Deborah Partida, ex-secy.-treasurer of Amer. Postal Wrkrs. Union Local 761, and ex-treasurer of the APWU’s Nev. State Assn., was sentenced on Aug. 23 to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay back the nearly $200,000 she stole from the Local and state assn. from 1995 to 1999. She was sentenced by U.S. Dist. Judge Roger Hunt (Clinton) in Las Vegas.
According to the May 17 plea agreement, Partida was Local 761 Treasurer from the middle of 1995 until Sept. of 1999. She was entitled to a salary of $150 a month. As soon as she took office, Partida began using the Local’s checking account and credit cards for her personal benefit. In some cases, she forged the local vice-president’s name on checks, then deposited them into a checking account which they shared. Partida, however, spent all of the embezzled funds herself.
In 1996, Partida took on the second office of Treasurer of the APWU Nevada State Assn., where she embezzled a lesser amount until the Fall of 1999, when the State Assn. President found their financial records to be poorly maintained with many missing documents. By this time, a Local 761 dissident had raised allegations of financial misuse against Partida, which prompted an investigation by the San Francisco Ofc. of the U.S. Dept. of Labor’s Ofc. of Labor-Mgmt. Standards. OLMS found that Partida had embezzled $223,175 from the union’s accounts.
Partida was indicted March 12 of this year on two counts of embezzlement, from the Local and State Assn., in violation of U.S.C. 29, Sec. 501(c); and two counts of falsifying the Local’s LM-2 and the state assn. LM-3 forms, by under-reporting her disbursements, in violation of U.S.C. 18, Sec. 1001. On May 17, she pled guilty to one count of embezzlement that included both the Local and state assn., while federal prosecutors dismissed the earlier counts. [U.S.A.O. Dist. Nev. 8/28/02, DOL OLMS 8/28/02]