Expensive hobby....

Embezzler with stripper addiction gets 20-year term

By Craig Kapitan
[email protected]


Published 12:45 a.m., Saturday, September 3, 2011

An accountant who embezzled more than $500,000 from a San Antonio medical corporation over a three-year period, spending much of it on strippers, was sentenced Friday to 20 years in prison.

Mark Anthony Flores, 35, began the day by admitting to the theft and asking state District Judge Sid Harle to allow a jury to determine his punishment.

Defense attorney Demetrio Duarte asked the jury for probation, describing his client as someone who was “intoxicated” by women who would shower him with attention — as long as he kept buying them expensive gifts. Probation, he argued, would allow Flores to pay back Health Texas Medical Group.

But to pay the money back over a 10-year probation period, Flores would have to come up with more than $4,300 per month, prosecutor Patrick Ballantyne responded. Someone who would take so much money then spend it on such “an incredibly ridiculous lifestyle” deserves a 30-year term, he suggested.