Craig Hone

A Westmoreland County man will be heading to state prison when he is sentenced after pleading guilty Wednesday in county court to stealing nearly $700,000 from his former employer.

Craig M. Hone, 53, of New Kensington pleaded guilty to felony theft by deception before Judge William Shaffer.

The plea agreement calls for a sentence of 1 to 2 years in a state correctional facility.

His parole will be followed by probation, the length of which is at the judge's discretion at the time of sentencing, and could be a maximum of 18 years.

Hone will also be ordered to pay court costs, fines and $683,768.30 in restitution.

He is scheduled for sentencing on Feb. 20.

State police filed the charges after Hone was accused of stealing nearly $700,000 from Cygnus Manufacturing, where he worked for more than 10 years, by submitting more than 200 fraudulent invoices.

During his employment, police said, Hone was responsible for purchasing, receiving, shipping, inventory management and production scheduling.

In his capacity with the business, according to court documents, Hone had the “ability to generate purchase orders, receive inventory from purchase orders and perform the receipt of inventory into the system and perform inventory adjustments within the system to write-off inventory items.”

Investigators said Hone submitted bogus invoices to the company between June 2009 and July 2016, after creating a fraudulent vendor, Tailored World Travel, for products that were never received.

The scheme was discovered after an October 2016 internal analysis.

Tailored World Travel was a “personal company” that Hone started, said police. The company, however, provided no goods or services, and police could find no record of it, short of a post office box and bank accounts.

A search warrant of that banking information turned up copies of checks issued by Cygnus to Tailored World Travel.