Six-year prison term given to office manager who embezzled $200,000

A Newark woman who admitted to stealing more than $200,000 from a gynecologist in Union while she worked as his office manager was sentenced yesterday in Superior Court in Elizabeth to six years in state prison.

Ana Carla Oliveira, a 37-year-old mother of two, will be jailed because she was unable to make full restitution. Authorities said she regularly deposited insurance checks into her own account instead of the doctor's while running his office from March 2005 through February 2008.

Yesterday, Oliveira sobbed at the defense table as she told Superior Court Judge Joseph Donohue that she was sorry for the pain she had caused the doctor, Donato Russo, and his wife Maria, who sat in the court's gallery.

"I want to apologize to my family, my children," Oliveira said. "I just want to tell them I'm sorry for what I've done." Dressed in an orange sweater, black pants and high-heeled boots, she was later handcuffed and escorted out of the courtroom by two sheriff's officers.

The doctor described Oliveira as a manipulative liar. He said she threatened the employees working under her and decided how much they would be paid based on what they would do for her.

She sent flowers to his home on Christmas Eve, charged to his own credit card, he said. She flaunted an extravagant lifestyle, sporting designer clothes and a $6,000 watch, enrolling her children in private schools and attending Broadway shows, he said.

She took younger office employees to New York City clubs in a limousine, drove a BMW and enjoyed fancy vacations to Brazil or the Bahamas.

"This was all paid for on my tab, with stolen money," the doctor told the judge, as his wife leaned her head on her hands. It was money they had intended for their two small children's college education and their own retirement, Russo said.

The doctor said he confronted Oliveira with evidence of her theft on Feb. 14, 2008, after reviewing his finances. She initially denied everything, he said, but later pleaded guilty to a theft charge on May 26, according to Deputy First Assistant Prosecutor Anne Frawley.

Oliveira's defense attorney, Michele Labrada, told the judge her client was denied after applying for mortgages on the two properties she owns jointly with her husband. The couple is going through a contentious divorce and have two children, ages 12 and 5, who need her at home, Labrada said.

"She could not make the restitution, not for lack of trying, but because of other factors," the defense attorney said of the $161,476 Oliveira still must pay.

Oliveira, who says she has a business degree from Seton Hall University, was recommended for her job by her brother-in-law, also a gynecologist, Russo said. He had implicitly trusted her, in part because her husband is Portuguese and emigrated from the same hometown as Russo's wife.

But he said he gave her too much freedom while he was busy juggling many patients, working long days and delivering babies at all hours of the night. "I don't take lavish vacations like she did," Russo said. "After she came back from these vacations, she bragged about them. I've lost faith in people; I can't trust people anymore. Now I have to practice medicine and be an accountant also. It's not fair. I didn't go to medical school to do both."