Henry Schein credit supervisor pleads guilty to embezzling $1.6M from the Melville-based company
Henry Schein's headquarters in Melville in 2023. Credit: Tom Lambui
A man who worked as a credit supervisor for a Melville-based company pleaded guilty on Thursday to embezzling $1.6 million of its money to pay for his wedding, a restaurant renovation in South Carolina and luxury foreign travel, according to the U.S attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York.
The man, Tony Ream, 34, of Greenville, South Carolina, admitted he embezzled the money over four years by sending wire transfers from a company bank account to one he controlled, the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote in a news release announcing his plea to a wire fraud charge.
He faces 20 years in prison, the release says. Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 15, the court’s docket shows. Whether there was a plea bargain — and if so its terms — wasn’t disclosed.
The plea was entered at the federal courthouse in Central Islip before U.S. District Judge Sanket J. Bulsara, who the docket says will also sentence Ream.
The company was not named in court documents, but the description in the news release — "an American distributor of health care products and services, and serves as the world’s largest provider of health care solutions to office-based dental and medical practitioners worldwide" — and the headquarters, Melville, is almost identical to language on the website of Henry Schein. On Friday, a source confirmed to Newsday that the company is Henry Schein.
None of Ream’s lawyers listed on the docket returned messages seeking comment on Thursday evening. Schein didn’t return a message seeking comment on Friday.
The news release says Ream was hired in 2019 to work in the company’s credit department and became a credit supervisor.
From October 2020 through November 2024, the release says, "Ream siphoned corporate funds from customer refund accounts, some of which were inactive, and diverted the funds to his own personal accounts, masking the fraud by recording each transaction as a refund that was issued to a customer."
"Ream also deceived his subordinates into unwittingly taking steps that facilitated his embezzlement scheme," according to the release, which doesn’t say how he got caught.
He’s agreed to make full restitution to the company, the release says. His employment status wasn’t clear from court records.
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.
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