South Meck High boosters stole $200K and used COVID loans to cover tracks, feds say
On the website of a Florida nonprofit that serves the homeless, Anthony and Deana Sharper were portrayed as a success story — a couple who went from sleeping in a minivan with their children to entering college together and launching successful careers.
“The program was AWESOME for our family,” Deana Sharper said in her account of the family’s rise from near financial ruin. “We learned how to manage our money, create budgets for our household, and save properly.”
New federal court filings attribute a different set of personal financial skills to the Charlotte couple — all of them criminal.
In an eight-count indictment unsealed Wednesday, the Sharpers are accused of embezzling at least $200,000 from a Charlotte-area high school booster club, then using COVID-relief business loans to cover their tracks.
The Observer has learned that the victimized booster club was at South Mecklenburg High School, where Anthony Sharper Sr. was club president and Deana Sharper served as the concession stand and school store coordinator, court filings show.
Now, both are charged with wire fraud, which carries up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Anthony Sharper, a certified public accountant, also is accused of a rash of additional crimes, ranging from making false statements to a financial institution to filing a false tax return. If convicted of all charges, he faces decades in prison and millions of dollars in financial penalties.
In their filings, prosecutors had said they also will be pursuing up to $436,000 that the couple pocketed from their criminal acts. The couple are scheduled to make their first court appearance June 2.
Anthony Sharper did not respond to an email Wednesday seeking comment for this story. His attorney, Chris Young of Washington, said his client had no comment Wednesday.
The couple’s Facebook pages, which teemed with photographs of themselves and their children, had been disabled by 4 p.m. So had the Sharpers’ first-person account, highlighted by the Florida nonprofit, of overcoming their financial struggles two decades ago.
South Meck principal Glenn Starnes and school athletic director Jose Garcia also did not respond to Observer emails or phone calls.
In a Thursday statement, booster club co-president Kriss Anne Carlstrom said the Sharpers resigned from the club’s board last year, and that a series of “irregular transactions” were discovered and reported to the club’s bank. The club, she said, “cooperated fully” with the resulting investigation, which included the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. postal authorities.
As detailed in the 13-page indictment, the Sharpers slowly took charge of the booster club finances then drained money from the account for years. By 2019, they were the only authorized signatories on the club’s checking account.
Over a three-year period starting in 2017, the Sharpers wrote more than $100,000 in checks to themselves from the account for fraudulent reimbursements, wired club money directly to their personal bank accounts and also used booster credit and debit cards to run up thousands of dollars in personal expenses in six states as well as during a trip to London, the indictment claims.
In some cases, their raids on the booster club’s money grew increasingly lavish — $5,000 for Charlotte Hornets tickets; almost $850 on meals at Ruth’s Chris; more than $20,000 in cash and ATM withdrawals, according to the indictment. Anthony Sharper then used at least $20,000 in booster club money to pay down the credit card charges he and his wife had been running up, prosecutors say.
In 2020, Sharper filed for pandemic-related economic relief for both the booster club and his own accounting firm. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, all three applications were built on fake revenue, payroll and employment numbers, leading to Sharper receiving $236,000 in relief loans from Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
In May, he used $40,000 of the federal loan money on South Meck’s playing fields, painting the offices of the school’s coaches and purchasing sports equipment, the indictment claims. He used another $25,000 of the money set aside for pandemic relief for businesses to pay down the outstanding balance on the booster club credit card.
Much of the rest of money, he used for unlawful business or personal expenses, prosecutors say, including almost $20,000 he used to buy a 2019 Honda Civic.
In May 2020, Anthony Sharper emailed booster club members a screen shot showing a $150,283 balance in the club account. In fact, according to the indictment, the actual number was $522.07.
That same month, according to the indictment, Sharper tried to dissolve the club.
This story was originally published May 19, 2021 at 6:09 PM.
