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Darren Bottinelli's days are numbered cooking up fabulous barbecue at his Northwest Portland food cart. His past caught up with him Wednesday.

(Jeff Manning/The Oregonian)

It had all the makings of a feel-good fable for the foodie crowd.

Darren Bottinelli had reinvented himself as a chef at 44, leaving behind the arcane world of health benefits for the grueling and largely solitary life of food cart proprietor. In less than a year, Botto Barbecue had become one of the city's most acclaimed purveyors of Texas-style brisket and ribs.

"They're the finest I've had in this city, with a thick, smoky black bark that slides off the bone like a banana peel," Willamette Week said in August.

But this tale has no Hollywood ending. Before he started making an honest living with smoke and meat, Bottinelli was a thief, a high-living West Hills swell who admitted he paid for his expensive vacations, his pricey club memberships and big restaurant bills out of the $3 million he stole from the poor and disabled clients of his former life.

Botto was more than a food cart. It was a desperate bid for redemption.

Bottinelli's day of reckoning came Wednesday before U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jones. His lawyer pleaded for probation, arguing that Bottinelli needed his freedom to continue working at Botto, which was the only way he could pay restitution to his victims.

"This is a broken man facing hatred and rebuke," said Thomas Price, the public defender appointed to represent Bottinelli. "Nevertheless, he's got a plan. He's created a business with the help of his mother that provides the basis for reimbursement to the victims."

Botto is generating sufficient revenue to allow Bottinelli to repay his victims $2,500 a month, Price said.

Jones was having none of it. Family members gasped as the judge sentenced Bottinelli to 46 months in confinement.

"You don't steal $3 million and not go to prison," he said.

Axis Health Partners

Darla Edwards, 62, is a retired nurse in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. She knows little about the complex business of health benefits administration. She knows only that she had painstakingly accumulated about $12,000 in her health savings account, and that it was gone when she tried to retrieve the money in 2014 for long-delayed dental work.

She remembers the sinking feeling she had when she called Axis Health Partners, the company in charge of her account. No one answered. "There are some horrible people in the world," Edwards said.

Bottinelli founded Axis in 2004. Its role was simple -- to hold money that employees set aside for health care expenses in a trust account and process their payments to doctors, dentists and others.

There was barely any oversight. Bottinelli's theft was all too easy given what prosecutors called "the vacuum of a virtually unregulated business."

The company initially prospered, developing a nationwide clientele. Bottinelli moved into a million-dollar home on Southwest Buena Vista Drive in Portland's West Hills. He married a prominent architect's daughter and began moving in all the right circles. He joined the Waverly Country Club, the Multnomah Athletic Club and the University Club.

Around 2009, Axis employees started seeing less of Bottinelli. He simply stopped coming to the office every day. They figured he was working remotely.

"Even though I worked for the guy for 10 years, I feel like I hardly knew him," said Jennifer Robare. "He was distracted, aloof."

On March 19, 2014, Bottinelli made a rare appearance at the Axis office and informed his six stunned workers he was shutting the company down. "He just walked in with cashier's checks and paid us off for the week, Robare said. "We had half an hour to leave."

There were no cashier's checks for Axis clients. One by one, across the country, they tried unsuccessfully to retrieve their money.

Disabled employees of Goodwill Industries of South Texas -- hired to work the mailroom of a U.S. Army base in Corpus Christi -- called their bosses in terror after their pharmacies rejected their Axis payment cards.

Stellar J, a Woodland, Washington, construction firm, was hit hard; its employees collectively lost $128,000. But the disabled employees of NTI, a Boston company, had it worse. Alan Hubbard, NTI chief operating officer, said 200 of his workers -- 90 percent of them sufficiently disabled to be receiving Supplemental Security Income benefits from the federal government -- lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"This money made the difference between getting their medications and putting food on the table or paying their rent," Hubbard said.

The U.S. Departments of Labor and Justice launched investigations.

Investigators determined 3,000 employees lost more than $3 million. But clearly the impact went far behind the lost savings. One victim told investigators because of Bottinelli's theft out of her health savings account, she was forced to spend money on medication that normally would have gone to her car payment. After her car got repossessed, she also lost her job because she couldn't get to work.

Living the life

Bottinelli initially told friends that the changes wrought by the Affordable Care Act of 2010 had effectively put Axis out of business. Federal prosecutors came to a far different conclusion: Bottinelli had pocketed the employees' money to support his extravagant lifestyle.

Bottinelli never contested the charges. He agreed to plead guilty last spring to a single count of theft in connection with health care.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Donna Maddux painstakingly compiled a list of expenditures that illustrated Bottinelli's prodigious appetite for the finer things in life. On March 5, 2011, he racked up a $1,162 tab at the renowned French Laundry restaurant in California's Napa Valley. On Nov. 11, 2011, he spent $1,774 at Le Pigeon in Portland. A month later, he stayed at the famed Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. The bill: $3,857.

The optics, as they say in politics, were not good.

But Bottinelli, clearly an aficionado of good food, had a plan. He would remake himself as an authentic, work-a-day barbecue chef. He opened Botto earlier this year. He told a customer on a recent busy lunch hour that he learned how to cook barbecue in Austin, Texas, where he'd gone to college and earned the nickname Botto.

Bottinelli, reached earlier this week at his food cart, declined comment. Price, his attorney, argued in court Wednesday that Bottinelli's success at Botto was proof he was worthy of a second chance.

"A person can be redeemed," Price said. "My client is deeply humiliated, he knows how far he has fallen. There needs to be a path for him to become a decent person again."

Price presented the court with a check from Bottinelli in the sum of $50,720, money he'd raised selling some of his last "goods and possession."

Judge Jones said he was impressed. "You have worked hard," he told Bottinelli. "You have a great talent as a food preparer."

But then the veteran judge narrowed his eyes. "There are 3,000 people out there that have suffered from your criminal acts," he said. "Where were your thoughts when you racked up a $50,000 bill at the Waverly Club or $100,000 for your wine collection?"

Jones opted to go with prosecutors' recommendation of 46 months at the minimum-security prison in Sheridan. He was also ordered to pay more than $3 million in restitution.

For others in Portland's bustling restaurant scene, Bottinelli's story is one they can barely relate to. "It's all very perplexing," said Matt Vicedomini, who runs his own eponymous barbecue food cart in Portland. "I live in a basement apartment, just paying my rent, trying to work my way through life. That's what most folks with food carts are doing. No one else is living the luxurious life."

-- Jeff Manning

503-294-7606, jmanning@oregonian.com