Former Art Institute of Chicago Payroll Manager Gets Prison Time for $2 Million Embezzlement

Michael Maurello, a onetime payroll manager at the Art Institute of Chicago, on November 16 was sentenced to three years in prison for misappropriating some $2.3 million over a thirteen-year span. As well, he will have to pay back to the institution the money he stole. Maurello had been indicted in January on two counts of wire fraud and two counts of bank fraud stemming from allegations that he had diverted funds from the payroll account to his own personal coffers between 2007 and 2020. He pleaded guilty to a single count of wire fraud this past April. Maurello’s transgressions came to light in 2019, when a financial review of the Art Institute turned up evidence of unusual activity in the payroll account.

The museum launched an internal review and discovered that he had been falsifying employee payments and skimming money to finance jewelry purchases and trips to Las Vegas and Hawaii. In delivering the sentence, US District Judge Manish Shah characterized Maurello’s actions as in violation of the “basic trust that keeps society from falling into anarchy.”RelatedINUVIALUK ARTIST KABLUSIAK WINS CANADA’S SOBEY ART AWARDMARIËT WESTERMANN BECOMES FIRST WOMAN TO LEAD GUGGENHEIM GROUP “I truly apologize for what I did,” a “visibly distressed” Maurello told those assembled at the sentencing, theChicago Tribunereported. “The Art Institute was good to me, and I took advantage of that.” Maurello had originally faced up to thirty years in prison for each of the two bank fraud charges and twenty for each of the two wire fraud charges. The single charge to which he admitted typically carries a minimum sentence of four years. Instead, the guilty grifter will spend three years in a prison medical facility, followed by three years of supervised release.

His attorney, Frank Cece Jr., noted that since the start of the investigation, Maurello, who broke his neck as a teenager, lost a leg to gangrene and was deserted by his husband of twenty years. Cece described his client, who at the time of sentencing was residing in an assisted living facility, as “the shell of a former man.”.