FORMER WASTE MANAGEMENT EMPLOYEE SENTENCED FOR EMBEZZLEMENT

Martin Carlson, Acting United States Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, announced today that a York County man has been sentenced to 63 months’ incarceration for embezzling $708,806 from an area waste hauling company. Wayne H. Heilman, Jr., age 42, of York Haven, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to the 63-month term by U.S. District Court Judge Sylvia Rambo. Heilman pleaded guilty to a one-count Information charging him with mail fraud. Heilman was also ordered to pay $708,806 restitution and ordered to undergo three years of supervised release after imprisonment.

Heilman is a former Camp Hill-based employee of Waste Management, Inc. Among other duties, Heilman was in charge of a special trust account established by Waste Management for the benefit of Hampden Township at Commerce Bank. Each month, Waste Management paid into the account 50 cents for each ton of garbage collected in the township. The account was established for the benefit of Hampton Township so that the township could draw upon the funds in the event of a waste management-related emergency.

During his guilty plea hearing, Heilman admitted that he had devised a scheme to embezzle the trust funds by writing one to three checks a month payable to himself, typically in amounts ranging from $5,000 tp $9,000, by forging his supervisor’s signature on the checks, and by depositing the checks into his personal bank account. He concealed his scheme from detection by scanning the account’s monthly statements into his home computer, by deleting the check entries, altering the account balances, and by forwarding copies of the altered statements to his supervisors in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. Heilman’s scheme was not detected by Waste Management until the late summer of 2007 when his supervisors inadvertently discovered several forged, cancelled checks payable to Heilman. When confronted on August 29, 2007, Heilman gave the company’s internal investigators a full written confession.

The case was investigated by the Harrisburg Office of the FBI and was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kim Douglas Daniel.

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