Baltimore County woman who bilked friends for fake cancer treatments to be sentenced

After seeking money from friends, Leone pleaded guilty to felony theft

The message sounded desperate.

"I need to raise $1,900 before the end of the night," it said. "My medical bills and everything has totally put us in the poor house. … I want to live and I want to stop losing stuff just because of this cancer."

The Facebook plea was from Dina Perouty Leone, who at the time, in June 2009, "was asking everyone and their brother for money," according to the message's recipient, Maurica Marcum, a former classmate of Leone's at Sparrows Point High School.

"I never would ask anyone or want others to know our business, so please don't tell anyone," Leone continued in her message. "I am just lost."

In fact, Leone had been seeking money from friends and acquaintances for months, prosecutors said, ostensibly to help her pay for treatment of terminal stomach cancer. As far back as October 2004, she wrote an Internet posting saying she had been fighting the disease for "over a year and a half" — only that time it was breast cancer. Later, she said she'd had cervical cancer for a decade.

None of it was true.

On Thursday, Leone — who has a son and a stepdaughter, both teenagers — is to be sentenced in Baltimore County Circuit Court on a felony theft charge to which she pleaded guilty in June. Leone, 38, who was ordered jailed after her plea, faces a maximum of 15 years in prison. She could also be required to serve most of an additional 10-year sentence for a violation-of-probation charge in Carroll County in connection with a mortgage scam in which, among other crimes, she was convicted of taking $11,500 from a Sykesville woman.

After her indictment almost a year ago on theft and conspiracy charges in the cancer case, Leone tearfully admitted on television that she had never had the disease but had pretended she did because her husband, Patrick Leone Jr., a construction contractor, "made" her do it.

Despite the chemotherapy treatments — which often cause nausea and loss of appetite — that Leone claimed she was enduring, she never seemed to lose weight from her 191-pound, 5-foot-3-inch frame, her friends said, and appeared perpetually rosy-cheeked. She could not answer basic questions about her medical care. At one point last year, she showed up at a gathering with a bald head, saying she had lost her hair to chemotherapy. But her friends said she'd had a full head of hair just two days earlier, yet another factor that raised suspicions.

Leone's lawyer, John M. Hassett, the third she has retained since her arrest, declined to comment on her behalf. Her sister-in-law, Kristy DeHoff, said she was "pretty ticked" about the scam.

"I was hurt in more ways than one, and so was my family," DeHoff said. "We thought she was dying."

Leone's friends, some of them cancer sufferers, responded to her entreaties. Marcum, a nurse, offered her the $20 she had in her PayPal account. "I can send it to you if u need it!" she wrote in their Facebook exchange. "Sorry, it's not much but I've been out of work for 4 months and things are tight. Let me know if that will help!!"

Others gave considerably more. Two women, on whose behalf Leone was charged, "lavished money on her," said Assistant State's Attorney Adam D. Lippe — more than $10,000 each. Both of those women, Jennifer Lynch and Jennifer Lasek — also a former classmate and wife of the nationally ranked skateboarder Bucky Lasek — confirmed to The Baltimore Sun that they had been taken in by Leone's tales, which included the assertion that she needed help because she had no health insurance.

Last fall, one of the women filed a complaint against Leone with Baltimore County police, and the allegations were investigated by an economic crimes team. Ultimately, the case was forwarded to the state's attorney's office for prosecution.

"In all her communication with us, she maintained she had cancer, would drop off her medical records and would provide us with her doctor's name," Lippe said. "Originally, she blamed one of the victims for lying that she did not have cancer, that the victim wanted to sleep with her husband, and asked us to have her arrested."

The prosecutor said a review of the defendant's checking account showed no payments to doctors' offices or hospitals, even as she was pocketing money from her friends for such purposes, but rather toward clearing overdrafts, paying her children's school expenses, grass-cutting services at their Rosedale home, bull-roast tickets and a deposit for a small dog — a pug.

In interviews with investigators, Leone variously claimed to have post-traumatic stress disorder, cancer and bipolar disorder, but would later contradict herself. At one point, according to the state's probable-cause affidavit, she said she "isn't the bipolar chick she used to be." Leone claimed "that the only time she asked for money from anyone was when her husband's car was going to be repossessed," the court document says.