Long Grove con man gets 8 years

Patrick Del Monico did a lot for people, his friends and family say.

If your mother was sick, he'd visit you twice a month, even though his own daughter was hospitalized.

If you were locked out of the house, he'd scale the walls to get you in.

If your child played on the St. Mary's football team he coached, he'd help them become the best athlete they could be.

And if you befriended him, he'd rob you blind.

Again and again and again.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge John Darrah took note of the good the 66-year-old Long Grove resident has done in his life, but he said it didn't outweigh the horrible financial crimes he committed, stealing even his own son's identity and not repaying money to a friend, Robert Strom of Cary, who has multiple sclerosis and can't pay his medical bills now as a result.

"I have never encountered a case where someone has shown such complete and utter disrespect for the law as you have," said Darrah, before sentencing him to eight years in prison.

"Whatever crimes he did commit, the sentencing letters painted a picture of someone who had certainly done some phenomenal things," Beau Brindley, Del Monico's attorney, said after the hearing. "The family remains committed to supporting him."

The sentence was in line with federal sentencing guidelines, but higher than the five years Brindley had asked for, and far higher than the immediate release many of Del Monico's family sought.

But it was lower than the nine years and two months Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacqueline Stern had requested.

As Stern pointed out, Del Monico was not a one-time criminal. In 1992, he caught a break with U.S, District Judge James Zagel, who gave him a light one-year sentence for defrauding his employer, Valspar, out of at least $330,000. Zagel even went further, amending the sentence to a work-release program so Del Monico did not have to serve any time.

Within a year, Del Monico was deceiving his probation officer, telling him he had started his own business, when in reality he had landed at Indeck, a Wheeling company that makes industrial boilers. He was also deceiving the company. Just a few months after landing there in 1993, he was creating phony invoices to steal from them, too, President Marsha Forsythe-Fournier told Darrah.

About 30 Indeck employees showed up in court to watch the sentencing.

Del Monico took them for $1.3 million over nearly 10 years, Forsythe-Fournier said, with the scheme finally unraveling when they went looking for a semitrailer Del Monico had "purchased" for the company and found out it didn't exist.

But he wasn't done yet. He then hopped to Demar Logistics of Carol Stream, which he took for $40,000. With the feds closing in, he borrowed $28,000 from Strom.

"All the money they had - a man in failing health," noted Darrah.

He got $3,200 from another friend and took his son's social security number to run up another $40,000 on a credit card. He also filed for bankruptcy and consistently lied to the court, squirreling money away in a McHenry account under a false name and wiping out evidence on his computer hard drive just hours before a bankruptcy trustee showed up. He even lied to Darrah about being able to post a $100,000 bond. When Darrah discovered the deception, he locked him away.

"While you were doing all this, you were living in a seven-bed, four-bath house of 6,700 square feet in a rural wooded lot in a prestigious area of our community," noted Darrah, who acknowledged Del Monico's dedication to fatherhood and the hardship the sentence would cause to the family. About 10 of them were present, dressed in black and sobbing during his sentencing.

"You chose to live a lifestyle based on taking money from other people," he noted. "I wonder what your children would have said (if you had simply said), 'We're going to have to live in a smaller home ... but not risk going to the penitentiary,'"

"You defrauded other people out of their hard-earned money ... for the people that were important to you. That can't be just."