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File photoWith his easy smile and warm handshake, 76-year-old Bob Libby is someone whom even strangers describe as a gentleman.
He was a successful businessman, keeping the books at top Portland companies.
He was a respected brother in fraternal organizations.
And to this day, he's a beloved husband and father. Since his wife's stroke in 2002, it has been Bob Libby helping her in and out of the wheelchair each day, year after year.
But Libby had a secret.
As the sole bookkeeper, he was stealing from the very groups that trusted him: the Maine Charitable Mechanic Association, Deering Masonic Lodge No. 183, the trustees for the Masonic Temple in Portland, and the Masonic Learning Center.
By the time Libby was caught in July 2006, checks were bouncing and the power was about to be shut off at the Maine Charitable Mechanic Association building on Congress Street.
Prosecutors charged him with theft of nearly half a million dollars. In court, Libby confessed to embezzling the money and said it was a problem that got out of hand. On Nov. 6, he was sentenced to nine months in jail.
But the true character of Libby remains a puzzle.
How could this model citizen, a man with no criminal past, steal so much from the people who trusted him most?
Emotional pleas from Libby's daughter and his wife to the judge, along with a 10-page memo written by his lawyer, painted a picture of a devoted husband who made a terrible choice. Gerard Conley Jr. said his client used nearly every penny of the stolen money to pay for home health care for his disabled wife, so the couple would not be separated.
Jack Gray, the close friend who uncovered the scheme, doesn't want to hear it.
He bristles at the fact that Libby has been free since the embezzlement was discovered. Libby cooperated with investigators, so he was never taken into custody. There was never any bail imposed.
"We trusted him," said Gray, who went to Deering High School in Portland with Libby in the late 1940s. "We've been betrayed for years. He's the biggest con artist that ever came down the pike."
Libby, when contacted by telephone, declined to comment for this story.
'WE HAD ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA'
Susan Jodice said her father taught her to follow the rules.
And until last year, she thought he lived by the same ones.
"We had absolutely no idea" what was going on, she said. Libby telephoned Jodice, his only child, last summer.
He said he was in trouble.
"It just blew us away. This is not a person that is a thief," said Jodice, an elementary school teacher who lives in South Windsor, Conn.
After the secret was revealed, Jodice tried to rationalize what her father had done. Maybe he was developing dementia or Alzheimer's disease, she thought.
"I don't condone anything that he did. Not any of it," Jodice said in a telephone interview from her home. "The funny thing is, he brought me up not to condone anything like that."
Libby was the nephew of renowned Deering High School principal Carleton Wiggin, and he served three years in the U.S. Air Force after graduating. He studied business at the University of Maine, where he was treasurer of his fraternity. In the career that followed, Libby worked for Portland Pipeline Corp., Maine Research Corp. and E.C. Jordan Co. He worked throughout the 1980s for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maine, retiring in 1992.
Family and business were two major components of Libby's life leading up to last year.
A third was the fraternal community in Portland, notably the Masons and the Maine Charitable Mechanic Association. Both of those groups own buildings in Portland and perform a variety of philanthropic work. They rely on investments, dues, donations and gifts from wills.
COMPLETE CONTROL OF THE BOOKS
Libby had become a member of the Deering Masonic Lodge No. 183 as a young man, and he invited Gray to join.
The brothers knew Libby as a great teller...
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