Former East Cleveland Police Chief Scott Gardner will avoid prison time following his March 12 guilty plea on a single charge of failing to pay taxes.
Gardner was initially indicted on 24 counts of failing to pay taxes, theft in office, money laundering, passing bad checks and other charges. A day after his trial started in Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Gardner pleaded guilty to one of those felony charges – failing to pay state sales taxes – and the other 23 were dismissed.
Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Saffold told Gardner during his sentencing Thursday that Gardner’s claim of just being a bad bookkeeper was not convincing.
“I believe you believed you could just do this, get away with it and nobody would notice, but for the phenomenal investigative work of the agents who testified in this case, I think you never would have paid this money,” Saffold said.
But, citing sentencing guidelines for this type of offense and the fact that it’s the first felony on Gardner’s record, Saffold gave Gardner five years on probation and 600 hours of community service.
“One hundred hours for every year that you engaged in this scam, and that's what it was, a scam,” Saffold said.
Between 2014 and 2019, Gardner failed to pay more than $203,000 in state sales taxes from his private security business.
Making matters worse, according to Cuyahoga County Assistant Prosecutor Samantha Sohl, Gardner was placed on probation for failing to pay taxes in two other cases in 2014, the same time he started failing to pay his taxes in this case.
“He knew he was having issues. He willingly made those issues,” Sohl said. “He willingly kept bad records here so that he could financially benefit from them.”
Gardner has reached an agreement with the state to pay back $149,000 – Saffold added that obligation to the terms of Gardner’s probation. Gardner is also on a “habitual offender” list and won’t be able to operate a business in Ohio.
Prosecutors had asked for Gardner to serve time in prison.
"If I even get a whiff, a sniff, that you're cutting corners out there in the world, that you're running some kind of business and maybe not doing the things you're supposed to do - if I find out about it, you're going to prison,” Saffold told Gardner.
