CSN construction theft case will progress with 30 charges, not 34

By Jeff German

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 | 2 a.m.

After keeping the criminal theft case against four College of Southern Nevada employees on hold for a month, District Judge Donald Mosley has decided it should proceed toward trial with 30 charges instead of 34.

Mosley said Tuesday he is tossing out four counts of “misconduct of a public officer” that had been filed against construction chief William “Bob” Gilbert. The judge wrote that after researching case law, he concluded that a college associate vice president is not a public officer in Nevada.

That leaves Gilbert facing 13 theft charges for allegedly using college equipment, materials and employees to build his Mount Charleston estate. Three men who worked under Gilbert in CSN’s Facilities Management Department — Thad Skinner, Matthew Goins and George Casal — are charged with assisting in the alleged thefts from January 2002 to June 2007. All four defendants remain on paid administrative leave, CSN spokeswoman K.C. Brekken said.

Their trial is scheduled to begin Dec. 7.

The prosecutor on the case, Chief Deputy Attorney General Conrad Hafen, could not be reached for comment Tuesday, and Gilbert’s attorney, John Momot, declined to comment.

In early June, Momot and the other defendants’ attorneys asked Mosley to dismiss all the charges. They argued that the attorney general’s office had withheld from the grand jury evidence favorable to the defendants. But Mosley found no merit to the brunt of that argument.

Defense attorneys also had contended that Anthony Ruggiero, the former lead investigator for the attorney general in the case, gave misleading testimony to the grand jury.

But in his findings, Mosley noted that after listening to recordings of Ruggiero’s interviews with witnesses and comparing them with the grand jury transcripts, he was “satisfied that no inaccuracies of any consequence” had occurred.

“Mr. Ruggiero in some instances quoted what was said in the interview and in other instances paraphrased that information, but all was done with reasonable accuracy,” Mosley said.

Mosley had scoffed this month at the defense claim that the charges should be dismissed because the attorney general failed to give the grand jury a CSN police report that found “no indication” of any college property at Gilbert’s Mount Charleston home.

Mosley called the police investigation “slipshod” and said it looked as if the college’s primary aim had been to contain fallout from a Las Vegas Sun story.

CSN Police Chief Sandy Seda sent his deputy chief and a sergeant to inspect Gilbert’s 4.26-acre estate several days after the March 26, 2007, newspaper story raised questions about the construction taking place.

“These people went up there to do a little damage control,” Mosley told defense attorneys during the hearing. “It was a rather self-serving investigation.”

The judge also shot down the defense claim that the indictment was faulty because Hafen failed to call two former CSN presidents to testify before the grand jury. Mosley said the two presidents likely would have harmed Gilbert more than helped him if Hafen had questioned them in front of the grand jury.