November 11, 2020 – A suburban Chicago businessman has been charged with fraud for allegedly swindling more than $2.6 million from hospitals who paid for personal protective equipment (PPE) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A criminal complaint charges Dennis Haggerty, Jr. president of At Diagnostics Inc. (IL), with one count of wire fraud.
According to the complaint, Haggerty and two business partners formed At Diagnostics in March 2020 to sell PPE. Two large university hospitals – one in Chicago and the other in Iowa City, Iowa – ordered a combined one million N95 face masks from the company.
As a deposit on the masks, the hospitals paid more than $3 million into a bank account that Haggerty falsely represented as an At Diagnostics account but which was actually solely controlled by Haggerty.
When At Diagnostics failed to deliver the masks on time, Haggerty allegedly falsely claimed to one hospital that his bank had no record of the payment being received. After his business partners confronted Haggerty about the whereabouts of the money, Haggerty altered a bank statement to make it appear as if the funds had never been received, the complaint states.