Burr Ridge Suspect 'Inadvertently' Got Nearly $1M: Feds

BURR RIDGE, IL — The case is continuing against a Burr Ridge businessman who swindled two hospitals out of millions of dollars last year, according to federal prosecutors.

Last November, Dennis W. Haggerty Jr., 45, who had an office in Willowbrook, was charged with one count of wire fraud.

According to a criminal complaint, Haggerty and two business partners formed At Diagnostics in March to sell personal protective equipment. This happened just as the pandemic was starting.

Two big university hospitals — one in Chicago and the other in Iowa City, Iowa — ordered a combined 1 million N95 face masks from the company, the complaint said.

As a deposit on the masks, the hospitals paid more than $3 million into what Haggerty falsely claimed as an At Diagnostics bank account but actually was one solely controlled by himself, prosecutors said.

The complaint states Haggerty spent part of the hospitals' money for his own personal benefit, including buying two Maserati luxury cars and a Land Rover SUV.

When At Diagnostics failed to deliver the masks on time, Haggerty lied to one hospital that his bank had no record of the payment being received, prosecutors said. After his business partners confronted him about the money, he altered a bank statement to make it appear as if the funds had never been received, the complaint said.

To date, Haggerty has failed to return $2.6 million paid by the hospitals for the undelivered masks, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Patch's recent review of court documents show that after At Diagnostics failed to deliver its first order of N95 respirator masks to the unidentified teaching hospital in Chicago, the hospital placed a second order for 500,000 masks. The hospital's payment system then "inadvertently released" $933,825 to Haggerty's account, according to court records from March.

He used $250,000 of the unexpected windfall to partially refund the Iowa hospital for masks that were never delivered, prosecutors said.

After the Chicago hospital canceled its order and notified Haggerty of the mistaken payment, Haggerty promised that he would return the money shortly and then failed to respond to the hospital's later efforts to get it back, according to the documents.

Haggerty could serve up to 20 years in prison for the charge in the complaint.