In U.S. District Court in Erie yesterday, a former car dealer was sentenced to 51 months in prison, two years of supervised relief, and a $5,000 fine for his guilty plea to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. 52-year-old Andrew Gabler was also ordered to pay $1,696,210 in restitution to Indiana-based S&T Bank.
Gabler was the owner of Lakeside Auto Sales and Lakeside Chevrolet, which were liquidated to help S&T recover some of its approximately $1.88 million in losses. Investigators found that over a four-year period starting in January of 2015, he and his finance manager, Chad Bednarski, falsified documents indicating that customers had made down payments and that they had inflated customers’ incomes on loan applications. Gabler also sold extended warranties to customers and kept the money rather than turn it in, and he and Bednarski falsely reported sales to GM in order to collect rebates. The two did not inform S&T of the sale of vehicles under the bank’s floor plan financing program in an attempt to delay and avoid making payments to the bank.
Gabler’s attorney asked Judge Susan Paradise Baxter for a sentence of no more than a year of house arrest, saying he was only “robbing Peter to pay Paul” in order to keep his failing businesses afloat. Assistant U.S. Attorney Christian Trabold countered that Gabler was “really robbing Peter to pay Andy.”
Gabler and Bednarski were each indicted in 2019 by a federal grand jury on seventeen criminal counts. They initially pleaded not guilty but agreed to a plea deal reducing the charges to a single count for each of them. Bednarski is scheduled to be sentenced today.
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