A retired Hollister police sergeant who was a candidate for
sheriff in 2010 has been arrested and charged with a felony on
suspicion of embezzling about $102,000
– during a period of more than six years starting in March 2004
– from the department’s union over which he presided as president
in that time.
A retired Hollister police sergeant who was a candidate for sheriff in 2010 has been arrested and charged with a felony on suspicion of embezzling about $102,000 – during a period of more than six years starting in March 2004 – from the department’s union over which he presided as president in that time.
Ray Wood, 53, surrendered to custody Thursday afternoon at the San Benito County Jail. He was booked and released on $60,000 bail, according to records at the San Benito County Courthouse.
When reached by cell phone Tuesday, Wood declined to comment and referred all questions to his attorney, Terry Bowman from the San Jose-based law firm Rains Lucia Stern. Bowman did not immediately return a phone message.
The state attorney general’s office filed the grand theft charge last week to coincide with an arrest warrant, according to court records. It followed a five-month probe conducted by an investigator from the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, done to prevent a conflict of interest locally.
Outside investigator Terrence Simpson reported the suspected embezzlement occurred between the start of March 2004 and the end of December 2010, when Wood retired from the Hollister Police Department after more than 25 years and handed over union duties he had held the prior 14 years. Among the evidence obtained through a search warrant filed March 11 were union checking records, while the local bank’s earliest available documentation came from that March 2004 timeline.
The complaint alleged that Wood was the only person known to oversee the union’s financial matters with San Benito Bank, now called Santa Barbara Bank & Trust. The city routinely withholds union membership dues and then submits a single check to the union.
According to Simpson’s testimony in the complaint: “The majority of the deposit slips showed that some portion of the deposit, ranging from $50 to more than $3,000, was given to the customer by the bank in cash.”
Simpson alleged in a court document filed Monday – the investigator’s statement to accompany the previously filed criminal complaint – that during those six and a half years Wood cashed out $46,147 from check deposits he had made as president of the police union. Simpson further alleged that the former sergeant wrote police union checks to “Ray Wood” – or for cash – which totaled $45,891.
Simpson’s statement went on to accuse Wood of writing “numerous” police union checks totaling $10,407 to individuals unrelated to the organization. One example alleged in the records was a man – the investigator called him a “local petty criminal with a lengthy misdemeanor criminal history” – who received nine checks from the police union. The resident told the investigator he had done “odd jobs” for Wood in the past several years.
In total, the complaint alleged Wood was responsible for more than $102,000 in missing funds from the union account. The figure amounted to more than half of the $187,914 that the union collected in membership dues and fundraising during the stretch, according to the records.
At this point, there are no court dates scheduled besides a hearing for a return on the warrant at 8:30 a.m. Sept. 20 at the San Benito County Courthouse.
While Simpson is the investigator in the case, the attorney general has assigned the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office to prosecute it. Deputy District Attorney John Chase said he is handling the prosecution, but declined to comment further because “there’s really not much to say” outside of the court documents.
As for the investigation, it started earlier this year after Wood handed over union duties upon retirement – about six months after finishing third among four candidates in the county sheriff’s race – and sought to close the old account in favor of a new one. When the search warrant for bank records became public in May, Wood responded about the embezzlement allegation and contended he was not the only officer who controlled the union’s finances.
“There are multiple people that had control over it,” Wood told the Free Lance in May. “We are talking about the whole department. There has to have been hundreds.”
The outside investigator, however, alleged in the recently filed complaint that former colleagues interviewed for the probe said Wood was the only person handling finances. Simpson said he interviewed “nearly a dozen” current and former Hollister police officers.
“All of the witnesses agreed that during the last several years the (Hollister police union) was effectively a one-man show run by its president Ray James Wood,” according to the complaint.
Simpson’s investigation included reviewing union records from the 1970s into the 1990s, according to the complaint. He determined the union bylaws historically called for a five-member board and that the holders of those positions changed every year or two. Wood took over union president duties in 1997.
Wood’s run as union president ended with his retirement last December. Court records alleged that as part of the transition, Wood told Hollister police Officer David Anderson he would hand over control to him. Anderson agreed to accept the role until the union could elect new leaders. But the complaint alleged Wood didn’t turn over any paperwork such as bills and receipts and insisted he hadn’t kept proper records, while Wood assured Anderson that all bills were up to date.
The complaint noted that in late December, Wood and Anderson met in a parking lot to complete the paperwork in transferring over authority of the bank account. When Anderson went to the bank Jan. 4 to finish the transfer of authority, the manager told him Wood wanted to close the old account and start a new one, court records alleged.
On Jan. 14, Anderson met with Wood and expressed a desire to use the existing account, but Wood rejected use of it because there possibly could be checks “floating around” of which he was unaware, court records alleged.
On Jan. 20, a day after attending a police union board meeting and asking members to “start fresh and not worry about past transactions,” according to court documents, Wood was at a San Benito Bank teller window when Anderson arrived three minutes after it had opened. The court records alleged at the bank, Wood and Anderson argued about whether to close the account and a bank manager decided to freeze it until the union had a chance to produce meeting minutes.
Anderson returned to the bank that afternoon with the minutes and gained control of the account, according to court records.
Anderson asked the bank for statements and a list of all checks that were not written for three primary monthly bills dating back to May 2008. He received the information, along with a city printout of checks regularly issued to the union for dues, and noticed that “deposit amounts were almost always less than the check amounts,” according to the court records.
