Insurer paid off A $10,000 personal loan to United Public Workers state Director Gary Rodrigues was repaid by Hawaii Dental Service, not Rodrigues, a woman testified yesterday in federal court.
Rodrigues’ $10,000
loan, witness says
By Debra Barayuga
dbarayuga@starbulletin.comMarietta Loughrin, 83, wife of the late Allan Loughrin, who formerly worked in UPW's accounting office, said that she overheard her husband and Rodrigues discussing repayment of the loan one evening after dinner at Rodrigues' home in Bend, Ore.
"I heard Mr. Rodrigues telling my husband he was going to make my husband a consultant with HDS (Hawaii Dental Service), and he would receive checks every month" to repay the loan, she said.
Loughrin said to her knowledge, her husband did not do any consulting work for HDS or UPW after he retired.
But she acknowledged she was not aware of any communications between her husband and HDS and did not make it her business to ask her husband about the checks.
"I knew what it was for," she said.
Rodrigues is on trial in U.S. District Court on charges he negotiated medical, dental and life insurance contracts with inflated premiums and embezzled from the union by funneling consulting fees to companies owned by his daughter to benefit himself and family members.
His daughter, Robin Haunani Rodrigues Sabatini, is also charged with receiving and depositing consulting fees for work she allegedly did not perform.
During opening statements, Rodrigues' defense attorney Doron Weinberg denied that Rodrigues negotiated higher premiums so that his daughter could benefit. He said Sabatini did legitimate work for the UPW and was compensated.
Hawaii Dental Service had entered into a contract with UPW to provide alternative dental benefits to union members. The agreement factored in consulting and administrative fees, which is a customary practice, according to HDS officials who testified this week.
After her husband retired, Loughrin said, they moved into Rodrigues' Bend home in 1990 at Rodrigues' request because he wanted someone to "keep an eye on the place."
Rodrigues had purchased the property for himself and his then live-in girlfriend and secretary, Georgietta Carroll, who is Loughrin's daughter.
Under questioning by Weinberg, Loughrin said she could not remember when her husband began receiving the checks, and she never asked him about it. "He took care of it. I didn't want anything to do with it," she said.
"He didn't do anything for the dental people," she later added. "I know because he would tell me."
Earlier, she said the money her husband loaned Rodrigues came from $18,000 she received from her insurance company for an accident she was involved in some years before. She agreed to loan the money after her husband said Rodrigues wanted it to install a sprinkler system at his Bend property.
On Wednesday, Wesley Park, former president and chief executive officer of Hawaii Dental Service from August 1995 to 2000, said he met with Rodrigues shortly after he took over at HDS and asked him where to send the consulting fees that had accumulated.
Rodrigues instructed that HDS send the consulting fees to Four Winds RSK -- Sabatini's company on Kauai. In March 1996 a check for $25,381 for the period of January 1994 to December 1995 was sent to Four Winds.
Her employer, William Hancock, who ran an accounting firm, testified earlier that Sabatini did not form Four Winds until 1996 or 1997 and that she had been working for him full time prior to that.
Park said, under questioning by Weinberg, that the $25,000 in fees was HDS money -- not UPW money -- that was owed to UPW's consultant.
