Elys Found Guilty of Embezzlement : Trial: Jury says the trustee and his wife stole from the college district. He is convicted on 29 counts, she on three counts.

Ventura County Community College District Trustee James T. (Tom) Ely and his wife were found guilty Tuesday of stealing from the district by padding expense accounts, overestimating mileage, and misusing public funds for expensive clothing and fancy dinners.

Ely, 55, was found guilty on 29 counts of fraud, embezzlement and conspiracy. His wife, Ingrid Ely, 47, was convicted on one count each of conspiracy, grand theft and embezzlement.

Ely could be sentenced to up to six years in prison and his wife to three years for bilking the district out of more than $15,000. The couple are scheduled to be sentenced by Superior Court Judge Lawrence Storch on Aug. 9 after a hearing on their request for probation.

After the verdicts, the Elys hurried to the county probation office as about a dozen reporters and photographers followed close behind. After a photographer ignored Ely’s warning not to take his picture, he lunged at her, grabbed her camera and threw it to the floor. In an attempt to stomp her camera, he wound up stomping her foot with the heel of one of his cowboy boots.

“I’ve got rights too, you know!” he yelled.

Ingrid Ely, wearing dark glasses and hiding behind a pillar in the corner, yelled, “No, Tom, no!”

Tears streamed down her face as she talked about the verdict: “We’re just in shock. We’ve worked so hard (for the district), and this is how we get treated.”

Ely, his face flushed, added: “I never thought this was a possibility.”

Later, he said: “Obviously, they bought the lies and the perjured testimony that the D.A. was able to put on.”

Jury members, relaxing during happy-hour Tuesday at a Ventura bar, said they considered each of the counts carefully. They had deliberated the case since Thursday afternoon.

“As I see it,” jury foreman Christopher Darwin said, “they had no defense. They just had excuses. They didn’t say, ‘I didn’t do it.’ All they could say was, ‘I did it because.’ I had a hard time accepting all those excuses.”

Throughout the trial, the Elys’ attorneys argued that everything the couple did was within district guidelines. Tom Ely testified that he and his wife never conspired to steal and in some cases made mistakes on expense accounts.

Willard P. Wiksell, Ingrid Ely’s attorney, said he plans to ask for a retrial. “There is just an insufficient amount of evidence” to convict, Wiksell said.

He said the couple’s lives have been destroyed.

“This is a bitter blow,” Wiksell said. “No sentence can come close to the hurt they feel now.”

Before the trial started, Ingrid Ely said she was fearful of going out in public. She said she waited until late at night to go to the grocery store for fear of being called “a thief.” At one point, she likened her and her husband’s plight to that of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

Darwin said he felt the Elys “were probably good people. But they started doing this and it worked, so they did it again, and it worked, and the thing snowballed.”

The charges against the couple stemmed from eight trips they made together at district expense between April, 1988, and January, 1990. At one point while in Vancouver, B.C., the Elys spent $290 on sweaters in a gift shop at a ritzy hotel where they were staying at district expense.

In Washington, they charged the district for nine meals in one day and billed it for a play they attended at the Kennedy Center, evidence showed.

And while at a convention in Las Vegas, the couple was reimbursed for air fare and cabs, even though they had driven their car to the event, according to testimony.

Ingrid Ely was accused of accepting more than $3,000 in travel advances from Moorpark College, where she served as the president of the alumni association, even though her expenses had been charged to her husband’s district credit card.

“They were on a roll,” juror Sarah Lamos said.

Another juror, Phil Marifield, said the panel first reached agreement on Count 3, in which Tom Ely was accused of embezzlement of a travel advance given to him for a trip to Las Vegas in 1988.

Marifield said there were many disagreements as the jurors considered the three boxes full of vouchers, receipts and other evidence. “It got rather heated at times,” he said.

Darwin added: “At one point we stopped and said, ‘Hey, this isn’t a lynch mob.’ We stepped back and thought about each charge.

“The overwhelming weight of the evidence is that they were guilty.”

Juror Bernard Milligan described the experience as “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done--mentally and emotionally.”

For at least two minutes, the courtroom was hushed as Judge Storch slowly thumbed through each verdict sheet.

As the court clerk read the litany of guilty verdicts, Ingrid Ely slowly shook her head as her husband took notes.

Several members of the seven-man, five-woman jury said they gave little weight to the Elys’ argument that they were just following district procedures.

“The trustees are the ones charged with setting those procedures,” one juror said, adding that she did not think that district administrators share any blame in the case.

As a central part of the prosecution, Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol J. Nelson had told the jurors that Tom Ely bullied district officials into meeting his demands.

Darwin, a manager himself, criticized district administrators for not standing up to Ely.

“There was an attitude of weak management in the district,” he said.

Nelson said the most important thing to her is that Ely, as a convicted felon, can no longer hold public office.

“That’s important because this is a man who abused the public trust,” Nelson said. “My personal conviction is that he was a thief and that he had been stealing from public education. . . . That’s pretty bad.”

Times staff writers Mack Reed and Carlos V. Lozano contributed to this story.