A former employee of a Merrillville-based not-for-profit service agency was sentenced to two years in prison Tuesday morning after pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud in February. United States District Court Judge Philip P. Simon sentenced Valencia Franklin of Lynwood, Illinois, to 24 months in prison followed by a year of supervised release
Fourteen people, including several Southern California residents, were arrested Wednesday, May 28, and accused of scamming the government out of more than $25 million in COVID-19 relief funds and federal small business loans, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Two federal criminal complaints named 18 defendants, four of whom are believed to be in
A Redondo Beach man was charged last week in North Carolina after he allegedly posed as an investment adviser and defrauded victims of more than $4 million over the course of several years. Jon Patrick Kubler, 52, was indicted on charges of securities fraud and transactional money laundering after he allegedly provided investment planning and
A second suspect in the kidnapping and torture of an Italian man inside a luxurious SoHo apartment in a failed bid to get him to give up his cryptocurrency password was criminally charged Tuesday after turning himself in to authorities, police said. William Duplessie, 33, surrendered at 7:45 a.m. to cops at the 13th Precinct
The former owner of a trio of San Diego businesses that provided surrogacy consulting services to prospective parents was sentenced Friday to two years in prison for stealing money from her clients. Lillian Arielle Markowitz, 40, who owned My Donor Cycle, Surrogacy Beyond Borders and Expecting Surrogacy, pleaded guilty to taking hundreds of thousands of
A Newport Beach attorney who admitted that she swindled investors out of $8.7 million in order to bankroll her lavish lifestyle and high-rolling gambling habit was sentenced Monday, May 5 to one year and nine months in federal prison. A luxuriant lifestyle of high-end jewelry, luxury cars, a six-month stay at a opulent Las Vegas
OAKLAND — Oakland’s interim mayor is delaying the release of a deeply consequential, two-year budget proposal that had been expected to detail how the city would balance a looming $265 million budget shortfall. The move by Interim Mayor Kevin Jenkins comes just two weeks after Oakland’s top finance official quietly resigned from the job she’s
REDWOOD CITY – A jury on Wednesday found a former Caltrain deputy director guilty of embezzling public funds to build a personal “crash pad” in a historic Burlingame train station, declining the defense’s argument that his supervisor had given him permission to put the funds toward renovating the apartment and residing there while working 80-hour
Several nonprofit groups across the country are suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in a bid to restore funding tied to providing legal representation for roughly 26,000 unaccompanied children in the United States, days after the Trump administration moved to cancel such contracts. The federal lawsuit announced Wednesday, March 26, was filed