Law Firm Secretary Admits She Took Funds

ABINGDON, Va. – Anna Howell didn’t look like someone pleading guilty to federal felonies.

The longtime legal secretary and bookkeeper flashed a bright smile to her public defender, and to a pair of teary-eyed women who came to Thursday’s plea hearing for support. Howell mumbled her responses to Magistrate Judge Pamela Meade Sargent, which were swallowed up in the cavernous, mostly empty courtroom.

But a possible 40 years in prison and $750,000 fine dangled above Howell like a sword of Damocles in the airy chamber, accenting the petite 43-year-old’s defiantly upbeat posture.

She pleaded guilty to one count each of money laundering and mail fraud without a deal, having rejected the government’s offer. She told Sargent that she had hijacked money from a real estate trust account managed by her employer, the law firm Jessee & Read. Between September 2007 and October 2008, Howell said, she issued stop payment orders on checks and directed the bank to reissue them as money orders, which she used to pay for personal expenses.

The indictment charges Howell with stealing more than $31,000 from the trust account over 13 months. She also admitted to adding her family members to the law firm’s group insurance, generating more than $2,000 in premiums.

When confronted by the firm’s attorneys, Howell admitted her scheme and promptly began to make restitution, according to federal prosecutors and her defense attorney. She and her husband sold their house at a discount, and wrote the law firm a check for $35,600.

That amount actually exceeds what Howell allegedly stole from Jessee & Read’s trust account. But that isn’t everything she is accused of taking.

Attorneys on Thursday revealed that Howell admitted to pocketing cash payments from Jessee & Read clients, which never made their way into financial books she kept. She also admitted to forging the signature of an attorney on checks from the firm’s general operating account. Her defense attorney, Brian Beck, said the attorney whose signature she usurped was not actually an authorized payee of the account, and that the bank shouldn’t have cashed the checks.

“That’s kind of a cloudy issue,” Beck said in an interview.

Jessee & Read hired an accounting firm to conduct an audit at a cost of $9,000, Beck said. Howell’s former employer now claims that she stole upwards of $6,000 in cash payments.

“Ms. Howell has admitted that some of that happened,” Beck said. “She said it was more than $1,000,” but less than what Jessee & Read claim.

Overall, the firm claims that Howell owes them $57,000. And this amount – if not the crime – remains in dispute.

“She owes a little bit more money” than she has paid, Beck said, counting the money stolen from the trust account and the cost of conducting an audit. But, the defender said, the accounting firm’s audit does not support a loss of $57,000.

Thursday’s hearing marked exactly two years from the day that Howell stood in Washington County Circuit Court, before a different judge, and pleaded guilty to a similar crime.

That offense stemmed from the time Howell worked as the secretary for Circuit Court Judge C. Randall Lowe, whom she had served years before as a secretary when Lowe was in private practice. On June 4, 2007, Howell pleaded guilty to forgery, uttering and grand larceny in stealing more than $16,000 from the judge’s fund.

In an ironic twist , Howell’s defense attorney in that case was an attorney who worked in the same firm as Lowe when Howell became his secretary. Daniel Read, now partnered with John Jessee, hired Howell after she pleaded guilty to stealing from Lowe. Some three months later, federal prosecutors allege, Howell embarked on a plan to steal from her new employer.

When federal prosecutors unveiled the new indictment, Howell’s probation officer filed a motion to revoke time suspended from her sentence. The judges in the 28th Judicial Circuit have disqualified themselves from the case, which is now pending appointment of a substitute judge.

Howell will be sentenced in federal court in August.

dgilbert@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2558