Forgery suspects anything but clever
Missteps made for easy arrests
Regina Baker, from the looks of the federal charges brought against her and her alleged ring of check forgers, failed a number of lessons in how to pull off the perfect caper:
For instance:
• When you have a legitimate-looking forgery of a payroll check, make it out to someone other than yourself. Prosecutors say Baker and her seven co-defendants made out the checks in their own names.
• When the bank teller asks you for identification as you try to cash a forged payroll check, don’t show your own New York State driver’s license to prove it’s you.
• Don’t cash forged checks in one bank after another on the same afternoon, five of them in two hours on Aug. 13 in Baker’s case, according to the filed charges.
• And finally, be aware that banks these days have surveillance cameras, ones that are directly aimed at those cashing checks.
Baker and each of her confederates all had their photos taken at least once by bank cameras as they showed their identification while cashing the phony checks, prosecutors say. Some of the check cashers even gave their thumb prints for further identification.
In the annals of white-collar crime, this wasn’t exactly a tough one to crack.
Roberta Kane, an agent with the U. S. Secret Service, the agency that investigates bank fraud, laid out the case in a 10-page affidavit filed Oct. 28.
“Using the documents provided by the bank,” she wrote, “it is possible to determine, to the minute, when each check was cashed.”
And then she proceeded to do exactly that. She submitted five pages of charts showing the date, time, bank branch, payee, check number, ID used, whether a bank photo was taken and the amount of the check.
In all, Kane reported, 52 counterfeit checks made to look like payroll checks from the Niagara Lutheran Home and Rehabilitation Center were cashed.
Home employees confirmed to federal authorities that none of the checks was actually issued by Niagara Lutheran, which is on Hager Street near Canisius College.
The checks, all for amounts just under $500, were cashed at various M&T Bank branches, according to the charges.
The total amount for the three-day spree, prosectors said, was $24,661.59.
Neither the Secret Service nor the U. S. attorney’s office yet knows who created the checks. All they know is the checks were made out to each of the eight defendants and cashed from Aug. 13 to 15.
Charged with a scheme to defraud a financial institution were Baker, 49, of Fargo Ave.; Dawn Campbell, 47, of 137 Wiecker St., who served a state prison term in 1993 on a robbery charge; and Campbell’s roommate, Carmen Wells, 45, who also served a state term for robbery.
Viola Woods, 45, whose address was unavailable, also was charged. Woods, a former health aide, was sentenced to a year in prison in 2002 for assaulting a 96-year-old patient in Cheektowaga’s Manor Oak Skilled Nursing Facility. Prosecutors said she used a washcloth to smear feces on the man’s face because he was unruly while she cleaned his room.
Woods got a year on that charge and another year for mugging a young woman on Chippewa Street.
Another of those charged, Adrienne S. Edrington, 23, was arrested last year by sheriff’s deputies after she was accused of calling in a bomb threat to the Erie County Holding Center. Deputies said she had earlier been ejected while visiting her boyfriend after a drug dog detected marijuana on her clothing. She was arrested in May on a shoplifting charge.
Rounding out those arrested with Baker were Keith Walker, 34, who was sentenced to six months in jail for a 2003 assault, and Joseph McKay, whose age and address were unavailable. An eighth defendant was charged, but prosecutors say there is a possibility someone was using his identity.
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