For Gregg Sunday, every day is Christmas.
The disgraced former business manager of the Scranton School District is free to rise from his own bed, sip coffee in his kitchen and drop off his wife, Joan, at her job in the district he defrauded.
Sunday is 58, retired, and his $79,000-a-year pension is the gift that keeps on giving, secured by a weak felony charge crafted to keep him out of jail and collecting checks from the taxpayers he ripped off.
Sunday deserved to go to prison, but had the “assets” to land a sugarplum plea deal. Prosecutors said his sentence — three years probation, $8,000 in restitution and the preservation of a $6,566-per-month state pension — was predicated on his cooperation. Sunday was the district’s top “financial watchdog” for 33 years. He knows where to dig for damning bones in the district’s financial graveyard.
Maybe Sunday gave prosecutors blockbuster evidence, but nearly eight months after he sashayed out of court sporting a smarmy grin, no one has been charged or put behind bars except a mechanic who once foolishly considered Sunday a friend.
Dan Sansky deserved to go to prison, and refused to cough up names of co-conspirators he said he didn’t have. He wakes up each day in a Lackawanna County Prison cell. The school district’s former “fleet manager” pleaded guilty to one felony count of theft by deception for billing repairs on district employees’ personal vehicles to taxpayers. Sunday, his wife, son and relatives had their cars serviced at Sansky’s West Elm Street garage at least 38 times, all on the public dime.
Sansky was locked up on Sept. 6. He holds a “light construction” job on work release and reports back to prison each evening. While Sansky, 68, serves a six- to 23½-month sentence for felony theft by deception, his 66-year-old wife battles lung cancer and COPD.
This morning, Lacka-
wanna County Court Judge Margaret Bisignani-Moyle will hear a request to allow Sansky to serve the rest of his minimum sentence — about three months — on house arrest. Tom Nolan, Sansky’s attorney, told me Tuesday that Mary Ann’s health has deteriorated and time is all Dan has left to give her.
Sansky sold two properties, including the garage raided by state police in 2018, and escrowed proceeds to pay $31,000 in restitution. Nolan said Sansky plans to retire. The business he built was liquidated to pay his debt to society and he’s eligible for Social Security — which Gregg Sunday will also be able to collect around the time his wife’s public pension checks begin.
Nolan will stand before the judge and plead for justice tempered by mercy. He will say, as he did at sentencing, that but for “one mistake,” Sansky lived an honorable life as a former Pennsylvania Army National Guard soldier, hard worker and loving husband, father and grandfather. Sansky is 68, and had no prior criminal record, a fact Moyle herself noted before sending him to prison.
Nolan will argue that although Dan Sansky deserved to go to prison, Mary Ann Sansky deserves to have her husband by her side as she fights for every sunrise she has left.
It’s an easy case to make.
If every day is Christmas for Gregg Sunday, justice and mercy demand that Dan and Mary Ann Sansky be together at home for what could be her last Christmas.
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, also notes that because his November sentencing was postponed, convicted former Scranton mayor Bill Courtright seems likely to spend the holidays at home. Contact the writer:
kellysworld@ timesshamrock.com, @cjkink on Twitter. Read his award-winning blog at
timestribuneblogs.com/kelly.