Cathleen Schmid/Provided
A serial embezzler convicted of stealing $10,000 from her Mason employer in 2005 is at it again. The Enquirer’s Kimball Perry reports:
Craig Riviello thought Cathleen Schmidt was an ideal administrative assistant and a hard worker, so he was mystified when the police took her away from his business in handcuffs.
What Riviello didn’t know is the employee he hired in June actually is Cathleen Schmid, a West Chester woman who has been hiding from Hamilton County authorities after she was indicted in May, accused of stealing $220,000 from her Fairfax employer. That was after Schmid, the daughter of a deceased Cook County, Ill., judge, was convicted of stealing more than $60,000 from two other employers.
“How does she continue to find employment with this kind of background?” Riviello asked Thursday.
Riviello hired her, he said, after calling her references – including a former employer – and conducting Internet searches. But because Schmid gave Riviello the wrong name, he was unaware of her thievery history until her arrest at work.
“We had no inkling at all,” said Riviello, owner of Miami Valley Materials Testing, in Tipp City, Ohio. The company does strength and other testing on metals, plastics and products made from them.
Schmid stole $51,000 from an employer in 2005, stole $10,000 from a Mason employer after that and then was hired in 2007 by Flavored Syrups, a 10-employee Fairfax company that makes and bottles coffees and syrups.
That company then was taken over by Dominion Liquid Technologies which assumed all of the employees it kept had been checked out when hired. Schmid is accused of stealing $220,000 from that company. After she was indicted in May for that charge, she disappeared.
Riviello said Schmid, 47, told them she lived in West Carrollton, about 20 minutes south of their Tipp City offices. He wondered, though, why her paychecks listed a West Chester address.
Riviello is upset that adding a “t” to her name allowed Schmid to evade her newest employer from finding out about her criminal history.
“This has been going on since 2005, seven years,” he said. “That really aggravates me because … that tells me the systems are broke or don’t work.”
Schmid had “limited” bookkeeping duties at her new job, but so far his investigation shows no money missing from his company. “I’ve been working with the bank,” he said.
Schmid is scheduled to be in court Friday to answer to the Hamilton County charges.
