Former financial professional for Philly Pops, Jewish Exponent pleads guilty to embezzling more than $1.4M

A former financial director for the Philly Pops and the Jewish Exponent admitted Tuesday that she stole more than $1.4 million from the nonprofits and used the stolen funds to pay off thousands in credit card debt.

Cheryl Lutts, 43, of Philadelphia, told a federal judge that the funds went to cover expenses for travel and lodging, legal services, and funeral costs, among dozens of more mundane things like her cell phone and utility bills.

“Did you do what the government said you did?” U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage asked Lutts as she pleaded guilty to 24 counts of mail and wire fraud.

Lutts, seated next to her attorney at the defense table, replied with a single word: “Yes.”

As a result of her guilty plea — which did not come as part of a deal struck with prosecutors — Lutts now faces up to 20 years in prison on the most serious count at a sentencing hearing Savage scheduled for October.

She offered little in court Tuesday to explain what prompted her embezzlement. Her attorney Maranna J. Meehan acknowledged that her client was currently undergoing outpatient treatment for opioid addiction.

Lutts’ pattern of theft, which stretched over four years and across two high-ranking positions with notable nonprofits, was all the more remarkable for the serious financial struggles both organizations were facing in the years before she was hired.

Roughly a year before Lutts started her job as director of business operations for the Exponent — the second-oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper in the United States and a subsidiary of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia — the publication was forced to lay off its entire 15-member editorial staff in the face of losses averaging $300,000 a year.

And within months, Lutts began using her position to drain its accounts of $1.2 million starting in 2016. She hid her graft by doctoring bank statements presented to her employers and secretly taking out a corporate credit card in her name.

The federation fired Lutts in 2019 for unrelated performance issues and it was her replacement who discovered the financial anomalies she left in her wake, the organization’s executives have said.

By that time, Lutts had already landed a new job working as the controller for the Philly Pops, the largest standalone popular music orchestra in the country and a nonprofit that had emerged from bankruptcy just seven years before.

There, too, prosecutors say Lutts stole — a total of $254,617.

At the time of Lutts’ arrest last year, a Pops spokesperson said the nonprofit had fired her months before after discovering “questionable transactions” during a routine review of its books. Even as the Pops were investigating their own losses, the FBI reached out to them regarding the problems that had surfaced at the Exponent.

Both the Exponent and the Pops cooperated with the investigation.