NEW YORK – The US Department of Justice said Wednesday that the former chief operating officer of a suburban Chicago company has been sentenced to six years and five months in prison for embezzling $1.85 million through fraudulent orders for COVID-19 testing kits and other false claims for expenses.
Dennis Haggerty Jr., of Burr Ridge, Illinois, will serve the 77-month prison sentence once he finishes a 57-month prison sentence he was previously hit with for defrauding an Iowa hospital out of $2.5 million for undelivered N95 respiratory masks.
Prosecutors from the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois announced on Wednesday that Haggerty had entered a negotiated guilty plea earlier this year to one charge of wire fraud on accusations that he had made payments to himself in 2021 and 2022 from his company, which had sold COVID-19 testing kits. Haggerty had made payments that were purportedly for services and goods provided by himself and the company's main vendor, a test kit manufacturer, but those services and goods were not provided and the payments instead went to a bank account that he controlled.
At that time, Haggerty had been on court-ordered release and facing separate charges that he had stolen millions of dollars in payments for the undelivered N95 respirator masks. He was sentenced in December 2022 to 57 months in prison and ordered to pay $1.9 million in restitution for wire fraud and money laundering charges.
Prosecutors previously said that Haggerty and two business partners had formed a company, At Diagnostics, in March 2020 and quickly afterward inked a deal with the Iowa hospital for the delivery of 500,000 N95 masks.
Haggerty was indicted in December 2023 on the more recent fraud charges. Prosecutors did not identify the company that Haggerty had defrauded.