Fire Dept. Embezzler Gets 7 Years

A former accountant who pleaded no contest to embezzling more than $530,000 from the Los Angeles County Fire Department was sentenced Friday to seven years in state prison.

Superior Court Judge Gordon Ringer handed down the maximum sentence to William Paternostro, 41, noting that the former county employee had “quietly and efficiently” embezzled the money “for reasons of gross, premeditated greed and financial gain.”

Said Ringer: “For a period of seven years, bit by bit, he siphoned off this enormous amount of money to buy expensive cars and a house, to give his wife a life style in which he shared.” The judge also indicated that the sentence was based partly on “the trust factor,” noting that Paternostro had betrayed the public’s trust a second time by laundering some of the embezzled funds through a church account. Paternostro, who is a Jehovah’s Witness, was treasurer of the church.

Before the sentencing, Paternostro expressed remorse, asking Ringer to grant probation instead of jail time so he could care for his three children and repay the debt.

“Sir, I know what I did was wrong,” he told the judge. “I really want to be able to make restitution . . . to make right what was wrong.”

In June, 1988, Paternostro was charged with six felony counts of embezzlement. He is believed to have taken between $750,000 and $1 million, beginning perhaps as early as 1980, a county auditors report said. Prosecutors said they could not assemble enough evidence to prove in court that Paternostro was responsible for so large a theft. The exact total and date could not be confirmed because records were destroyed as is customary after a certain period of time.

Some of the money was taken from a revolving petty cash fund used to pay minor expenses incurred by county firefighters on the department’s behalf.

“He would deposit (the checks) into a certain Fire Department account,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Steven E. Weiss. “Then he would withdraw the same amount and transfer it to one of many other accounts, some of which belonged to his church. Then he withdrew the same amount out of there and transferred it into one of his personal accounts.” He also cashed county checks sent to the Fire Department and deposited them directly into his own accounts, Weiss said.

Weiss described the theft as “part of a long deliberate scheme.”

“That was the appropriate sentence given the length of time the thefts went on, four to seven years, and the amount of money that was taken altogether . . . and that this was an ongoing practice,” he said.

Defense attorney Richard McCann argued for probation, calling the embezzlement atypical of Paternostro’s behavior.

“It appears to be an aberration that came from an extreme amount of stress and pressure,” McCann said.