Cherryville residents have gotten some closure this week.
The former finance director, Bonny Alexander, was sentenced Friday for embezzling more than $400,000 from the city.
And six Cherryville men, four with ties to law enforcement, have been sentenced for conspiring to transport stolen goods across the region.
But two more defendants must appear in front of a judge before the charges that rocked Cherryville can be put to rest.
FBI sting
Federal agents came to Cherryville in October 2012 to serve search warrants and make arrests.
Undercover agents had executed two sting operations that netted six Cherryville men.
One ring included Frankie Dellinger, Wesley Clayton Golden and Mark Ray Hoyle.
Dellinger was former narcotics detective with the Cherryville Police Department. Golden was a captain on reserve with the Gaston County Sheriff’s Office, and Hoyle was a friend introduced to the scheme by Dellinger.
Another operation resulted in charges against John Ashley Hendricks and then-Cherryville Police Officers Casey Justin Crawford and David Paul Mauney III.
Both groups of men offered to provide protection for truckloads of what they thought were stolen goods and money.
Each man pleaded guilty to the charges, and all have now been sentenced.
Dellinger got the stiffest sentence of three years in prison. Crawford got just under three years, and the others were sentenced to about a year and a half in federal prison.
Up next
Jennifer Hoyle, Cherryville’s former utilities director, has pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $100,000.
Hoyle’s illegal activity was not tied to Alexander’s.
Hoyle would accept cash payments from customers and issue paper receipts. She would credit the customers’ accounts with the payment, keep the cash, and then, by using her supervisory override privileges, go into the computer system to delete the transaction.
She used these tactics to take $92,922 from the city from January 2008 through May 2011.
Hoyle will be sentenced March 20.
Chief on standby
Former Cherryville Police Chief Woody Burgess will be the last to receive his sentence in the multiple investigations led by federal and state agents.
Burgess has pleaded guilty to embezzling $5,173 in checks and three guns from Cherryville.
Burgess was suspended when the other police officers were arrested, and he later resigned. Charges against him followed.
His sentencing has not yet been scheduled.
You can reach Diane Turbyfill at 704-869-1817 and twitter.com/GazetteDiane.