His victims say Paul Stella was a charmer.
Stella was known to treat his customers like gold at his funeral home on Harford Road. Grieving family members usually held no doubt that Stella, gregarious and generous, could be counted on to bury their loved one right.
That was before they found out the man was robbing them blind.
In a courtroom packed with his embarrassed relatives and enraged former clients, Stella was sentenced yesterday to nearly 4 1/2 years in federal prison for plundering close to $1 million in prepaid funeral accounts for 191 customers.
"I think he should have gotten more time," said Martha Thomason, 81, of Essex, who worked with the FBI to record Stella lying about how he drained her burial nest egg.
Despite the evidence of theft over nearly four years and a legal finding that the victims were among society's most vulnerable, Chief U.S. District Judge Benson E. Legg brushed back prosecutors' call to send Stella to prison for slightly more than five years.
Instead, the judge departed from recommended guidelines calling for a sentence of between 63 and 78 months and ordered Stella to prison for 53 months followed by three years of probation. Stella's attorney had asked for a prison sentence of three years.
Stella, who had pleaded guilty to a single count of bank fraud, was also ordered to pay restitution of more than $757,000.
"He stole from elderly, sick and financially strapped people so that he could maintain a lifestyle that included extravagant gambling, vacations, 11 expensive vehicles and lavish gifts," Rod J. Rosenstein, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, said in a statement yesterday.
From his eponymous funeral home in the 7500 block of Harford Road in Northeast Baltimore, Stella persuaded dozens of customers to deposit prepaid funeral expenses in accounts at a bank and let him serve as a trustee, according to court documents filed with his guilty plea.
Many customers had signed up for the program when the funeral home was still owned by Hartley Miller. Stella, who had worked for Miller, took over the business in March 2003.
After receiving money, authorities said, funeral home employees opened prepaid funeral expense accounts at Madison & Bradford Savings and Loan and its successor, Madison Bohemian Savings Bank. But starting in June 2004, Stella forged customers' names and closed 111 of their bank accounts, investigators found.
