Frankfort woman gets 1 year in prison for embezzlement

Prosecutor says she used funds for minority students as ‘piggy bank’

A Frankfort woman was sentenced to a year in federal prison after pleading guilty to embezzling more than $650,000 from a national student organization working to improve minority representation in the pharmacy industry, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago.

Carmita Coleman, 50, of the 19900 block of Edinburgh Lane, was also ordered Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly to pay more than $490,000 in restitution, but Coleman and her husband in February filed for bankruptcy.

Coleman had been indicted in November 2020 and pleaded guilty in January to a single count of wire fraud, court documents show.

During the fraud scheme, which lasted from 2011 to 2016, Coleman worked as executive director for the student organization and was responsible for managing its finances. The organization was funded through student and chapter dues, convention registration fees and donations from corporate sponsors, according to the indictment.

In the government’s sentencing recommendation, filed with Kennelly last month, prosecutors said that Coleman “used the organization’s funds as her own piggy bank,” tapping its accounts to pay for vacations to destinations including the Bahamas and the Caribbean.

During 2011 and 2012, according to the document, Coleman wrote nearly $70,000 in checks from the organization’s accounts payable to herself and to her husband, and in subsequent years “she made an astounding number of cash withdrawals.”

Trips to a bank to cash checks or to make ATM withdrawals averaged about 200 transactions annually during 2013, 2014 and 2015, according to the filing.

While the money she oversaw was intended to help provide scholarships, defray student expenses and pay for community outreach, Coleman tapped funds to enrich herself and her family, according to the filing.

The organization was identified in the indictment only as “Organization A,” but it was the Student National Pharmaceutical Association, which sued Coleman in federal court in March 2021 in an effort to recoup allegedly pilfered funds, according to court documents.

The Louisiana-based group was founded in 1972 and its members are pharmacy students who are concerned about the profession of pharmacy, health care issues and the poor minority representation in these areas, according to its website.

The organization’s lawsuit is on hold pending the outcome of the bankruptcy filing by Coleman and her husband in federal bankruptcy court in Chicago, a document in the lawsuit indicates.

To conceal the theft from the student pharmacy, submitting false annual financial reports showing the organization had received “substantially less revenue” than had actually been taken in and recording lower fund balances than the actual cash that was on hand, according to a filing in Coleman’s criminal case.

In February 2016, another person was to have been installed as the organization’s executive director after a separate entity overseeing the pharmacy group called into question Coleman’s depiction of the student organization’s finances, according to the government’s sentencing recommendation document.

Coleman “feigned outrage at any suggestion of impropriety and insisted she could delineate the organization’s spending ‘to the penny,’ ” assistant U.S. Attorney L. Heidi Manschreck said in the filing.

Even after being ousted as the organization’s executive director, Coleman refused to turn over control of its bank accounts to continue to wring money from the group, the prosecutor wrote.

The government had asked for a sentence at the low end of the sentencing guidelines, which called for a prison term of between 41 and 51 months followed by a period of probation.

Prosecutors noted Coleman had, in an effort to make restitution, been making payments to the student pharmacy group, but those payments have since stopped.

Coleman and her husband, in their bankruptcy filing, said their monthly income is nearly $5,300 and that they rent the Frankfort house where they are living.

The judge overseeing the bankruptcy case, in the most recent filing in the matter, said the case is in danger of being dismissed after Coleman and her husband, so far, failing to submit fees for filing the case, amounting to about $400. A status hearing is scheduled for June.

At the time of the embezzlement from the student pharmacy group, Coleman was a professor and interim dean at Chicago State University’s college of pharmacy, but no funds were embezzled from the university, according to court documents.