The owner of a Reno music store pleaded guilty Tuesday to staging a burglary and submitting forged documents to collect a hefty insurance settlement.
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Thomas Lee Deatherage, 45, faces up to eight years in prison after pleading guilty in Washoe District Court to insurance fraud and forgery. A July sentencing was scheduled. He remains free on bail while awaiting a June trial in federal court in Reno.
In the federal case, he is charged with multiple counts of bank fraud and aggravated identity theft for using his father's identity to obtain a $100,000 commercial bank loan.
Court records show that in October 2005, Deatherage filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and, months earlier, received about $200,000 from insurance claims for his business, Winchester Music, which he later named Western Music Sales and High Sierra Music Co., 148 Plumb Lane.
The Nevada attorney general's staff said restitution was set at $150,000. Court documents show victims claimed Deatherage stole about $280,000.
Deatherage pleaded guilty to fraudulently reporting to the Hartford Insurance Co. that someone in May 2006 had burglarized his storage facility in Sparks and stole a 50-inch plasma screen television, a computer laptop and musical instruments valued at nearly $100,000. He then created false invoices and receipts for the stolen property.
Months before he made the claim, the insurance company paid him more than $73,000 after he said someone burglarized his
store.
At the time, he reported the storage unit burglary, he had defaulted on commercial bank loans, was going through bankruptcy and the bank had seized many instruments that had been collateral for his loans, records show.
Other claims made against Deatherage in a criminal complaint included creating fake inventory, hiding inventory, paying maintenance workers to not make repairs on his store, creating phony receipts for merchandise he didn't have and generating false payroll records to show a higher loss to the insurance company.
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