Kotredes jury deliberates into early morning

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BANGOR – After a day of listening to testimony from former Millinocket Town Manager James Kotredes, Penobscot County jurors hearing his trial began their deliberations Thursday evening and continued early Friday morning.

The jury went out at 6:30 p.m. Thursday and by 1:45 a.m. Friday still had not rendered a verdict. At midnight, Justice Allan Hunter sent a note to the jurors asking if they wanted to go home for the night, but the jury sent a return message opting to continue its deliberations.

Kotredes, 45, of Bangor is charged with Class B theft and faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Prosecutors claim he stole upward of $16,000 from the town in the way of personal charges on the town’s credit card while he worked there from 1995 to 1997. He left Millinocket at that time and became city manager in Brewer. He was there less than two years when he pleaded guilty to stealing $11,000 from a youth hockey fund in Millinocket. He resigned his position in Brewer.

On Thursday, Kotredes told jurors he regularly used the town credit card to pay for gas because he drove his own car on town business and never submitted an expense report. He said he kept track of how much the town owed him for his mileage in a now-missing green ledger, and that when he used the town’s credit card for his own personal use he offset the expenditure against the balance the town owed him.

Testimony indicated Kotredes was paid about $50,000 a year in his Millinocket position and he $190 a month as a travel stipend. He also was to receive 20 cents a mile whenever he traveled more than 20 miles outside the town.

Kotredes testified Thursday that he did submit mileage reimbursement slips in 1994 but found that it eventually became a futile exercise because many times he never received the checks. He said it was then he began to keep track of his own expenses in a ledger and to charge gasoline for his vehicle on the town credit card.

Cash advances on the credit card, often made on weekends and totaling more than $5,000 over the two-year period in question, was money owed to him by the town, Kotredes testified. One $500 cash advance was used for a major repair on his car, which he claimed he charged to the town because his car broke down while he was using it on town business.

He said he started keeping the ledger based on the advice of an auditor at the former Bangor accounting firm of Brooks and Carter.

He testified that he left the ledger in his office when he left Millinocket’s employ, and that he since has asked for it back several times but that the town has never returned it to him. The town employees who testified during the trial did not recall ever seeing the green ledger.

Arthur Greif, Kotredes’ attorney, stressed through his questioning that Kotredes never put in a voucher for mileage reimbursement. With Kotredes on the stand, the two estimated that Kotredes drove 2,700 miles per month on town business. That, Greif argued, translated into about 72,000 miles during the 27-month period mentioned in the indictment, or $14,000 in mileage reimbursement for which Kotredes never submitted a voucher.

A weekend-night stay at a Bangor hotel was because of a municipal convention in the city, snowmobile helmets were purchased because of Kotredes’ need to occasionally check up on town-maintained snowmobile trails and a $114.77 bill at a Myrtle Beach, S.C., hotel was for souvenirs and gifts for town employees and others who did business with the town, he testified. He said he felt it was important to help improve town workers’ morale because there had been layoffs and everyone was overworked.

Another Myrtle Beach charge of $345 at the Holiday Inn was not supposed to have been on the card originally, he said. He said he had reserved the room on the card but had planned to pay for it with cash. He said when he was checking out there was an argument at the front desk between management and unhappy customers and that he waited in line for 25 minutes to try to pay for his room. Finally, because he was going to be late for a golf tee time, he simply signed the slip charging it to the town card and subtracted the amount from the running tally he had in his ledger of money the town owed him.

He said he did not recall the town’s bookkeeper asking him several times for receipts to coincide with purchases he had made on the town card, though Doris Lowell testified to that last week.

Penobscot County District Attorney R. Christopher Almy noted that while Kotredes paid $1,430 of a town credit-card bill to reimburse the town for Christmas presents for his wife in 1995, he did not have the money in his own checking account to pay for those items until February, according to Kotredes’ personal financial records.

Then, just before the jury began deliberations, Almy noted in his closing arguments that from January 1996 to March 1996, when Kotredes made a personal payment on the town credit card, Kotredes continued to take cash advances on the town card.

“Why, if his ledger showed that he owed the town that [$1,430] was he taking cash advances? His balance must have been zero if he owed the town that money. If not, he would have just written against the balance, right? But between the time he made the purchase on the card and made the payment, he took out several cash advances,” Almy stated.

“This is a breach of trust,” the prosecutor said. “He misused his power.”

Almy noted that 11 credit-card statements were missing from the town records for the period when Kotredes was the town manager, including the one that contained the Myrtle Beach charges. The prosecution obtained copies from the bank that held the card.

“That’s very disconcerting, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.

But Greif accused the prosecution of shaping its witnesses’ testimony and said jurors should rely on the documents that show that Millinocket councilors approved payment to the credit card each month.

He further accused the prosecutor of withholding the check for $1,430 from the jury until Greif discovered that the town actually had paid only half of the credit-card bill owed.

“Oh yes. There has been a breach of the public trust here, but not by Jim [Kotredes],” Greif said during closing arguments.

Greif accused some in the town of having an agenda against Kotredes, who had cut the town’s expenses. Some people lost their jobs or were demoted and he scaled back significantly the amount of money the town paid to its attorney. It was that lawyer, Dean Beaupain, who later conducted part of the audit that the state claims showed Kotredes was taking money from the town.

He accused bookkeeper Lowell, who Greif claims was demoted during Kotredes’ tenure, as having a vendetta against Kotredes, saying she was in the courtroom to “sharpen her ax and wield it.”

As bookkeeper, Lowell was a primary state witness.

Beaupain also received about $19,000 for his role in that audit, Greif told jurors.

He said the credit-card statements were in the records when Kotredes left because there had been routine annual audits that never revealed any missing credit-card statements. He suggested to the jury that after Kotredes pleaded guilty to the theft charge in 1998, his enemies sought vengeance and that perhaps it was then the credit-card statements were misplaced by “accident or by design” by those enemies.

Almy challenged the jury to judge the credibility of each witness carefully, praising Lowell for her bravery in standing up to Kotredes.

As for Kotredes, Almy said, “You’re entitled to find that he’s a fraud.”