Tucson CitizenTucson Citizen

Casino worker embezzled $644,000

Citizen Staff Writer

SHERYL KORNMAN

skornman@tucsoncitizen.com

A Tucson man who was employed at a Desert Diamond Casino as a “slot floor person” pleaded guilty Friday in federal court to embezzling $644,422 from the casino.

The theft is the “largest casino theft by an employee in Arizona casino history,” said Sandy Raynor, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, in a news release.

Adam Thomas Vega, 31, will be sentenced June 19.

Vega pleaded guilty to theft by an employee of a gaming establishment on Indian lands and to federal tax evasion.

He stole the money from the casino by “fraudulently” obtaining the passwords of supervisors and generating fraudulent jackpot override tickets, according to Raynor.

She said he generated 585 tickets in amounts ranging from $100 to $1,199. She said the amounts were purposely under $1,200 to avoid generating a federal tax withholding form.

The IRS estimated he evaded $205,077 in taxes.

The plea agreement requires him to provide restitution to the Tohono O’odham Nation and pay any back taxes.

He faces up to 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $1 million in the casino theft and up to five years in prison and a $100,000 fine on the tax evasion charge.

Our Digital Archive

This blog page archives the entire digital archive of the Tucson Citizen from 1993 to 2009. It was gleaned from a database that was not intended to be displayed as a public web archive. Therefore, some of the text in some stories displays a little oddly. Also, this database did not contain any links to photos, so though the archive contains numerous captions for photos, there are no links to any of those photos.

There are more than 230,000 articles in this archive.

In TucsonCitizen.com Morgue, Part 1, we have preserved the Tucson Citizen newspaper's web archive from 2006 to 2009. To view those stories (all of which are duplicated here) go to Morgue Part 1

Search site | Terms of service