Crane Cooke was sentenced to prison after stealing $180,000 from his mother, punching an elderly employer and repeated drink driving offences.
Crane Cooke was sentenced to prison after stealing $180,000 from his mother, punching an elderly employer and repeated drink driving offences.
A construction industry project manager who squandered more than $180,000 worth of profits from the sale of his mother’s Waikato house while she was living in a dementia care facility has been jailed for theft and a raft of other crimes.
Crane Charles Cooke, 52, also punched an elderly man he had been working for and was twice caught driving while intoxicated - after eight previous drink-driving convictions.
“The defendant’s offending . . . occurred during the haze of an extraordinarily strong alcohol addiction,” defence lawyer Scott Leith told Auckland District Court Judge Andrea Manuel this week. “He does realise that the alcohol problem that underpins his offending is severe.”
The judge ordered a jail term of three years and six months. Although Cooke’s mother died in 2017, the judge also ordered him to pay $109,184 in reparations upon his release from prison - the amount of money others would have inherited from her estate had the fund not been pilfered.
“It’s a serious fraud and a gross breach of the trust his mother put in him when she was vulnerable,” the judge said. “You manipulated and exploited her when she was vulnerable and she needed your help.”
Court documents say Cooke, most recently a Whangārei resident, was given power of attorney for his mother in 2009 with the standard stipulation that he wasn’t to use the position of trust to benefit himself or anyone other than his mother. The woman began living in a Hamilton-based secure dementia unit in December 2012 and her house was sold the following year. Only she and her son had access to the bank account that held the profits from her home sale.
“Following her death, the victim’s solicitor began the process of winding up her estate,” Waikato police noted in the agreed summary of facts for the case. “It was then discovered that all the money and proceeds of the house sale were missing from the victim’s ANZ account without any reasonable explanation.”
A subsequent investigation found 1303 unexplained withdrawals from the woman’s account between February 2013 and January 2016. Most of the withdrawals took place in Auckland, where Cooke was living at the time, but purchases were also made in Waikato and Canterbury. They included spending at liquor stores, supermarkets, hardware stores, restaurants and gambling facilities, court documents state.
“When spoken to by police the defendant admitted that he had access to his mother’s bank account as her attorney and that he had used it but was unable to remember any of the transactions he made due to his alcoholism at the time,” documents state.
In a victim impact statement referred to in court this week but not read aloud, the defendant’s sister said her brother left their mother destitute and “denied certain dignities in her twilight years”. Cooke’s lawyer disputed that characterisation and the judge agreed to disregard it for the purposes of sentencing.
But Sergeant Phil Mann, who prosecuted the case for police, argued that there was truth to the statement.
“He did display no regard for the needs of his mother,” he said.
In addition to the five counts of theft by a person in a special relationship, Cooke pleaded guilty to one count of assault regarding the incident with an employer last February; drink driving and driving while disqualified on another occasion; as well as drink driving and careless use of a vehicle in October.
“The victim [who was punched twice in the head] was elderly and vulnerable,” the judge said, ordering Cooke to pay an additional $500 for the man’s emotional suffering.
Crane Cooke was sentenced to prison after stealing $180,000 from his mother, punching an elderly employer and committing repeated drink-driving offences.
The judge also referred to the defendant’s “extensive” prior criminal history, which included multiple occasions in which he was more than twice the legal limit for driving, 11 prior “assault-like offences” and five prior convictions for driving while disqualified.
One incident in January 2020 that garnered media attention was a crash in Hamilton in which Cooke was charged with careless driving after nearly running over a pedestrian who was pushing her baby in a pram on the footpath. After crashing through wooden bollards on the side of the road, the chain attached to the bollards was able to stop his ute’s momentum less than a metre from the pedestrian and her baby, court documents state.
The most recent drink-driving arrest came after staff at a Bay of Islands hospital saw him drive off, seemingly intoxicated, and alerted police.
The judge acknowledged that the stolen money would most likely have to be paid back in small instalments after Cooke’s release from prison. But she expressed optimism he would do so.
“You have experience and talent, and I’m satisfied you would be in a position to make reparation once you have had a chance to get back on your feet,” she said.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
