An Emporium couple are behind bars for allegedly stealing more than $164,000 in a year from the gas station where the wife served as manager.
Jennifer Weichman, 49, and Dean Weichman, 53, both of 55 Sizer Run Road, were arraigned Monday before District Judge Barry Brown and jailed — the wife in lieu of $164,314.79 bail and the husband in lieu of $82,157 bail. She is charged with 62 felony counts, while he is charged with 49 felonies, all relating to theft.
According to the criminal complaint, Emporium Police Chief David Merritt was contacted by the owner of Fuel-On, identified only as Sayed in the complaint, in June of 2022 regarding an employee stealing money and falsifying spreadsheets and accounting numbers. The complaintant said he believed it had been happening for some time, as the company accounts found almost $180,000 of cash missing from 2021 to the present.
Jennifer Weichman had been manager for two years, and was the sole employee responsible for sales accounting, inventory, lottery machines, food ordering, taking cash deposits to the bank and entering cash deposits into the accounting system, the complaint stated.
Sayed told police that an employee who was checking the accounting had taken another job, and no one had been overseeing it for some time as they had to train a new employee. When unaccounted-for money was discovered, Sayed began taking a closer look.
The accounting showed that Weichman had been entering smaller amounts of cash as deposits than the point-of-sale system was recording, and that lottery tickets and cigarettes were always short in that store as well, the criminal complaint stated.
When Sayed spoke to Weichman about it, she did not dispute the amount of money missing, and offered to pay the money back either by getting a loan or paying it back by payroll deduction, the complaint stated.
Merritt interviewed past employees and people who knew Weichman and learned that Weichman was also giving gasoline, groceries, vape cartridges and tobacco items to her family members. She would order food from Fuel-On’s suppliers, and have her husband take it home for their family’s use, the chief stated.
Weichman also allegedly used Fuel-On’s suppliers to cater her daughter’s wedding in 2021, and had the invoices paid by the gas station’s accounts, the complaint stated.
She would also take boxes of cigarettes, claim to be delivering them to the Johnsonburg Fuel-On store but keep them for her own use, or give them to family members or friends. Some of the deliveries she would take to the local Moose Club and have the invoices paid by the gas station, the complaint alleged.
An employee told Merritt that Weichman always had large stacks of cash, and would get gift cards from local stores like Dollar General and Rite Aid, and would use those cards to pay her bills, according to the criminal complaint.
Through further interviews, Merritt learned that during the last year, when Weichman and her husband were going to the Moose Club daily, between $11,000 and $23,000 was being put into a skills game a week. Since the couple were removed from the board of the club, weekly totals of those games have decreased to about $3,000, the complaint stated.
One person told Merritt that Weichman said the bartenders at the club should be grateful for her, “that if she had not put so much cash through the machines there would not be enough money for paychecks,” the complaint stated.
Merritt said through his own knowledge, Weichman always had a large amount of cash, and she and her husband had purchased several vehicles and a utility vehicle within the last few years. Fuel-On employees told Merritt they had seen her removing money from the safe, right out of the skills games and placed it in her pocket or with her cell phone, which she would take with her when she left the store, according to the complaint.
Sayed told police that Weichman said she would pay back the money as long as he didn’t involve the authorities.
Merritt stated that Weichman’s husband had to be aware of the alleged criminal activity and conspired with her, and both benefited from her thefts, the complaint stated.
The charges against her are 12 counts of theft by unlawful taking, 12 counts of receiving stolen property, all third-degree felonies; 12 counts of knowledge that property is proceeds of an illegal act, first-degree felonies; one count of organized retail theft, a third-degree felony; one count of conspiracy to commit retail theft, a third-degree felony; 12 counts of conspiracy to receive stolen property, third-degree felonies; and 12 counts of conspiring with knowledge that property is proceeds of an illegal act, first-degree felonies.
Dean Weichman is charged with 12 counts of knowledge that property is proceeds of an illegal act, first-degree felonies; retail theft, a third-degree felony; 12 counts of conspiring with knowledge that property is proceeds of an illegal act, first-degree felonies; 12 counts of receiving stolen property, third-degree felonies; and 12 counts of conspiring to receive stolen property, third-degree felonies.
Both are scheduled to appear before Brown on Aug. 11 for preliminary hearings.
Meanwhile, this is not Jennifer Weichman’s first brush with the law.
She had been employed as a legal secretary for the late Harold B. Fink in Port Allegany when, from April 2005 to July 2007, she took about $19,000 which belonged to the firm. At the time of her arrest, Fink was 80 years old and was fighting cancer. He passed away before she was sentenced.
Weichman served seven years of probation for her conviction in that case.
