Legion Officer Charged in $81,000 Theft

A remand is not a conviction, and a prosecutor's statement that he confessed is not a guilty plea. The case the district attorney laid out is an altered discharge form and the post's money. Those are the facts a trial would have to prove.

Southampton Town police arrested David Agtsteribbe on Nov. 9. He was arraigned the next morning before Southampton Town Justice Karen M. Sartain, pleaded not guilty, and was ordered held without bail. He is due back in court on Nov. 13. The Legal Aid Society is representing him.

He is charged with second-degree grand larceny, second-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument, two counts of first-degree offering a false instrument for filing, and three counts of first-degree falsifying business records. He is accused of moving $81,798.31 of the Hampton Bays post's money into his own account between September 2022 and August 2026, while he was finance officer, and spending it on personal bills, shopping, and travel.

Prosecutors say an altered discharge paper is how he joined the post in 2021, that he enlisted in 1986, pleaded guilty at a court-martial the next year to stealing from another soldier, served five months' confinement, and left the Army in 1988 with a bad-conduct discharge and the rank of private, and that the prisoner-of-war period he described was time in an upstate New York prison on a grand larceny conviction. He is accused of claiming two Purple Hearts, special-forces service, and retirement as a lieutenant colonel.

In court, a prosecutor told the judge that Agtsteribbe had confessed to lying about his service and to taking the money.

All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.