Former Club Hastings chief executive Robert Munro Don (inset) was sentenced to home detention for ripping off his former place of employment. Photos / Ric Stevens
Robert Munro Don told a services club in Hastings he was the man with the expertise and experience to help manage it out of a financial downturn.
But the smooth-talking fraudster with a hidden criminal past lasted only a year as the Clubs Hastings chief executive, and in that time stole thousands of dollars.
The fact Don was ripping off the club – an amalgamation of the historic Heretaunga and Hibernian Clubs with the Hastings RSA – came to light after the club’s committee resigned en masse in January this year.
They quit after club members demanded a vote of no-confidence when Don left.
A new committee found deficiencies in the financial records, according to one of those who took over, former long-serving Hastings RSA chief executive Neil Murphy.
Delving further, they found that money that rightly belonged to the club had been directed to the same bank account number as the one used to pay Don’s $100,000 salary.
“The old RSA had a slogan, ‘People helping people’,” Murphy told NZME. “The only guy this person helped was himself.”
The former committee members had “no idea what was going on”, he said.
“He’s smooth. He’s a practised thief,” Murphy said.
The amount taken was not large – about $12,500, which has been repaid – but the Hastings District Court was told on Friday that Don’s breach of trust had caused “angst” among the club’s staff and volunteers.
Club members in the public gallery called out “shame” as Don walked past them, wearing a surgical mask, after being sentenced to six and a half months of home detention on four counts of theft by a person in a special relationship.
After Don resigned, club members discovered he had a criminal history but had hidden it behind a name change.
In 1999, under the name Darrin Roger Don, he went to prison for a year after taking $25,000 from an elderly man in a rest home he was running.
The court was told that Don, now 60, has had a string of dishonesty convictions since then, most recently for forgery and obtaining by deception in 2020.
The home detention sentence will not be the first time he has been confined to his house on an ankle bracelet, and police sought a jail term this time on the grounds that such a sentence had not deterred him.
Murphy said that Don had been hired with the help of a recruitment agency.
“The suggestion I would make would be to use a different recruitment agency,” Judge Gordon Matenga said in court.
A criminal history check came up clean because Don had changed his name. Don also used another alias to be contacted to give himself a reference.
He was employed as the Clubs Hastings chief executive between January 2024 and January 2025.
A police summary of facts said he came into the club at a time when it was experiencing a financial downturn, requiring expertise to help it move forward.
“The defendant Don portrayed himself as this person,” the summary said.
In May 2024, Don was given permission to upgrade his work vehicle.
He took the $20,000 allocated and transferred it into his personal account, then refused to provide paperwork for the trade-in.
The court was told he benefited by about $5000 this way, and used the money to buy flights for a trip overseas.
The same month, Don bought a Nespresso coffee machine from Harvey Norman, paying $899 on the club credit card.
The machine was supposed to provide club members with coffee when their cafe was closed.
However, Don took it home and never returned it. Police found it at his Havelock North house when they searched it in March this year.
In July last year, Don sold a large barbecue roaster owned by the club to one of its members for $3000. He provided the unwitting buyer with his own bank account number for payment.
He also sold a large chiller on a trailer to a club member for $4500, again providing his own bank account number.
Don used the $7500 from these two transactions to pay for more overseas travel.
Don wrote a letter of apology to Clubs Hastings, which Judge Matenga read out to the court.
“I hope you will eventually forgive me,” it said. “I am sincerely sorry.”
Don’s lawyer, Gavin English, said his client had repaid the money and had been seeing a counsellor to address the “root cause” of his offending.
Police confirmed to NZME that Robert Munro Don is the same person as Darrin Robert Don, who pleaded guilty to six counts of fraud in Auckland in 1999.
Don in those days ran a retirement home and defrauded an elderly man who was “not of sound mind” by billing him weekly instead of fortnightly.
The man paid Don an extra $25,000 without question.
Don was caught after the man’s family discovered he had tried to get the man to sign over an insurance policy worth $175,000.
Don also deposited into his own account two $500 cheques that residents had tried to mail to charities. He did the same with another cheque at another rest home he was associated with.
In addition to his history of dishonesty, Darrin Don was declared bankrupt while running a supermarket in 2009. His listing on the official insolvency register online is tagged “multiple insolvencies”.
Murphy said that since Don was unmasked, Clubs Hastings members had put in more than $30,000 to keep the club going and they now had a manager who was known to be honest and reliable.
“Probably out of this adversity, the club will get stronger,” he said.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of frontline experience as a probation officer.