She must have been the most popular sales gal at the Saks Fifth Avenue jewelry counter.
A former Saks saleswoman is set to stand trial today on charges she stole more than a million dollars from the posh chain’s Manhattan flagship store – a small fortune she’s accused not of keeping, but passing along to customers.
Cecille Villacorta, 51, faces 25 years in prison for grand larceny.
A well-dressed, striking woman from the Upper East Side – she stands 5-foot-10 and weighs only 100 pounds – Villacorta was for six years one of Saks’ hardest-working sales people.
Both sides agree that between 2000 and 2006, Villacorta sold more than $27 million in fine jewelry, according to court papers.
“She was the top-grossing sales associate in the fine jewelry department,” said her lawyer, Chad Seigel. But Manhattan prosecutors charge that in her greed to get the big commissions and bonuses that come with big sales, Villacorta turned the jewelry counters into her own personal racket.
In a massive, 317-count indictment, the DA charges that over that same six-year period, she talked 229 favored, repeat customers into going along with her lucrative scam.
Villacorta would allegedly sell, say, a $300,000 diamond bracelet using this enticement: that the customer could expect to open his or her credit card bill in the future and find a nice little “refund” credit – for jewelry that was never in fact returned.
In this way, through some 400 of these bogus “refund” credits, Villacorta stole more than $1 million from Saks, the DA says.
Along the way, Villacorta pocketed at least $50,000 in commissions she was never entitled to, the indictment also charges.
Villacorta’s lawyer counters that Saks simply cooked up an unsubstantiated case against their most successful – and therefore most expensive – sales associate.
“Our defense at trial will be that because she generated the level of sales that she did, which produced high commissions for her, it benefited Saks to get rid of her but retain her customers so she can’t take them with her,” Seigel said yesterday.
“How do you do that? You have her falsely arrested.”
It’s commonplace in the industry – and at Saks in particular – for sales associates to give deep price breaks to favored customers, Seigel said.
The case is merely a misunderstanding over which transaction codes Villacorta entered into store computers when recording these price breaks, the lawyer said. Villacorta used the transaction codes for refunds only because “there was really no system for making the kind of legitimate accommodations she was making,” he argued.
Saks and the DA’s Office declined to comment.