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Bogus theater passes are under investigation
By MAUREEN BYRNE AHERN
But when she and her friends tried to use the tickets to see Dragonfly last Tuesday at the theater at Seminole Mall, they were told the passes were bogus. Talk about embarrassing, Needham said Monday. "It was like, 'Oh, I'm so sorry,' " she remembers telling her friends. "I guess I'm going to have to buy you another Christmas present." Needham is not alone. The line of people in her predicament appears to be as long as one for a box-office blockbuster. "This has been a total nightmare," said Jeff Vetter, general manager of the Entertainment Film Works theater at the mall. He says the theater intended to donate four, maybe six, tickets but that hundreds -- or more -- ended up in circulation and that he has had to redeem 500 bogus passes as a goodwill gesture. He blames a woman named Jan Marie Stater, who he says has been making fake copies of the theater's courtesy pass and selling them to unsuspecting victims. Stater, who lives in Seminole, says she had a contract with the movie theater. "Yeah, I'd like to see that contract," Vetter said Tuesday. Both the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office are investigating the matter. "I want to clear my name because I've been in the business for 12 years," Stater, 32, said Tuesday. "They're ruining my name. This whole thing has been so unfair." When asked to explain her side of the story, Stater said she needed to ask her attorney if she could talk to a reporter. She never called back. Ms. Needham says for the past six years she has attended Fall Festival Days, an event in November sponsored by the Kiwanis Club of Seminole, which last month was named the second-best club in Florida. The annual affair at the Seminole Vocational Education Center features live entertainment, arts and crafts booths, games and a tent highlighting local businesses. In the tent, Ms. Needham spotted Stater sitting at a table selling discount movie passes to the Seminole theater. For $3, people could buy a courtesy pass, which could be exchanged for a ticket at the theater. That meant a $3 savings for an adult ticket. "She seemed very legit," Ms. Needham, 38, recalled. And it was a Kiwanis event, Ms. Needham figured. "That was probably one of the reasons I bought (the tickets), because they do such great things," she said. Theater manager Vetter says Stater came to the movie house before the event and asked an assistant manager for some free passes so they could be raffled at the Kiwanis festival. Vetter said the theater gives courtesy passes to patrons if they become ill during a movie or if a film has technical problems. The theater rarely gives out courtesy passes for charity events, Vetter said, but the assistant manager made an exception and gave Stater a handful of passes. Every pass has a serial number on it, he said. "They're very tightly controlled," he said. Or so he thought. Vetter said he's not sure what transpired, if anything, between assistant manager Robin Riedinger and Stater regarding the Kiwanis festival. It is against the theater's policy to sell courtesy passes, he said. Riedinger did not return a phone call. "The whole thing just shocks me," said Fall Festival Days chairman Bill Miller. Vendors pay the Kiwanis Club to rent a space under the tent, but the club receives no money from the sales of merchandise. Kiwanis member Terry Carr said the group does not investigate the vendors. "We're a group of volunteers," he said. "Our natural assumption is that everybody is legitimate." Vetter said the situation got worse and gave this account: Stater later called assistant manager Riedinger and told her she had more copies of the courtesy pass and asked if she could give them away. Stater told Riedinger she had only a couple dozen. Riedinger acquiesced but told Stater to make no more copies. "This is something I would have immediately shut down, but I didn't know about it," said Vetter, a 1987 graduate of Seminole High School who was an usher at the theater when it opened in 1986. When Vetter found out about the bogus passes in early December, he said, he decided the theater would accept them because his assistant made the mistake of telling Stater she could give away the few dozen she had. "All of a sudden, instead of there being a couple of dozen out there, there were 20 to 30 coming in a day," Vetter said. And they weren't stopping. Throughout December, the fake passes kept trickling into the theater, Vetter said. They look similar to the real passes but have no serial numbers and different wording at the bottom. Some had a paid stamp with the initials JS on the back. Vetter said Stater told him she would stop selling the bogus passes, but she didn't. It came to a head for Vetter, the theater manager, when a woman called him on Jan. 31 and said she had bought about $300 worth of passes from Stater on Jan. 15, Vetter said. The woman also told him Stater "had a stack of them in her car," he said. Enough was enough. A letter posted to the box office window says the theater "cannot accept them anymore than we could accept a counterfeit bill." "Most of (the patrons) take it very well, but some people get really mad," Vetter said. Vetter also called the Sheriff's Office. Stater is being investigated on allegations of fraud and petty theft, said sheriff's spokeswoman Marianne Pasha, who said Stater may have sold about 1,200 fake passes. No arrest has been made.
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