Ex-Chester Housing Authority chief sentenced to 3 years for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars

The former head of the Chester Housing Authority was sentenced to more than three years in federal prison Monday for fleecing the cash-strapped agency out of nearly $545,000 meant to provide affordable housing in one of Delaware County’s most impoverished communities.

Norman D. Wise, 58, of Mullica Hill, apologized to the authority’s board and acknowledged that he and his deputy, Douglas E. Daniel, had steered work worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to a company in which they both held a secret financial stake.

Between 2019 and 2023, he and Daniel submitted more than 40 invoices to the authority they led — almost all of it billing for jobs that were never done or had already been completed by other contractors or salaried CHA employees.

“I selfishly and greedily schemed to benefit financially by violating the trust that was bestowed upon me,” Wise told U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone during his sentencing hearing in federal court. “There is no bigger regret in my life than embarking down this path and willfully using the power and privilege that I had to help … fill my own coffers.”

But Beetlestone balked at Wise’s pleas to be spared prison time because of his remorse and long tenure with the agency.

“Your actions were not a momentary lapse in judgment — they took place over years,” she said. “You knew what you were doing was wrong. You traded on the respect you earned over years at the Chester Housing Authority, and you betrayed that trust.”

Wise’s punishment came eight months after he pleaded guilty to counts of theft and wire fraud in connection with the scheme. His crimes are the latest setback for the struggling Chester Housing Authority, which has suffered under mismanagement, lack of funding, and court-ordered monitoring for much of the last three decades.

In fact, when Wise accepted his first job with the agency as a property manager in 1998, the Chester Housing Authority had been operating under the management of a court-appointed receiver for four years after a finding by a federal judge that it had allowed much of its affordable housing stock to become uninhabitable through inattention and lack of necessary repairs.

That judge, U.S. District Judge Norma Shapiro, spent much of the next two decades monitoring the Chester Housing Authority’s spending and upkeep on the 801 affordable housing units it maintains in 12 locations across the city.

She eventually handed control of the agency back to its board in 2015. And after her death in 2016, the housing authority renamed its headquarters in Shapiro’s honor.

Four years later, its board appointed Wise, a U.S. Army veteran with a long tenure at the authority, as its director of public housing. But by then, he and Daniel had already embarked on their scheme to skim money from the authority’s coffers.

Prosecutors said much of the work that Wise and Daniel billed the authority through their company, Trinity Management Group, was for small jobs like landscaping work or window replacement that would not attract much scrutiny from the authority’s board. But in phone conversations, secretly recorded by authorities, Wise left little doubt as to what he and Daniel were up to.

“TMG hasn’t done any real work, Doug,” the housing authority director said in one 2022 call, quoted in government court filings. “I know that is all BS. Yes, that’s illegal. Yes, it is fraud. Yes, it is.”

Since the discovery of Wise’s crimes and the authority’s decision to fire him in 2023, Chester Housing Authority officials say they have unearthed several other ways in which mismanagement by Wise has left the organization to suffer.

He artificially inflated tenant occupancy rates and caused lengthy delays in turning vacated units for reoccupancy, the authority’s general counsel Mary M. Zissimos said in a letter to the court. He also failed to complete tenant rent changes for many units, allowing inflated debts to accrue on the housing authority’s books for years.

“These men eroded trust within our organization, harmed morale among our employees and damaged our reputation in the eyes of the public,” Zissimos wrote. “It will take CHA — and the people of Chester — years to fully recover.”

Daniel is set to be sentenced Tuesday for his own role in the embezzlement scheme as well as a separate bribery scheme in which he has admitted to accepting more than $34,000 in bribes from Lester Coleman, a contractor seeking work with the agency.

Wise, too, received more than $42,000 in kickbacks from Coleman in exchange for steering CHA contracts worth $2.5 million his way. But Wise was not charged in connection with that crime, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Louis D. Lappen, because he withdrew from the bribery arrangement with Coleman in 2017, and by the time authorities discovered it, the statute of limitations had expired.

Still, as the former housing authority director sat in court Monday, he acknowledged the irony that his sentencing was taking place in Shapiro’s old courtroom at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia. He spent the proceeding at the defense table under her official portrait — fixed by the painted gaze of the woman who’d spent much of her career on the bench seeking to transform the agency he once led.

It was another judge — Beetlestone — who would ultimately dole out his punishment. In addition to a 37-month prison term, she ordered Wise to pay back the more than $545,000 he and Daniel stole.

“You were a public official,” she said. “You did not live up to those duties and responsibilities.”