Timothy Sanchez couldn’t maintain the ruse forever. And he’s beginning a sentence because of that. On March 5, Sanchez, former president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 906, was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas to 18 months in prison, followed by one year of supervised release, for embezzling more than $51,000 from the union, which represents about 200 employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Health Resource Center in Topeka, Kan. and Waco, Texas. He also will have to make restitution in the amount of $50,156, a sum slightly less than what he took.
Federal prosecutors had alleged that Sanchez, now 40, a resident of Topeka, made unauthorized charges with his union debit card, wrote unauthorized checks from a union account to cover personal expenses, and concealed his thefts by making false statements on financial reports to the Department of Labor. Sanchez had pleaded guilty in September following a probe by the U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards.