A jail cell with metal bars and bunk beds.
PHILADELPHIA – The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has suspended a Chester County lawyer who was sentenced to one day in prison earlier this year for stealing valuable coins from a safe-deposit box.
The court on Monday hit Richard DiStefano with a temporary suspension that he could petition to dissolve in the future. He’s currently in year one of three of supervised release and has been ordered to pay $1.6 million in restitution.
Three months ago, DiStefano received a sentence that closed his criminal case, which was initiated in September 2025 by federal prosecutors. He pleaded guilty after admitting what he’d done during the execution of a search warrant.
Prosecutors said that in July 2017, he began taking precious coins stored in a safe-deposit box at a Wells Fargo on South Broad Street. He continued stealing them over the next three-plus years, and the theft wasn’t discovered until June 2024.
The FBI obtained records that showed DiStefano was the last person to have accessed the box. He’d been taking the coins and selling them at various auction houses over the years. The coins had an appraised value of more than $1.6 million.
The coins belonged to a historic society of which DiStefano was a member. Prosecutors wrote that it still has not regained its coins, and there’s a “good chance” it never will. DiStefano sold pieces of the collection at a discount, they added, to fund his lifestyle, including paying for his children’s education.
“Almost everyone experiences economic hardship. Defendant DiStefano didn’t use his legal skills to remedy his problem,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Grenell wrote in a sentencing memorandum in April.
“He didn’t try to work. Instead, he stole more than a million dollars’ worth of coins from a historic society here in Philadelphia.”
Grenell called his crimes “offensive” and said DiStefano had “no respect for the law” in recommending at least two years in prison. U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage stopped well short of that in ordering just a one-day incarceration followed by three years of parole and participation in a mental health program.
