Court upholds prison time for Chelsea woman convicted of sucking her elderly uncle's accounts dry

A Chelsea woman was fairly convicted and sentenced to 4 1/2 years in federal prison for draining her loving, yet eccentric uncle's accounts nearly dry over two years, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

A jury in US District Court in Boston had convicted Jayne Carbone in October, 2021 of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft for the ways she stole from her uncle, which included poorly done fraudulent documents that gave her complete control over two of his financial accounts, letting her abscond with more than $500,000.

To get to its conclusion that Carbone received a fair trial, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston first recounted her uncle Wayne Kerr's life and how he had managed to retire with more than $500,000 - which included storing money in a safe, shoe boxes and other spots around his house, because he didn't trust banks.

Born in 1941, Kerr was a longtime resident of Chelsea Massachusetts, where he resided in a first-floor apartment unit of a triple-decker home that he owned, and rented out, on Grove Street. Kerr enjoyed a stable professional life, first working as an assistant manager for a local grocery store chain for twenty-four years before later managing the Chelsea Community Center (also known as the Chelsea YMCA or just simply the Chelsea Y) until his eventual retirement in 2016. Upon his retirement Kerr's income consisted of social security, pension checks, and rental income from his second- and third-floor Grove Street apartment units. Kerr was also a modest man. He did not gamble regularly purchase clothes, invest in the stock market, take frequent vacations, use recreational drugs, or drink often. Instead, he was described as a homebody. For reasons that will soon become clear, it's important to note that like many members of his generation, Kerr was not a technologically savvy man. He used neither email nor computers, and did not own a cell phone, or fax machine. Nor did he utilize credit cards or a checkbook. Instead, Kerr relied on tried-and-true methods, such as snail mail and cash, to conduct his affairs.

Kerr also possessed a peculiar relationship with money. His idiosyncrasies are probably best illustrated through his miserly saving habits that led him to shower at the Chelsea Community Center and collect his urine in a container, instead of flushing the toilet, to save money on his water bill. Kerr also mistrusted banks, leading him to store large sums of cash - $10,000.00 to $20,000.00 at a time - in his home safe, suitcase, and various shoeboxes. Yet, Kerr was also incredibly generous with his family and friends, often treating them to fine dinners and cash gifts. By the time he retired, Kerr had managed to accrue more than $500,000 consisting of: $160,265.50 in a Nationwide Life Insurance annuity account ("Nationwide account"); $330,560.76 in a Citizens Bank account; and a large sum of cash in his home safe.

Finally, Kerr also relied on familial assistance to conduct his personal affairs. Beginning with his mother, then his late sister (Carbone's mother), and eventually Carbone (we'll get to her shortly), Kerr depended on the women in his family to assist him with his chores. These tasks included, amongst other things, running errands, doing his laundry, cleaning, cooking, shopping, banking, prescription pickup, and postal business. Near the end of his life, Kerr also suffered from Parkinson's disease and stage four metastatic cancer.

And one of those women was Carbone, who lived in Kerr's triple decker and worked as his executive assistant at the Chelsea Y for 26 years.

Over the years, Kerr provided Carbone with ongoing financial assistance. For example, he paid for Carbone's first two vehicles, both of her weddings, IVF treatments, car repairs, gas, and various odds and ends. As she put it at trial, Kerr "just took care of me." ...

She also handled Kerr's finances, including hand delivering his bank statements to him, paying his bills, collecting his rental income, and setting up his bank accounts. As compensation for Carbone's considerable labor, Kerr acknowledged that he amended his will to leave Carbone the Grove Street property and also designated her the beneficiary of his Citizens Bank account.

And yet, prosecutors charged, it wasn't enough, the court continued. In 2016, she began making withdrawals from his accounts. She told the local mailman to put a hold on mail addressed to Kerr so he wouldn't see his bank statements. In all, she managed to withdraw some $511,000, the court said, continuing:

During this period, Kerr's finances weren't the only thing in flux. Carbone's relationship with her kinfolk became strained when, out of the blue, she started denouncing her family and questioning her lineage. Carbone also began displaying a noticeable socioeconomic status upgrade, evidenced by a recently purchased Lexus SUV, frequent vacations, and designer clothing and handbags. Additionally, she picked up a new trick of the fraudster trade: falsifying financial documents and bank statements, her mechanism for keeping Kerr in the dark about her thievery. Beyond the statements' inaccurate amounts, Carbone's manufactured false documents featured the marks of an amateur swindler, such as suspicious varying fonts, crooked and off-center numbers, and traces of white-out strips. By creating these phony documents, Carbone was able to falsely represent to Kerr that first, his Citizens Bank account had a balance of over $330,000 when, in actuality, it was in the red, and second, his Nationwide account had more than $160,000 when, in actuality, it contained a pittance, just $2,700. Her efforts to cover her tracks didn't end there. Further discovery revealed that Kerr's Citizens Bank account included a September 2017 letter purportedly authorizing Carbone to handle all of Kerr's banking transactions and granting her a durable power of attorney if Kerr became disabled or incapacitated.

But Carbone proved a bad swindler:

As is often said: What's done in the dark will come to light. That light shone on September 3, 2018, when Kerr called his nephew (Carbone's brother) "[d]evastated, depressed, [and] angry" after he'd spoken with a financial advisor at Citizens Bank. The bank's money-man informed Kerr that his accounts had been wiped out. Enlisting the help of a couple of other relatives — his niece and nephew (Carbone's sister and brother, respectively) — Kerr began reviewing and dissecting his financial records and bank statements and the fraud was unearthed. Yet, the identity of the perpetrator remained unknown until Carbone, while responding to inquiries about Kerr's funds, sent a series of texts implicating herself.

One of those texts read:

I will talk to you later if you want but for the immediate response I will start putting money back but I'm turning this around I'm not going to feel bad if he wants to do this and take some kind of action I am going to blow other shit up that is not going to be pretty.

A key issue in Carbone's appeal was a deposition Kerr gave as he lay dying in an assisted living center in 2021 - which was then introduced at her trial that fall, but without her lawyer's ability to cross-examine him because by then his health had declined so rapidly he was no longer able to hold a simple conversation, let alone testify in court; in fact, he died during the five-day trial. Kerr's testimony during his deposition was key government evidence at trial.

Carbone's attorney argued that the way the date of the deposition was pushed up because of Kerr's declining health meant an inadequate opportunity to fully grill him during that session and that the judge should not have allowed its introduction at trial because there was no opportunity for the lawyer to question whether Kerr could, in fact, testify - or attempt to show that he was already in such bad shape a few months earlier that his deposition was not really an interview with somebody who was all there.

The appeals court, however, said the judge used acceptable legal principals to allow the use of the deposition and that Carbone's case for blocking it on appeal fell apart because her lawyer provided no evidence of the specific information that might have bolstered Carbone's case that could have come out of the deposition had it been delayed.

Other than providing a general description of the perceived inconvenience of a slightly expedited deposition, Carbone does not point to, as our precedent requires, "specific, concrete ways" that the court's denial of her continuance motion actually prejudiced her defense. Id. Although she speculates that a continuance may have provided her more time to discover additional information about Kerr's finances and other activities, she does not point to any specific or concrete evidence, witness information, or strategy that she might have otherwise utilized had she been granted an additional few days.

Carbone is currently a resident of a federal halfway house in Brooklyn. After her release, scheduled for May 13, 2025, she will be on probation for three years.