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“I was a bookkeeper,” Tammy Longinetti, 48, told Superior Court Judge James J. Guida on Friday. “But if I can’t do that, I’ll do anything in an office — or even a restaurant. I’m also homeless, so I have to deal with that — starting over.”
Guida expressed sympathy for the “extreme hardship” to Longinetti’s disabled son of being “bounced from place to place” while his mother remained in the Bergen County Jail the past four months.
However, he told her “you have to do better than” $25 combined per month.
To satisfy him, the judge said, she’d have to pay $25 monthly to each of the victims as well as toward her fines in exchange for time served and five years of probation. Then he ordered her released.
Defense attorney Milagros Camacho told CLIFFVIEW PILOT that her client’s situation spiraled after her ex-husband failed to pay child support and she lost her apartment. He still owes her $40,000, Camacho said.
By pleading guilty to two counts of theft and one of receiving stolen property, Longinetti — aka Tammy Finocchiaro — resolved two probation violations and three pending indictments.
The largest theft involved $15,336.32 that she admitted taking from a Wood-Ridge woman she knew.
Another victim was in the hospital when Longinetti gained access to his Northvale home through an acquaintance, stole his checkbook and wrote about $1,400 in fraudulent checks over a 10-day span last summer for groceries and clothing in Northvale, Norwood, Palisades Park, Park Ridge, Rochelle Park and Secaucus, according to one of three indictments returned against her since last December.
The amounts ranged from $53 to $240, it says.
Longinetti — whose criminal record includes nearly a dozen recent arrests — also used a credit card stolen from a Closter man at the Stop & Shop in Emerson, the Kmart in Closter and a CVS in Old Tappan, authorities alleged.
The probation violations stemmed from two prior guilty pleas. One involved a burglary and the other forgery, both in 2013. Longinetti also had two other arrests that were downgraded to the municipal level — one for theft and the other for assault, records show.
STORY / PHOTOS: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia
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