The wife of a former Canberra public servant struggled to make ends meet at home even as her husband stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from some of the city's most vulnerable citizens, a court heard on Thursday.
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Timothy Stewart McLeod, 36, was a gambler and a drinker, the court heard. He had "frittered away" the money, while hiding it from his wife.
Prosecutors say McLeod was the "architect" behind a scheme in which $1.1 million was stolen in five years from ACT Public Trustee clients.
But the scheme eventually unravelled while he was on holiday in America, and a colleague at trustee's office uncovered irregularities in McLeod's client's accounts.
McLeod, a trust officer, would arrange for his tradesmen friends Joshua Leighton and Stephen Evans - who were approved trustee contractors - to perform work for the trustee's clients. He would then pay the tradesmen from the client's accounts. But the work was never done, and the money was split with him once it had been transferred into the contractor's account.
He would also buy televisions for nursing homes which already had them, and bought a MacBook laptop for an elderly client with dementia.
The amount McLeod took for himself was somewhere between $500,000 and $700,000, the court heard. He has pleaded guilty to four counts of theft.
At times choking back tears, his wife told the ACT Supreme Court that she started to notice in 2012 how money was tight for the couple, and that McLeod could no longer contribute to the mortgage. She started to notice his drinking, and that he spent most nights away from the family home.
"I felt it was harder to contain ... or not have a normal evening with friends without feeling like I had to interfere," she said, "trying to create boundaries to reign his drinking in."
She said they rarely spoke about what happened, but McLeod had since told her that he was "torn apart" by the events, and "that he's sorry for everything."
The couple now live with their two children in a small rural NSW town where they hold the licence for the local pub. She said she was forced to borrow money from her parents and that they made enough to cover the bills but not much more.
She told the court she knew her husband was going to jail and that she would continue to support him.
Prosecutor Anthony Williamson told the court that McLeod had "cynically and callously" exploited the inability of the trustee's clients to realise his crimes. He said that made the offences more serious, and he called for a sentence that firmly denounced his behaviour.
"It is bad enough to betray any employer's trust and use one's position to dishonestly appropriate money," Mr Williamson said, "But where the offending involves the appropriation of money being held on trust for some of society's most vulnerable members, i.e. the infirm, chronically ill and mentally impaired, the offending can be fairly described at particularly egregious."
McLeod's barrister Jack Pappas said that although prosecutors had called the man the architect of the plot, he pointed to the other offenders and said without receivers there would be no thieves. He said the man had facilitated justice by pleading guilty to the crimes and avoiding a lengthy trial.
Mr Pappas said the motivation behind the man's crimes was more complex than simply greed, and pointed to his addictive drives and desire to earn the respect of his colleagues and his wife.
The man's alcohol problem was extremely severe, the barrister said. He asked the judge to defer the sentence while McLeod, who also had diabetes, underwent a medically supervised detox at hospital before going into custody.
Justice John Burns agreed, and said he would deliver McLeod's sentence later this month.
McLeod is the last of four men to be sentenced for the theft. Evans and Leighton are currently serving time in prison, while Donald Savanahu avoided time behind bars.
