Randall Swartz Imprisoned For Agri-Mark Theft

The United States Attorney for the District of Vermont announced that Randall Swartz, 59, of Orleans, was sentenced yesterday in United States District Court in Rutland to 48 months of imprisonment following his guilty plea to a charge of mail fraud.  Chief Judge Geoffrey Crawford also ordered that Swartz serve three years of supervised release following completion of his prison term and pay restitution in the amount of $452,558. 

According to the charging information to which Swartz pleaded guilty, until January 2017 when he was fired, Swartz was employed as the maintenance manager at Agri-Mark’s cheese-making plant in Cabot.  As maintenance manager, Swartz was responsible for maintaining, repairing and replacing all machinery and equipment at the Cabot site.  The maintenance budget amounted to several hundred thousand dollars each month.  Swartz also owned a side-business, Kingdom RO, which sold reverse osmosis systems that were used by producers of maple syrup to concentrate and purify maple sap.  Agri-Mark also employed reverse osmosis technology at its Cabot facility. 

The information charged that beginning no later than 2010 and continuing up to the time of his termination, Swartz defrauded Agri-Mark by causing the company to order reverse osmosis equipment that was too small for Agri-Mark to use in its cheese-making processes.  Instead, Swartz stole the equipment and installed it in smaller RO systems he sold to clients of Kingdom RO.  Swartz further defrauded Agri-Mark by using company employees, on company time, to assemble and install these RO systems. 

At yesterday’s sentencing hearing, Judge Crawford found that Swartz caused a loss to Agri-Mark of not less than $452,558.  The Government had contended the loss actually was about $1.2 million. 

The sentence imposed by Judge Crawford represented a significant upward variance above the range called for by federal sentencing guidelines.  Swartz is currently in the custody of the Vermont Department of Corrections, where he has been held without bail since May 2018 while awaiting trial for murdering his wife.  In his sentence today, Judge Crawford ordered that Swartz’ federal sentence run concurrently with any sentence that may be imposed on the homicide charge.

This case was investigated by the Vermont State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations.

Swartz is represented by Richard Goldsborough.  The prosecutor is Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Waples.