suspended sentence and one year of probation for bilking her employers out of $119,000. DiBartolomeo, whose husband was the former mayor of Amherstburg, confessed before anyone had even noticed the missing money.
In 2011, Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital finance worker Baljit Dhaliwal was sentenced to nine months in jail for diverting 182 cheques totalling more than $430,000 into her own accounts. The court found no extenuating circumstances to explain Dhaliwal’s conduct, concluding she acted out of pure greed. In 2010, Lucy Kovachik was sentenced to two years less a day on house arrest for bilking her employer out of nearly $103,000. She had worked for the small, family-owned real estate company for 17 years. Dorothy Gyori was sentenced in 2008 to nine months in jail after she was caught forging signatures on cheques she made out to herself. The office manager for a home construction company owned by her brother-in-law, she took more than $208,000.
Khalaf takes care of her husband, who has Stage 4 prostate cancer. Their 24-year-old son ... committed suicide 1 1/2 months ago.