ROARING FORK BROADCASTING COMPANY
A woman convicted of bilking nearly $2 million from an Aspen clothing store in the mid-to-late 1990s faces 63 felony counts on the Front Range in connection with allegations she embezzled at least $400,000 from an environmental consulting firm.
Lafayette police in Boulder County arrested Lynda Mae Fratis, 60, of Longmont, on Oct. 5, according to court records. She was released from custody on the same date after posting a $10,000 cash-surety-property bond.
Fratis last appeared Oct. 25 in Boulder County District Court, where she waived advisement of the charges.
Judge Elizabeth Brodsky set a preliminary hearing for Dec. 9. Fratis, represented by Boulder defense lawyer Larry Mertes, waived her right to hold the hearing within 35 days of the filing of the charges.
According to a Sept. 30-dated arrest affidavit written by an officer with the Lafayette Police Department, Fratis told authorities she began stealing money “during Covid” with plans to reimburse her employer. Fratis had been working for the company roughly 15 years ago and most recently as its bookkeeper and office manager.
“It was just everything, and I was planning on paying the money back, but it just snowballed and snowballed,” Fratis was quoted as telling police interviewing her Aug. 26 at a Lafayette hospital where she was admitted after her employer filed her for stealing from the company. The interview was part of the police investigation into the embezzlement allegations.
The arrest of Fratis came more than 25 years after the late Pitkin County District Judge J.E. DeVilbiss, on March 1, 1999, sentenced her to three concurrent 24-year terms in state prison for stealing $1.7 million from the Boogie’s clothing store, which operated for more than three decades in Aspen on a ground-level floor below the like-named diner.
At the hearing, DeVilbiss threw out victim and business owner Leonard “Boogie” Weinglass for calling Fratis an expletive after he made a victim-impact statement to the court. Weinglass later apologized for his remarks and said his animosity toward Fratis got the best of him.
The sentencing was part of a plea deal between Fratis and prosecutors, who dismissed eight of the 11 felony charges against her. In exchange, Fratis pleaded guilty to three class 3 felony charges of theft over $15,000 and agreed to pay restitution in the amount of $1,792,360.72 at a rate of $10 per month while she was incarcerated.
Like the Aspen embezzlement case, Fratis allegedly was able to carry out the offenses in the Lafayette case because she oversaw her employer’s company books.
As a bookkeeper at Boogie’s clothing, Fratis would ask authorized personnel to pre-sign checks made out to vendors. She would subsequently delete the vendor’s name and replace it with her name. Fratis also doctored cash-register receipts from the store to reflect a lower amount of money than actually rang up that day, pocketing the difference.
Meanwhile, the ownership of the environmental consulting firm, believing the company should have been realizing a profit with increased business, had their accounting firm review the books. The probe showed that “the bookkeeper and office manager for the company has been stealing the money from the company over the last three to four years,” the affidavit said, citing statements from the accountant who contacted authorities after she discovered the scheme.
Having control of the company books also allowed Fratis to change invoice amounts after customers paid the invoice’s original amount. An example would be the company accepting a customer’s $2,000 payment on an invoice reflecting that amount. Fratis would then manipulate the invoice to show that it was $300, deposit that money into the company’s credit card account and take the rest of the money — $1,700 — for herself.
The accountant initially contacted Lafayette authorities Aug. 14 to report the alleged invoice doctoring. At the time, the accountant believed the amount stolen to be $135,000.
The accountant contacted police a second time, on Aug. 21, to report she had learned that Fratis had forged checks, made out to her, from a hands-off company co-owner who suffered from dementia, the affidavit said. With the new information, the accountant estimated Fratis had embezzled approximately $388,000, the affidavit said. The company Fratis had worked for since 2008 or 2009 also fired her that day.
On Aug. 28, the accountant reported the amount had risen to $419,000 “as of today” because more thefts had been discovered, “and the amount is likely going to increase.”
Prosecutors in the 20th Judicial District filed a single charge of felony theft and 62 counts of identity theft against Fratis on Oct. 25. The identity theft offenses represent each transaction Fratis allegedly completed by using unauthorized signatures.
The offenses date back to October 2019, before COVID-19 was declared an international pandemic in March 2020, and lasted through as recently as July, according to charging documents.
It was unclear whether the employer was aware of Fratis’ past in Aspen when she was hired. During the investigation, the accountant learned about Fratis’ decades-old embezzlement case in Aspen through an internet search.
The affidavit’s author said he asked the accountant “why (the company) hired Fratis if she has a history of employee theft, to which (the accountant) responded, ‘Good question.’”
According to the Lafayette officer’s affidavit, another company co-owner said Fratis “had a habit of always paying for everyone’s drinks when she went out with friends and that she and (her wife) got married on a cruise approximately two years ago and Fratis paid for every wedding attendee’s cruise.”
The interview took place at a Lafayette hospital where Fratis was admitted for mental health struggles after her employer fired her, according to the affidavit. Police interviewed Fratis when she was hospitalized.
Similarly, Fratis told the Aspen Daily News in a 2002 interview that she used the money she swiped from the Boogie’s retailer to fund a lifestyle that included dinner nightly in Aspen for not just herself, but her friends too. She also used the ill-gotten gains to take trips to Hawaii twice a year. She called her spending “an addiction to a lifestyle that I started living that I couldn’t stop.”
More than three years into her sentence and after filing a motion for reconsideration, Fratis appeared again in front of DeVilbiss, on July 9, 2002, asking for leniency and a lighter sentence. She and her Denver lawyer said she was eligible for a reduced sentence because she came to terms with her crimes and rehabilitated herself, and that she was a model inmate.
“Keep me on a tight leash,” Fratis told the judge, the Aspen Daily News reported at the time. Weinglass also attended the hearing. “I won’t let you down. I won't let Boogie down and I won't let my family down.”
The reduced sentencing made her eligible for parole in 2005; she was released that summer, according to court records.