NEW HAVEN, CT —A 41-year-old woman from Naugatuck has been charged in a federal criminal complaint with fraud and money laundering offenses related to her alleged theft of millions of dollars in computer equipment at the School of Medicine. ‘Yale University where she was employed, the US Department of Justice and the FBI announced on Friday.
Jamie Petrone-Codrington surrendered to law enforcement on Friday, appeared before US trial judge Robert M. Spector in New Haven and was released on $ 1 million bail, the acting US prosecutor said for the District of Connecticut, Leonard Boyle and special agent in charge of the New Haven Division of the FBI.
As alleged in the complaint, the Department of Justice said that from about 2008 Petrone-Codrington was employed by Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, and recently held the position of post of director of finance and administration of the emergency medicine department. .
As part of his professional responsibilities, Petrone-Codrington had the authority to make and authorize certain purchases for departmental needs as long as the purchase amount remained below $ 10,000, prosecutors said. Beginning in at least 2013, Petrone-Codrington embarked on a scheme in which it ordered, or “made other people work for her,” to order millions of dollars in computer equipment from suppliers of Yale using funds from Yale Med and arranged for the shipment of the stolen material. to an out-of-state company in exchange for money, the DOJ said.
It is also alleged that Petrone-Codrington falsely represented on Yale’s internal forms and in electronic communications that the material was intended for specific Yale Med needs, such as particular medical studies, and it divided the fraudulent purchases into orders below the $ 10,000 threshold that would require approvals, the acting U.S. TC attorney said, adding that the out-of-state company, which resold computer hardware to customers, had paid Petrone-Codrington by transferring funds in the account of a company in which it is a principal.
The criminal complaint accuses Petrone-Codrington of postal fraud, lasting up to 20 years; wire fraud, which carries a maximum of 20 years; and money laundering, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Boyle “stressed that a complaint is only an accusation and does not constitute proof of guilt.”
This matter is currently under investigation by the FBI and the Yale Police Department.
