Elderly mother of former Virginia state lawmaker indicted on felony embezzlement charges

Dec. 13--The 89-year-old mother of a late former state lawmaker is accused of stealing more than $180,000 over a three-year stretch from an American Legion Women's Auxiliary in Hampton, where she had been treasurer for more than four decades.

Anna S. Gear -- who lives in a nursing home and turns 90 in February -- was indicted by a Hampton grand jury on Dec. 2 with eight counts of felony embezzlement from American Legion Auxiliary Unit 48 between February of 2015 and May of 2018.

One of Anna Gear's sons said that "all of the money" went to another son, former state Del. Thomas D. "Tom" Gear, to feed his gambling addiction. It came to light, he said, when Tom Gear died by suicide in June 2018.

"He was a compulsive gambling addict of the worst kind," said Donald "Don" Gear, 58, of Hampton. "Sports gambling and day trading on the stock market on the margin. He would go to casinos. And he frequently did all three of these things at the same time ... He had a bookmaker and was always going to Atlantic City."

Anna Gear -- who had a stroke 12 years ago, is partially paralyzed on the left side and uses a wheelchair -- was served with the paperwork Thursday at the Newport News nursing home where she lives.

A Hampton magistrate went there rather than making her to go to the Hampton City Jail for booking. She was given a Jan. 6 court date and released on her own recognizance.

The indictments don't detail the dollar amount she's accused of taking, but Deputy Hampton Commonwealth's Attorney Ryan Zerby said it was "in the range of $180,000 to $190,000."

Documents from the American Legion's auxiliary say Tom Gear later repaid $62,000, reducing the loss to roughly $128,000.

Anna Gear is the widow of the late Thomas J. Gear, a prominent Hampton businessman who served on the City Council for four years, including two years as Hampton's mayor. He died in 1992.

Their son Tom Gear served on the Hampton City Council for three years, then was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates between 2002 and 2010. He developed a reputation as an outsider, a populist Republican with an independent streak.

He resigned shortly before the 2011 General Assembly session as he battled with multiple sclerosis and cared for his wife, Janice, who died in 2014.

The American Legion is a nonprofit wartime veterans service organization, with some 12,000 posts around the country. Its website says it was "chartered and incorporated by Congress in 1919 as a patriotic veterans organization devoted to mutual helpfulness."

Anna Gear joined the American Legion Auxiliary Unit 48, on East Mellen Street in the city's Phoebus section, in the 1950s, when she was in her 20s. She was the unit's treasurer for more than 40 years, and was the auxiliary's national president in the 1980s.

"She never had a problem, never had a shortage, never had a dime missing, period," Don Gear said. "Then she moved in with my brother and boom, it all blew up."

Anna Gear's attorney, Ron Smith, said that Tom Gear told his mother in recent years that he needed the money to pay for various medical expenses.

Smith said Tom also touted the "loans" as a good financial investment for the auxiliary: He gave his mother promissory notes vowing to repay the money at much higher interest rates than the organization was getting on its certificates of deposits.

Though Tom Gear initially began making payments, Smith said, he later stopped.

"He played on her emotions as a mother to get her to do it," Smith said. "And he made her believe it was a sound investment. But she didn't get anything out of it. She is a victim, much like the American Legion."

A few years ago, Tom Gear talked his mother into doing a "reverse mortgage" on her $541,000 waterfront home on North Willard Avenue -- which she bought with her husband 38 years ago -- and had her move into his much smaller house on Harris Creek Road.

"He told her that she needed to do it because the IRS was going to take the house and 'We're going to be homeless,'" Don Gear said.

A reverse mortgage allows homeowners to gain access to their home's equity, but Tom Gear quickly blew through all the proceeds, his brother said. Their mother lost the home to the bank in 2017.

"Half of that was my inheritance," Don Gear said. "He decided it was his."

Now, Smith said, Anna Gear is destitute, living in the nursing home on Social Security. "He took her for everything she had," Smith said. "She has absolutely nothing."

One morning in June 2018, Dominion Energy workers found Tom Gear, 69, sitting in his car in an industrial area near the river in York County. He was dead of a single gunshot wound. Medical examiners concluded he died by suicide.

Tom Gear once owned a commercial printing business, Gear-Up Printing on North Armistead Avenue, and also owned a Bingo hall on East Mercury Boulevard.

Don Gear says he doesn't know how much his brother lost to gambling, but said he has documents showing he lost $1.9 million to stock market day trading over four years. When Tom Gear died, he said, he had only about $200 in a checking account to his name.

"He knew it was all going to be exposed," Don Gear said. "All the money was gone."

Jackie Coffman, an executive board member and past president of the American Legion's Auxiliary Unit 48 -- and a paralegal at a Williamsburg law firm -- said that after Tom Gear's death, Don Gear brought over a cardboard box of his mother's checks and handwritten ledgers.

"The girls did a quick audit," she said.

They soon noticed "missing money" and several large checks that Anna Gear wrote to Tom Gear's company, TNT Entertainment Inc. They also discovered that 15 of the American Legion Auxiliary's certificates of deposits (CDs) had been cashed in.

According to the auxiliary's bylaws, Coffman said, all expenditures are supposed to be voted on by quorums at monthly meetings -- typically attended by about 15 or 20 women -- after motions and discussions.

She said the CDs were purchased decades ago with money from the auxiliary's regular Bingo fundraisers, held at Tom Gear's hall on East Mercury Boulevard. "The money had been there a long time," Coffman said. "But we didn't really know how much money we had since she would never tell us."

Over the years, Coffman said, American Legion Auxiliary members would often ask Anna Gear about the CD's, and how much they were worth.

"She would tell us that the only people who need to know about them" were the women who worked the Bingo games with her years ago. But those women, Coffman said, "had no idea" about them, either.

When the problems were discovered, some auxiliary members reported that matter to the Hampton Police in August 2018. But early on, Coffman said, auxiliary members didn't agree on what to do.

"Some of us wanted her to be held accountable and didn't want her to get away with it," she said. "Others didn't want to do anything with it. They said she had a stroke, and they didn't want to put the family through anything else after Tommy died, and they felt bad for Tommy's kids, too."

In February, Hampton Police Detective Brandt Hess wrote a memorandum to auxiliary leaders citing various concerns about moving forward. That included Anna Gear's age, physical and mental health, and inability to pay any restitution "due to the circumstances her son left her."

"The desired effect to hold persons accountable is a cornerstone of our combined justice system, but so is fair reasoning and compassion," Hess wrote, saying he "cannot foresee any judge or jury that will lock up this suspect."

But though Hess told the auxiliary that a civil action was more appropriate, he said he would move forward with the criminal investigation if the American Legion Auxiliary formally voted to make its intentions clear.

The auxiliary, which has about 40 members, did just that in March, with a resolution to proceed with a criminal case carrying unanimously. On March 25, Coffman wrote to Hampton Police Chief Terry Sult, Commonwealth's Attorney Anton Bell and the Virginia State Police.

"We feel the Hampton Police Department has not done its job and is trying to discourage us from having this investigated because of the publicity it might bring," she wrote in part. "Our unit is requesting a full criminal investigation and prosecution."

The investigation then continued under a different detective, Robert Hipple.

In the Dec. 2 indictments, Anna Gear is accused of committing eight counts of felony embezzlement -- two in 2015, two in 2016, three in 2017, and one in May 2018. Each is punishable by up to 20 years behind bars.

The auxiliary still has a few CDs left from the Bingo days and some other funds. "But we've had to budget ourselves after all this happened," she said. "We've had to cut back on a lot."

The auxiliary donates to veterans programs, she said, and traditionally funds four annual college scholarships of $1,000 apiece. They also sponsor up to eight Hampton high school students to attend "Girls State," a program to teach girls about citizenship.

Don Gear, for his part, contends that his mother didn't grasp that his brother was ripping her off. "She believed everything he told her," he said. "That was her oldest son. He planned it out. He knew what to say and when to say it."

Don Gear said Tom told him in a suicide note before he died that "he hoped that I would take care of our mother." But he wishes his brother did that, too, saying "he took her life savings" and forced her out of the home she could be living in for the rest of her days.

"You just don't do that to your mother," he said. "You just don't do it to another human being. He went right after her vulnerability." Now, he says, "she just sits there and cries."

But Coffman said Anna Gear is to blame as well.

"She knew what she was doing," Coffman said. "She's competent. And she could have said no. She wrote the checks. Tommy didn't write them. She did."

If Anna Gear felt pressured, Coffman said, she should have someone else become treasurer, "and that would have stopped it."

Smith, Anna Gear's lawyer, visited her at her Newport News nursing home this week, describing her as "shaken" and "heartbroken" with the recent turn of events.

"She's had a wonderful life," he said, "and she can't believe this is happening at the end of it."

Peter Dujardin can be reached at 757-247-4749 or [email protected]

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