CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Cuyahoga County grand jury has slapped the indicted former East Cleveland police chief Scott Gardner with 11 more charges that accuse him of money laundering and passing bad checks.
The indictment handed up Tuesday alleges that Gardner, 48, wrote thousands of dollars in checks he knew wouldn’t clear from a police union account to his private security company that employed off-duty police officers.
Prosecutors also said Gardner pocketed money from the Fraternal Order of Police’s Lodge 39 account.
Gardner, who was originally charged in August with theft in office and failing to pay state sales taxes for several years, now faces two dozens felony charges. Gardner was fired shortly after the initial charges.
He is scheduled for a June 28 arraignment.
Gardner’s attorney, Allison Hibbard, said prosecutors indicted Gardner again because of “their claimed ‘clerical errors’ in the initial indictment.” She also said the new charges “continue their pattern of re-indictments for the East Cleveland officers.”
Gardner was the first of what would ultimately become 17 current or former East Cleveland police officers charged as part of a yearslong investigation into the department. The department has about 45 officers.
Prosecutors wrote in court filings that the Ohio Department of Taxation began investigating Gardner’s security company, Constant Protective and Consulting Services, and found that Gardner had withheld more than $200,000 in state taxes from employees from 2013 to 2019, but he did not pay that money to the state. He also filed tax returns that underreported how much he owed in taxes, prosecutors said.
After learning he was under investigation, Gardner filed amended tax returns that reported the correct amount. Gardner told officials that he hired a company to do his taxes for him and said the failure to pay must have been a “clerical error,” the filing said. Prosecutors said employees of that company told investigators that they cannot file taxes on behalf of a business, and Gardner did not hire them to do so, the filing said.
Gardner pleaded guilty in Medina and Cuyahoga counties in 2014 to misdemeanors for failing to pay taxes on his company as well as a cigar business that he co-owned. The Ohio attorney general’s office sued him in Portage County for failing to pay taxes on his company. Gardner ultimately settled the lawsuit by agreeing to repay $28,000 to the state and signed a document acknowledging that he is responsible for filing the business’ taxes, the filing says.
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