April 15--A former low-level City Hall clerk who embezzled nearly $750,000 in Chicago permit fees faces up to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty Tuesday to theft and tax evasion charges.
Antionette Chenier, 51, deposited hundreds of checks, most of them payable to the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, into a personal account she had set up called "OEMC Chenier," prosecutors have said.
The Department of Transportation clerk, who worked for the city for 24 years, was caught only after Charter One Bank officials noticed unusual activity in her account and confronted her.
Chenier claimed the account was for a failed cleaning business she had started -- the Office of Emergency Management Cleaning, according to the charges.
The Midlothian woman made $60,000 a year processing permit fees that allowed moving vans and dumpsters to block public ways. But, according to her plea agreement, she was stealing up to $147,858 a year on top of that, and not reporting the illegal gains on her taxes.
Chenier pleaded guilty Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan. Preliminary sentencing guidelines call for her to be sentenced to up to three and a half years in prison, according to her plea agreement.
She embezzled $741,299 in a scheme lasting from August 2008 until January 2014, when she stopped working for the city, according to the agreement.
Chenier assured a bank official who called her about the suspicious deposits that the transactions were "all fine" but later said she would pay back the money and asked the bank employee not to report it, according to the charges.
When the officer told her that the deposits looked like embezzlement, she said, "Please don't use those words," prosecutors have said.
Chenier is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 10, according to the U.S. attorney's office.
sschmadeke@tribpub.com
