Carl Bradley Johansson, the owner of numerous Inland Empire-based trucking companies, was convicted in November 2022 for conspiracy to make illegal repairs on an oil tanker's cargo tanks and defraud the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT), tax evasion, and bank fraud. The Charge...
Leprinceton Dewon Burks, a thirty-eight-year-old resident of Carson, was recently sentenced to lifetime supervised release following 220 months in federal prison. Burks is the final defendant to be sentenced in a case that involved three other men and a fifteen-year-old female victim. Child ...
Matthew Skinner, a 45-year-old Santa Clarita resident, was sentenced to 77 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $1.7 million in restitution after pleading guilty to securities fraud. Social Media Helps Scams Flourish Skinner founded Empire West Equity Inc. in 2014. Later, when Empire W...
Derrick Patterson, a 23-year-old resident of Compton, was sentenced to 111 months in federal prison for targeting and robbing five victims from June 2021 to March 2022 using the app Grindr. Targeting and Robbing Members of the LGBTQIA+ Community Patterson used the popular social networking ap...
Puleaga Pele was arrested at his home on November 4, 2022, after being federally accused of illegally selling firearms without serial numbers – usually referred to as “ghost guns.” Earlier in the year, law enforcement investigated a separate complaint and discovered communications where Pele offe...
William D. Opp, a former construction contractor, was the second person to plead guilty to a bid-rigging and bribery scheme involving improvement and repair contracts with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). The arrest and subsequent guilty pleas result from a joint law enfor...
Quin Ngoc Rudin, a 55-year-old convicted felon, was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy with the intent to defraud the IRS and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) of over $60 million. Both fraud schemes were committed while Rudin was on supervised release for another...
A 42-year-old man named David Wayne DePape was charged with assault of an immediate family member of a United States official with the intent to retaliate against the official for the performance of official duties and attempted kidnapping of a United States official for the performance of offici...
In a classic case of recidivism, Rickey Lewis, 53, of Willowbrook in Los Angeles County, pleaded guilty to a bank robbery spree while he was out on parole for a previous conviction for bank robbery. On Sept.19, Lewis pleaded guilty to three counts of bank robbery and one count of attempted robbe...
An 83-year-old former dean of the University of Southern California's School of Social Work has agreed to plead guilty to the federal charge that she bribed politician Mark Ridley-Thomas, the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Central District of California announced Sept. 15. She had previously plead...
The owner of three supposed “wellness” centers in the Long Beach area has agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit health care insurance fraud and one count of aggravated identify theft, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California reported Sept. 14. Sara ...
On June 28, 2018, chiropractor Brian Carrico of Redondo Beach was charged along with eight others in a $40 million workers' compensation insurance fraud scheme. After almost four years, Carrico pleaded guilty on February 24 of this year to one count of soliciting kickbacks. His two companies, Pe...
An armed robbery crime spree has two coconspirators, each facing up to 20 years in federal prison. In separate trials, Colin Powell Lacey,28, of Hyde Park, and Kyle Richard Williams, 25, of Inglewood, each pleaded guilty to robbing at gunpoint five 7-Eleven stores and a smoke shop in Hollywood, ...
Los Angeles Police apprehended Sherman Oaks resident Trent Michael Tomasovich on July 23, 2019. He was turned over to federal authorities who charged him with one felony count of “distribution of fentanyl resulting in death.” He pleaded not guilty on July 24, 2019, in U.S. District Court for the ...
A seven-year series of scams by a third-party seller on Amazon.com came to an end earlier this year when the FBI arrested Ting Hong Yeung, 41, of Hacienda Heights, a suburb of Los Angeles. In a plea agreement, Yeung pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud on June 6 in U.S. District Court for t...
After nearly two years in custody, a 25-year-old Sylmar man has pleaded guilty to participating in a drug trafficking conspiracy and distributing fentanyl resulting in death. The incident in question occurred in May 2020, when the defendant sold ten fentanyl-laced oxycodone pills to a 20-year-ol...
On May 31, a 41-year-old Woodland, California man was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for possession with intent to distribute illicit drugs. The incident occurred a full year earlier in Nampa, Idaho, where the man was pulled over for a traffic violation. During the stop, police discovere...
After initially pleading not guilty, the former CEO of a Santa Cruz health and wellness center has admitted her guilt in exchange for an apparent plea deal, according to MSN and the San Francisco Chronicle. She pleaded guilty on June 3 to three counts of COVID fraud in the San Francisco Division ...
Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, California, flew to Maryland for the alleged purpose of killing Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Montgomery County police arrested Roske on June 8 near Kavanaugh's home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Police picked him up at about 1:50 a.m. after...
The upcoming 2022 midterm elections in November will be contentious. The divisions within each party are almost as profound as those between the two parties. Blue on Blue in California San Francisco is one of the most liberal cities in the country (63% Democrat, 7% Republican). Voters elected ...
There are 94 federal court districts in the United States. More than half of those districts do not have Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys. Seven of the 10 largest cities in the country don't have a confirmed U.S. attorney, according to a June 1 Bloomberg Law analysis in U.S. Law Week. President J...
Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer credits his county's AB 109 Crime Impact Task Force for arresting more than 567 repeat offenders who had been released early under the California Public Safety Realignment Act (AB 109). Passed in 2011, the act allows the incarceration and early releas...
Police escorted a Modesto man off a Jet Blue aircraft the morning of June 1 when the plane landed at Logan International Airport in Boston. The FBI arrested him on charges of two counts of “abusive sexual contact while in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States,” according to June ...
In separate incidents, two high school students and a 44-year-old man have been arrested for making bomb threats and mass-shooting students, reported U.S. News on June 1. The man, a Blackwell, Oklahoma, resident, allegedly phoned in repeated threats in February and April to two elementary, two m...
A federal grand jury in Sacramento has indicted a 27-year-old Northern California man for possession with intent to sell counterfeit prescription pills laced with fentanyl. He was also charged with dealing in firearms without a license and two counts of possession of fully automatic AR-15 style m...
