Sean Barriero will have to spend two months behind bars and four months on electronically monitored home detention for his role in the so-called Wonder Blunder.
U.S. District Judge Leslie E. Kobayashi sentenced Barriero on Thursday. Barriero has until June 14 to turn himself in to serve his jail term.
Barriero, 49, told Kobayashi, “I am truly sorry for the embarrassment I caused the University of Hawaii.”
After getting his sentence, Barriero said outside court that if he had his way and if he ever got back into concert promotion, he would try to put together a benefit concert for UH.
Kobayashi ordered him and co-defendant Marc
Hubbard to repay UH the $200,000 the school forked over to secure Stevie Wonder for a summer 2012 concert. Kobayashi sentenced Hubbard earlier this month to just under five years in prison for wire fraud.
Barriero pleaded guilty
in 2012 to having UH officials wire-transfer $200,000 to
his bank account in Florida through fraud. He kept $68,750 for himself, sent $120,000 to Hubbard and $11,250 to a promoter in Spain. The fraud was for
telling UH officials that the money was going into
escrow.
At the time, Barriero was learning the concert promotion business from Hubbard. He said he didn’t even know what escrow meant but said that’s where the money was going because that’s what UH officials requested.
The concert never happened because Hubbard lied about his ability to secure Wonder’s services. After the university started selling tickets, a Wonder representative told UH officials that the artist didn’t know about the concert and did not receive any of the school’s money.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Wallenstein told Kobayashi that Barriero thought there was going to be a concert because he believed Hubbard could secure
Wonder’s services. He said Barriero deserves a much shorter sentence than
Hubbard because his cooperation was instrumental in getting Hubbard to plead guilty.
He said Barriero recorded all of his concert promotion-related telephone calls on his computer. After telling investigators that the computer hard drive had been damaged, Barriero had it repaired on his own and turned it over.
“Because that hard drive was repaired, we got all
the evidence in the case,” Wallenstein said.
He said it would have been embarrassing to UH
if any of those recordings were played during a trial.
In the wake of the failed concert debacle, the school’s then-athletic director Jim Donovan lost his job, and other top UH officials were publicly grilled by state lawmakers over their handling of the matter.
