Professor sentenced in fraud
If you were to pick a rising star among the faculty at Central Washington University, James Cadello might have come to mind.
The 42-year-old philosophy professor was dynamic, articulate and charismatic - so much so that his boss had picked him from dozens of candidates to sit on a select committee of young scholars.
"I chose him because of his intellectual vibrancy," recalled Liahna Armstrong, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities.
"In a lot of ways, he was quite a dashing figure."
And quite dishonest.
Cadello was given a six-month prison term Tuesday by a federal judge. He had pleaded guilty to identity theft - illegally using the Social Security numbers of former students to create false identities, open checking accounts and fraudulently apply for credit cards, even though he never used the cards.
His partner in crime was a female student with whom he became romantically involved when she was 19 and in one of his classes. Cadello, according to a search warrant filed in the case, had helped her get false ID so she could drink with him in bars.
The woman, now 22, was given immunity by prosecutors for her cooperation with federal investigators.
According to prosecutors, Cadello got names and Social Security numbers of unwitting students from the school computer and named them as "parents" of fictitious children whose Massachusetts birth certificates he forged. He then obtained new Social Security numbers with those names and used them to obtain various sets of ID and apply for credit cards.
The incident has cost the university thousands of dollars for a new computer system that lists students without using their Social Security numbers.
The case has also inflicted damage on what had been a stellar career. Hired in 1995, Cadello had earned tenure at CWU last year.
Before that, he had been a popular professor at Regis College in Denver, after earning both a master's degree and a doctorate from Purdue University.
Armstrong said Cadello was respected by his peers and published in the field of modern continental philosophy. He has taught classes on the history of philosophy, postmodernism and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
He was fired in May.
"It's really a tragedy," said his attorney, Mike Filipovic. "It's almost inexplicable how this happened. He was an extremely popular teacher. . . . I got more letters of support from students, colleagues and the like in this case as I have in any case in the past 10 years."
Filipovic, however, failed to persuade U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly to spare his client from prison, although Cadello never used the credit cards.
He maintained that Cadello concocted the scheme because he was nearly $40,000 in debt. He had gained control of his finances and abandoned plans to use the credit cards by the time he was arrested in February, the lawyer said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Edsonya Charles said agents from the Social Security Administration, FBI and Postal Service recovered more than 40 sets of false IDs from Cadello's Ellensburg home.
Charles said that although Cadello may never have used the documents, his blatant violation of students' privacy warranted the prison sentence.
"This was very traumatic for them," she said.
The state Social Security inspector general's office said the scheme was uncovered when an agency worker became suspicious of the number of applications for cards involving Massachusetts birth certificates.