Ex-Property Manager Who Embezzled Gets 3-Year Term

After pleading guilty to embezzling more than $340,000 from two South County homeowners associations, a former property manager has been sentenced to three years in prison, law enforcement officials said Monday.

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Jim Fitzgerald, 45, also was ordered last week by Orange County Superior Court Judge Walter Posey to make restitution of $400,000, including legal and investigative costs, Deputy Dist Atty. Joe D’Agostino said.

D’Agostino said the restitution order amounts to a civil judgment on behalf of Aliso Viejo-based Seabreeze Management Co., where Fitzgerald worked as vice president when he embezzled.

Investigators discovered that Fitzgerald, 45, spent much of the money at Captain Cream, a topless club in a Lake Forest shopping center. When he was arrested last summer, he contended he had no money. He was represented in court by a public defender.

At the request of public defender John Zitny, the judge gave Fitzgerald the option of serving his sentence at a restitution center in Los Angeles if he can find employment within 90 days.

The restitution center, Zitny said, is a kind of halfway house designed for white-color criminals where they must spend nights and weekends while they work outside jobs. A third of their income is earmarked to repay their victims for monetary damages.

Before Fitzgerald pleaded guilty in court Wednesday, he tearfully apologized.

“He was upset he hurt people he really liked,” Zitny said.

Lisa Dale, owner of Seabreeze, said, “There is some measure of satisfaction in seeing him feel remorseful for his actions, although it falls far short of ever remedying the damage caused by his crime.”

Dale said she was “very disappointed” that Fitzgerald did not get a longer sentence.

According to the prosecution, since November, 1991, Fitzgerald had funneled money out of the bank accounts of the Camden Court Homeowners Assn., representing 188 townhomes, and the Niguel Ranch Homeowners Assn., which maintains slopes and greenbelts for that 1,200-home community.

He was accused of forging the names of association directors on bank signature cards on file at a bank where the groups kept their reserve accounts, then transferring money from those accounts to another bank, where he withdrew funds for his personal use.

But no one, including the auditor in his annual review, discovered anything was amiss until May 10, when Dale went to a local bank to apply for a car loan and noticed a $4,000 cashier’s check on the desk of the business accounts officer that was made out to the Camden Court Homeowners Assn.

Dale said Monday that she has repaid the homeowners associations, which were her clients, for their losses.