Embezzlement is at “epidemic proportions,” and prosecutors agree that gambling is behind much of it.

Muskogee County District Attorney Larry Moore made the statement Friday, noting district attorneys across the state have seen a noticeable increase in embezzlement and fraud.

“The consensus is — it’s the gambling factor,” he said. “We’re seeing people (defendants) in all walks of life who had not previously done any crimes.”

The last six to eight years, there’s been a “crescendo of embezzlements,” said U.S. Attorney Sheldon Sperling.

“Almost every embezzlement is driven by vice — which, for at least the last five years, has been gambling,” Sperling said.

He said most embezzlements over half a million dollars are almost always rooted in gambling, with the exception of former Marble City School Superintendent Larry Couch.

Couch entered federal prison at El Reno last week to serve five years for embezzling approximately $1 million from the school.

“Couch invested his embezzled funds in real estate,” Sheldon said.

That meant the money could be recovered and paid back to the school, he said.

The other motivation in large embezzlements seems to be high living or supporting family members, he said.

Rhonda Harris, in prison for embezzling from a Wagoner bank, bought horses, houses and property for herself and related families.

A former McIntosh County assessor never broke the law until she got caught up in the gambling habit, officials said. And a longtime bank employee in Cherokee County admitted gambling became her vice.

Jackie L. Borovetz of Muskogee, charged with 11 counts of embezzlement from the Muskogee County District Court Clerk’s Office, where she was a deputy clerk, suffered a gambling habit, prosecutors told a judge.

Borovetz is charged with diverting almost $600,000 from November 2007 through September 2008 into bank accounts she controlled. Yet, she didn’t have money to make bail at the end of September.

A judge ordered that if she should be able to post her $200,000 bond, a condition of her bail would be that she step into no gambling establishment. Borovetz remains in jail.

Her case is expected to go before the federal grand jury convening in Muskogee on Wednesday.

Those engaged in smaller embezzlements often are people who have a gambling habit or who fell on hard times, police say.

Muskogee Police Investigator Mark Ridley just sent an investigative report to prosecutors in which a McDonald’s employee claimed she was the victim of an armed robbery. She said she was robbed when she took the business’s bank deposit to First National Bank in Muskogee just before midnight recently.

The 25-year-old woman has since confessed the robbery was staged so she could spend part of the money, Ridley said Friday.

“She fell on hard times recently — got demoted, said she was fixing to lose her apartment, and she had children ... she wrote out a confession,” he said.

Now she has no job, he said.

Police Sgt. Bryan Farmer said the last embezzlement he investigated was linked to a gambling habit.

He remembers it was more than a year ago. A pizza place manager claimed he was the victim of an armed robbery.

“Guilt got to him, I guess — he gave a confession and told everything he did,” Farmer said.

Within the past two months, embezzlements from two Muskogee attorneys were reported, both for more than $100,000. Prosecutors are studying investigative reports on those cases. Motives for the embezzlements are not known.

“Bad habits (gambling) and hard times —Oh yeah,” are the two reasons Muskogee Police Investigator Lonnie Bemo gives for the embezzlements he’s investigated.

One clerk at a Kum & Go kept going back to the store and getting more money and returning to the casino where he hoped he’d win the money back, Bemo recalled.

Being short of money and bills being piled up are also given as reasons for embezzlements, said Muskogee Police Investigator Greg Martin.

And although prisons are overcrowded, there needs to be punishment for embezzlement, Moore and Sperling said.

“I think in any type of embezzlement case where the victim, public or private, is out money, if restitution is all that people are afraid of, that’s not a very big deterrent,” Moore said.

He said he would like to see incarceration and then a suspended sentence that is long enough for the embezzler to make restitution.



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