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Tuesday, September 11, 2001

By Christopher Snowbeck, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The former chief financial officer of the failed Allegheny Health, Education and Research Foundation will likely escape the final criminal charge he faces -- a claim by state Attorney General Mike Fisher that the executive illegally kept money meant to pay for a skybox at Three Rivers Stadium.

Prosecutors have agreed to place former chief financial officer David McConnell in the Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition program, which gives nonviolent first-time offenders a chance to wipe their records clean. McConnell must complete 12 months of probation, 150 hours of community service and pay $16,692 to the AHERF bankruptcy estate, but he is not admitting guilt to the felony charge against him.

Prosecutors charged that McConnell was given foundation money to cover the costs of renting a skybox at the stadium, but did not use most of it for that purpose.

McConnell wrote checks for skybox expenses from his personal account to shield the foundation from bad publicity, according to prosecutors. At the time, AHERF had laid off employees in Philadelphia and drastically cut the psychiatry department at Allegheny General Hospital.

In spring 1998, McConnell was paid $25,000 so he could cover skybox expenses during the coming baseball season. But when he resigned in June 1998, only about $7,300 from that advance had been spent on the skybox, according to lawyers for Fisher.

The deal "does not result in a conviction," said Tony Krastek, the senior deputy attorney general prosecuting the case. "Upon the successful conclusion of his ARD program, he can get his record expunged."

The agreement will be presented today to an Allegheny County Common Pleas Court judge. Because of the agreement, the bankruptcy estate gets the money without going through the uncertainties of a trial, Krastek said.

Originally, McConnell faced about 1,500 charges, most of which dealt with the tapping of charitable funds to pay operating expenses as the AHERF hospital system teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in 1998. But after the longest preliminary hearing in state history, Allegheny County Senior Judge Robert E. Dauer ruled in May that only the skybox charge was backed by enough evidence to warrant a trial for McConnell.

Dauer also dismissed all charges against former General Counsel Nancy Wynstra. The foundation's chief executive, Sherif Abdelhak, must still defend himself in a trial against more than 700 criminal charges.

It is relatively common for first-time offenders facing the kind of charges McConnell is to be given the option of entering the ARD program, according to Ross Lenhardt, senior assistant district attorney.

"You can give somebody who is a first-time offender the opportunity to correct their behavior without giving them a lifelong criminal record," Lenhardt said. "You let them show that this is an aberration."