Mark Durinski has repaid around half of what he stole. That helped reduce his punishment. On May 17, Durinski, former president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 294, was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the District of Maine to one month in prison and three years of supervised release for making false statements in financial records of the Limestone, Maine-based union to conceal duplicate reimbursements. He had been charged last August, and subsequently pleaded guilty to three counts in September, following an investigation by the U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards.
Durinski, now 64, a resident of Limestone, was an employee of the Defense Finance Accounting Service (DFAS) during 1995-2014. According to prosecutors, for the last five of those years he repeatedly claimed reimbursements for travel-related union expenses he already had received from his employer. As part of his guilty plea, he agreed to pay $53,544 in restitution plus a $300 special assessment. The light prison sentence also took into account Durinski’s health problems. At the time of sentencing, he had paid more than $25,000. He admitted to the judge: “I felt that I was really owed the money because of all the hours I gave to the union that I did not get paid for.”