More troubles for convicted bank robber

<p>Just a month ago, confessed bank robber Christopher Wenmoth and his defense attorney persuaded a Sonoma County judge that Wenmoth deserved to avoid state prison because he was a “one-hit wonder” driven by a gambling addiction to commit a single, deeply regretted transgression.</p><p>But new charges against Wenmoth suggest that his odd holdup at a Montgomery Village bank last summer may merely have marked an escalation of a lucrative run of larceny.</p><p>Sonoma County prosecutors have charged Wenmoth, 40, with stealing from his former employer — a Marin County drug and alcohol rehab center — by 10 times forging and cashing checks linked to the program’s bank account. He is alleged to have defrauded the not-for-profit Center Point Inc. of $22,678.</p><p>Wenmoth is currently locked up at the Sonoma County jail, serving the remaining six weeks of a sentence imposed by the judge who spared him a prison stay for the July, 2008, bank robbery.</p><p>Now Wenmoth has been served with a 30-count felony complaint. For each of the 10 times he’s alleged to have passed a bogus check, he was charged with one count each of forgery, grand theft and second-degree burglary.</p><p>In a letter dated April 17 and sent to a Press Democrat reporter, Wenmoth claims some responsibility: “I did cash several checks drawn on a bank account of a former employer, and that these checks were counterfeit, and the signatures on these checks were forged.”</p><p>But Wenmoth insisted in the letter that he didn’t know the checks were phony and said he didn’t keep the money.</p><p>He declares in the letter, written from jail, that the money was owed to clients of his former employer. He said he cashed the checks and gave the money to those clients.</p><p>“I did not know at the time I cashed them that the checks were counterfeit and forged,” Wenmoth wrote. “Therefore, there is no proof that I intended to commit a crime.<TH>.<TH>.”</p><p>The executive vice president of Center Point, Laura Lambe, said Wednesday she could not say anything about the alleged check forging nor about Wenmoth’s employment with her agency.</p><p>“We can’t really comment on that under the circumstances,” she said.</p><p>The new case accuses Wenmoth of passing bad checks over the course of five weeks in late 2007 and early 2008 — fully seven months before the Santa Rosa bank robbery. It’s not yet clear when the alleged fraud was detected, or why so much time passed before the charges were filed.</p><p>Spencer Brady, Sonoma County’s chief deputy district attorney, said one factor in the delay was the involvement of three jurisdictions. Wenmoth is suspected of committing aspects of the fraud in Sonoma, Marin and Alameda counties.</p><p>Wenmoth evidently was employed at Center Point at the time of the alleged check fraud. During one of his conversations with a Press Democrat reporter following his bank-robbery arrest, he said he rented an apartment in Marin County while he did clerical work at the San Rafael rehab facility.</p><p>Wenmoth said he quit Center Point early in 2008 because his rent went up so much that he couldn’t afford it. He then gave up the apartment and returned to Santa Rosa and moved in with his mother, he said.</p><p>He’d apparently been unemployed for some months when, last July 23, he walked into the US Bank branch in Montgomery Village and handed a teller a robbery note. A security camera captured a clear photo of him before he walked out with $2,250, He then set off on a summer road trip to South Dakota.</p><p>He was stopped and arrested on July 31 by a state trooper in Minnesota.</p><p>Brought back to Santa Rosa to face bank robbery charges, Wenmoth plead no contest. He and his attorney, Deputy Public Defender James Loughborough, told Judge Arthur Wick that Wenmoth pulled the unsophisticated bank heist after his life hit bottom from an addiction to cardroom gambling.</p><p>In mid-February, Wick announced an intention to commit him to state prison. But the judge changed his mind after reading what he called a compelling argument by Loughborough, who portrayed his client as a chastened, one-time criminal committed to reclaiming his life from a gambling habit.</p><p>On April 1, Wick handed Wenmoth a sentence that included a 10-month jail stay. Wenmoth was expected to be locked up about 64 days — until early June — because of credit for the time he served in jail following his arrest, and for good behavior.</p><p>The new charges confront Wenmoth with the possibility that he won’t be leaving jail in June, and he may yet be put in prison.</p><p>He’s next due in court May 13.</p>