Bad Guy Bruce Donner sentencing rescheduled

by Christopher Menkin

Bruce Donner, 52, of Berkeley Heights, N.J., owner of Donner Medical Marketing Inc., a New Jersey corporation that purported to be a medical equipment vendor, and forged invoices for Schwartz at Allied Health Care Services, sentencing has been rescheduled again, this time for March 8, 2012 in Newark, New Jersey before Judge Susan D. Wigenton.

Donner’s lawyer, Keith Biebelberg of Biebelberg & Martin, Millburn, New Jersey, said he looks forward to “putting forth a vigorous and hopefully persuasive presentation” on Donner’s behalf for a more lenient punishment. It won’t make the leasing companies who were screwed very happy.

Charles K. Schwartz, 52, the founder of Allied Health Care Service was convicted of the same mail charge as Donner which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. Schwartz was sentenced to 16 years and three months, plus ordered to pay $80 million in restitution as fraud, as well as forfeiting $75 million (he filed bankruptcy before pleading guilty. He is now serving his time at the Fort Dix Penitentiary in Fort Dix, New Jersey. When he gets out, he will have to pay a percentage of his income until his debt has been paid in full, as well as have three years of supervised release. He could be out when he is 60 years old with good behavior.

He and Donner were found guilty of executing over $135 million phony leases that caused losses of more than $80 million, not counting court and collection costs by more than 50 financial institutions that he was found guilty of stealing by using phony invoices for equipment that do not exist to lessees that did not exist.

Donner admitted that after he received the payments, he sent 95 to 97 percent of them to an entity Schwartz created to facilitate the fraud. He kept the rest as a commission. He reaped more than $4.1 million, funds that must forfeit, according to prosecutors.

While Donner was not named as the party who turned states evidence in the FBI Press Release, to those who have been following the case since Leasing News gave its first alert on February 19, 2010, know it was Donner who was unnamed:

“Schwartz and the medical equipment ‘supplier’ undertook efforts throughout the scheme to evade questioning from bank examiners who sought at various times to inspect the non-existent medical equipment, which technically belonged to the financial institutions. At one point during an August 2010 conversation between Schwartz and the purported supplier, Schwartz commented that the financial institutions had fallen “hook, line, and sinker” for the false explanation they had given to bank examiners who asked why the purported supplier used his home address on certain invoices.

http://leasingnews.org/archives/Sep2010/9_01.htm#schwartz