Trial begins for accused ex-trustee Tom Delanty

To Jim Huegli, Tom Delanty "walked on water."

Not only was Delanty married to a woman who had grown up next door to Huegli's mother, Nancy Huegli, but Delanty also claimed to possess an alphabet soup of titles and degrees: CEO, CPA, CFO and MBA.

Delanty seemed like the perfect person to help Huegli's aging mother with her financial affairs, he testified Wednesday on the first day of Delanty's trial on 29 counts of theft.

The problem, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Scott Peterson told the court, was that Delanty and his professional pedigree were false. Instead of befriending the then-90-year-old woman, he was stealing her assets, Peterson said during his opening statement.

At the time, Delanty was Huegli's financial adviser and a Whitworth College trustee. He also claimed to be head of an international company with 3,000 employees, which Delanty admitted in earlier court proceedings was not true.

Delanty is accused of stealing $150,000 from Nancy Huegli from 2000 to 2005. Huegli now has dementia and lives in a Gig Harbor nursing home, but her testimony was videotaped several years ago and will be played for the jury.

Delanty's attorney, Richard Hansen, said that Delanty befriended Huegli and performed hours of work on her behalf and that the money was partial payment for his services. Hansen said Delanty "was her surrogate son," and insisted the dispute over money should be regarded as a civil, not a criminal, matter.

Huegli kept a photo of Delanty and his family on the mantel, but what started out as a warm relationship between neighbors, took a turn in the mid-1990s when Delanty began doing Huegli's taxes after her husband's death, Jim Huegli testified. The Hueglis were well-off and enjoyed life in their modest Bellevue home. But as Nancy Huegli aged, she depended on Delanty more, Peterson said.

Delanty advised her to leave her stockbroker, with whom she'd had a long and successful relationship, Peterson said. Delanty told Jim Huegli that Susan Boyd, Jim's sister, said hurtful things about him and exploited old family wounds and, in the process, kept Huegli more isolated than ever, according to Peterson.

Delanty persuaded Huegli to make him head of a trust, removing her two children, court documents say. And by 2005, when she fired Delanty, because she wanted more control of her finances and asked for her documents back, he had keys to her safe-deposit box, her jewelry box, control of her checking account and the trust, her son said.

Although Nancy Huegli complained to her son about Delanty, Jim Huegli said he was hesitant to believe her. Delanty appeared to have credentials and Jim Huegli, a lawyer, valued those. He said Delanty also told him that his mother was increasingly not of sound mind.

When Jim Huegli asked Delanty for a bill for the time he had spent and was presented with a tab for $97,000, all but $22,000 of which had been paid by checks Delanty wrote himself from Nancy Huegli's account, Jim Huegli was alarmed, Peterson said.

Jim Huegli checked his mother's assets and found that three days before he requested the bill, Delanty also placed a lien on the house where Nancy Huegli had lived for 40 years. Jim Huegli found that his mother's accounts were empty, he told the court.

In addition to the criminal prosecution, the Hueglis filed a civil suit against Delanty in King County Superior Court. It wasn't the first time Delanty had been sued. Michiko Vincent, Gertrude Stostad, Charlotte Stirkins and Kathleen Moore, all elderly women, filed claims against him from the 1990s to 2007, after they allowed him to take control of their assets and found themselves broke, court records show.

David Chen, son of Frank Chen, who named Delanty as trustee of a fund set up to benefit David, who has cerebral palsy, also filed a lawsuit.

All have been settled except for Moore's suit, which was dropped.

Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522