Former Dairy Farmer Found Guilty Of Embezzling From Mini-Mart

By Eric Francis, Standard Coorespondent
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — A former dairy farmer with 17 grandchildren was found guilty of embezzlement last week after his employer testified that each time a deposit bag failed to make it to the bank he’d been the clerk on duty for that evening’s shift.
Gregory Manning, 56, a former dairy farmer who’d spent seven years behind the counter at the Corner Stop Mini-Mart in South Royalton suggested during his trial that it had been a sticky drawer on the bank’s night deposit box and sloppiness by bank employees that were behind the disappearances of four separate deposit bags over a four-month period.
Prosecutors countered that the more plausible explanation was a series of increasingly brazen thefts by Manning and said that bank surveillance cameras had captured video showing Manning trying to make it appear that he was depositing the bags when he was actually taking them for himself.
In the end, after two days of testimony, the jury of eight men and four women decided that the version put forward by police and the state was the more plausible explanation.
“We are obviously disappointed by the jury’s decision,” Manning’s defense attorney, Brian Marsicovetere wrote in a statement this week as he vowed to press forward with an appeal, adding, “Despite the video evidence, the significance of which was quite contested, the jury deliberated for almost three hours and asked to watch the videos again so it seems there was some doubt about the case. For several reasons, including the objections we lodged during the prosecutor’s closing statement and others made during the evidence phase, our plan is to request a new trial, and transcripts have already been ordered toward that end.”
During her closing argument last week Windsor County Deputy State’s Attorney Heidi Remick stacked a series of large colorful plastic blocks belonging to her children on the edge of the jury box as she suggested, “the elements of this case fit together brick-by-brick to form a solid wall of evidence.”
Discrepancies in the Corner Stop’s accounts which were discovered by store owner Dominick Amodeo quickly became a full blown investigation by the Royalton Police Department after Amodeo determined that Manning had been working during each of the shifts right before the bags went missing.
Officer Jean Breault testified that he looked at video surveillance tapes of the deposits being made by Manning on the nights in question and found that, from the vantage point of the bank’s closest camera to the night deposit box, it appeared that Manning had opened the drawer each times and dropped in a bag, but a second, more hidden, camera placed further away appeared to show Manning then sliding the bags right back out and placing them under his coat.
Breault said that it was apparent to him that Manning didn’t realize there were two cameras filming from two different angles and Remick echoed that theme in her closing argument, saying that it wasn’t until after Manning learned that police had additional video from that second that he put forward his explanation for having hung onto the bags, telling police that the box had been sticking shut on those occasions, which he said forced him to return the next day and put the bags in it.
“People some times make up desperate excuses to cover up wrongdoing (but) the desperation doesn’t make them true,” Remick argued before the jurors.
As to why Manning would suddenly take between two and three thousand dollars at a shot from a couple he considered close friends and expect not to be caught, Remick suggested that in the first alleged instance in October 2013, “maybe he just saw the opportunity” and, after that, Remick suggested Manning “got more careless each time as he got away with it,” continuing until he was confronted and fired in early January 2014.
“Everybody agrees that the Amodeos and (Manning) were friends,” Remick said, noting, “(The Amodeos) were devastated,” when the investigation began to zero in on Manning. But, Remick argued, “at the end of the day there is no other explanation, no other plausible conclusion.”
Marsicovetere had made a series of impassioned objections to the prosecution’s final presentation and argued that since the money had never turned up and, in his opinion, much of the investigation had been carried out by the bank rather than the police, the case was entirely circumstantial. “There is just no evidence that establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that this man did this,” Marsicovetere told the jurors.
The jury deliberated for just under three hours before returning a unanimous verdict against Manning, a father of four with 17 grandchildren. Family members had to help Manning’s distraught wife to a car outside in the wake of the jury’s decision.
If Manning’s conviction on the single felony count stands he will face a maximum potential penalty of up to ten years in prison and/or fines up to $10,000 or both.