Contractor gets prison time for role in South Bend housing authority fraud scheme
SOUTH BEND — A judge on Thursday sentenced a contractor found guilty for his role in a Housing Authority of South Bend scheme to steal federal money, while the agency's ex-director and a former employee remain to be sentenced.
Douglas Donley, a 42-year-old South Bend resident, was sentenced to 27 months in prison, two years of supervised release and an order to pay $303,920, according to the U.S. attorney's office for the Northern District of Indiana. The decision comes after Donley was found to have accepted 29 fraudulent checks from the housing authority exceeding $300,000 from October 2017 to March 2019, on the pretense that he was doing actual work.
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After an eight-day federal trial, a jury in November convicted Donley alongside HASB's ex-director, Tonya Robinson, and its former asset director, Albert Smith.
The two former housing authority employees were also supposed to be sentenced Thursday. Smith's sentencing was rescheduled to April 25, a court representative said. Attorneys for Robinson objected to prosecutors' pre-sentencing report, and the court will first rule on those objections before setting a new date.
From 2015 to 2019, the two HASB leaders were found guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the public housing provider, which is funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Prosecutors claim HASB issued checks to four outside contractors for maintenance work that never actually occurred. Contractors like Donley would then deposit the checks, withdraw a portion of each amount in cash and hand-deliver the money to HASB's main office at 501 Alonzo Watson Drive, the U.S. attorney's office said.
Over the course of the scheme, contractors received more than $5.8 million, prosecutors claim. While some of it went toward legitimate repairs, most of the payments were fraudulent and led to no improvements at housing authority properties.
Other contractors who already pleaded guilty to fraud in exchange for more lenient sentences are Tyreisha Robinson, Tonya Robinson's daughter; Archie Robinson III (no relation); and Ronald Taylor Jr. All are from South Bend.
Taylor was sentenced to more than three years in prison for his role in the scheme, according to WNDU, The Tribune's reporting partner. Archie Robinson III was ordered to spend six months in prison, six months on home detention and two years on supervised release. Tyreisha Robinson will pay more than $360,000 but serve no time in prison.
South Bend's housing authority manages about 600 active public housing units, an amount that's fallen from more than 800 in recent years. The drop is largely due to the recent demolition of the Monroe Circle townhomes and plans to tear down the Rabbi Shulman complex, both of which faced years of neglect that left many units in bad shape.
The housing authority's new director, Marsha Parham-Green, started this January. She told The Tribune that an immediate priority is to reduce the alarmingly high number of units sitting empty at the remaining properties.
More than a third of units owned by the agency sit vacant because they're in such poor condition. Meanwhile, South Bend's poorest households face the city's worst housing shortage.
Parham-Green told The Tribune this week that she meets daily with the agency's public housing team about how to move families from the public housing waitlist, which exceeded 900 households as of January, and into units.
Email South Bend Tribune city reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on X: @jordantsmith09
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: South Bend housing authority employee sentenced in fraud case
