Attorneys for former Glock Inc. CEO Paul Jannuzzo, charged with embezzling millions of dollars from the company, opened his defense Wednesday with a former IRS investigator refuting one of the charges that involving $1.89 million.
The defense witness, Art McGovern, spent 21 years tracking down perpetrators of financial crimes before retiring and starting a private financial investigations firm in Gainesville.
McGovern handed each Cobb County juror a three-ring binder containing copies of checks, deposit slips and bank account records that have already been admitted into evidence. He used the notebooks and several flow charts he created to walk the jury through how he tracked $1.89 million that Jannuzzo and another former Glock executive, Peter Manown, are accused of siphoning from a Glock bank account in 1997.
McGovern testified $1.8 million of the $1.89 million was later transferred back into a bank account controlled by the gun manufacturing company's founder, Gaston Glock. The remaining $90,000 was used by Manown to pay off his American Express credit card, pay his personal taxes and to make a deposit in a personal investment account, McGovern said.
"Jannuzzo never received a penny," McGovern said.
Jannuzzo, 55, is accused of conspiring with Manown to divert millions of dollars from Glock between 1991 and 2003 using cloned bank accounts, forged documents, and fraudulently obtained loans.
Manown has pleaded guilty to three counts of theft. He was sentenced to 10 months of probation, and no jail time, in exchange for giving prosecutors a statement about the alleged embezzling activities.
McGovern, who took the stand late Wednesday, has not yet addressed other counts of theft alleged in the indictment. He is expected to continue testifying Thursday.
Defense attorney Robert Citronberg told jurors during his opening statement that "the evidence will show Mr. Jannuzzo did absolutely, positively nothing wrong while at Glock."
A former Glock attorney, Kevin Connor, testified that Jannuzzo contacted him a few weeks after quitting Glock in 2003. Jannuzzo disclosed that he had several guns in his possession and wanted Connor to check whether the company's internal paperwork accurately reflected the whereabouts of those guns.
Jannuzzo is charged with stealing a custom LaFrance pistol that Glock at one time had loaned out to him, and that pistol was one of the ones Jannuzzo called him about on that day, Connor testified.
Connor said that when he attempted in 2003 to check Glock paperwork about the guns, Gaston Glock's son, Robert, told him not to talk to Jannuzzo. Connor said Robert Glock intended to handle the matter personally, but to his knowledge, Robert Glock never followed up on it.
"It was a joke that anybody who left [Glock] was kind of treated as a criminal," Connor said. "Quite often people I respected were kind of vilified for leaving Glock."
The trial is in Cobb County because Glock's North American headquarters are in Smyrna.
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