KY man who stole from employer used some of the money to pay back his previous thefts
An Eastern Kentucky man who stole from his employer and used part of the money to repay his thefts from an earlier employer has been sentenced to five years and five months in federal prison.
A judge also ordered Franklin Fletcher to pay $374,192 in restitution in the most recent case.
Fletcher received credit for paying $20,110 of that by signing over his stock in the company, according to a court record released Monday.
Fletcher was an executive at NYTIS Exploration, which produces oil and natural gas in Eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia.
The company is part of Denver-based Carbon Energy Corporation and has an office in Lexington.
Fletcher, who listed a Paintsville address in one court document, abused the company’s payroll system to steal money.
In some cases, he generated checks to his wife without her knowledge, then altered them to make it appear in the computer system that they’d been issued to other customers or clients, forged his wife’s name and cashed them.
In other cases, Fletcher issued checks to himself and signed them using a signature stamp from the company president, according to a court document.
He stole the $374,192 between 2012 and March 2018, according to a court record.
Fletcher kept much of the money, but used some to make more than 50 payments totaling $70,503 to Booth Energy, an Eastern Kentucky coal company, according to a court record.
The company figured out in 2009 that an employee who had been fired was still getting a check, and a payroll review showed the checks actually were made out to Fletcher, according to a memorandum filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn M. Anderson.
The bogus checks to Fletcher totaled $988,621, most of it from a subsidiary of the company called Interstate Lodging, according to a court record.
Among other things, Fletcher used the money to buy a BMW and make credit-card payments, a court record said.
Booth fired Fletcher and was able to recover some money from his bank accounts, but he signed an agreement to repay $747,404, according to a court document.
There were no criminal charges in that case because the owner of the company did not want to make the case public, the document said.
An investigator looking into the NYTIS case found that Fletcher had used some of the money he took from that company to make payments on his restitution in the earlier case, Anderson said in the sentencing memo.
“After he received a second chance at a steady, good-paying job, the defendant reverted to the easy way out, stealing from the next unsuspecting employer to repay the first while also keeping substantial embezzled funds for himself,” the prosecutor wrote.
U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves sentenced Fletcher last week. The 65-month sentence was the maximum under advisory sentencing guidelines.
Reeves ordered Fletcher to report to prison Oct. 29. He will have to serve at least 85 percent of the sentence.
