Sentencings for Encinitas Dentist and Leucadia Pizzeria Bookkeeper

Updated 6:40 p.m. Wednesday

An Encinitas dentist and his wife who admitted using credit card information from patients to buy luxury clothing and merchandise were each sentenced today to a year in jail and placed on five years probation.

Dr. Edward Bodek, 60, and wife Mary, 56, pleaded guilty earlier this year to financial elder abuse and identity theft. The defendants were sentenced by Vista Superior Court Judge David Berry. According to court documents, patients began reporting last year that they were seeing unauthorized charges -- mostly large charges ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 at a time -- from the dental practice on their credit card statements. When patients called the dental office, they were told that the charges were errors that would be corrected, authorities said. A company that processes credit card charges for the dental office reported that there had been more than $260,000 in disputed charges in the defendants' account since the beginning of 2012, according to the court documents.

Investigators learned that the Bodeks rented 30 storage units containing clothing, handbags and fur coats, most of which still had the sales tags on it and had never been worn.

Meanwhile, a former bookkeeper who embezzled more than $545,000 fromthe Leucadia Pizzeria chain where she worked was sentenced today to four years in state prison. Susan Dawn Seibert, 49, pleaded guilty in June to one count each of embezzlement and forgery and admitted an allegation that she took more than $500,000 from her employer. The defendant quit her job last year when she learned that the restaurant planned to audit the books, suspecting that Seibert had forged checks to herself during her four years with the company, according to Deputy District Attorney Anna Winn.

The audit showed that Seibert had indeed written 172 checks to herself from the Leucadia Pizzeria account, Winn said, adding that the checks were forged with an owner's signature. Winn said Seibert covered up the embezzlement by listing legitimate vendors as the recipients of the checks. Seibert told the Leucadia Pizzeria owners that she took the money to pay back a previous employer who had sued her for embezzlement, Winn said. Leucadia Pizzeria has stores in Encinitas, La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fe–City News Service