A former Fannie Mae sales associate out of Huntington Beach was sentenced Tuesday to 15 months in federal prison for taking kickbacks from a broker who sold foreclosed properties.
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Fannie Mae Foreclosure Specialist: Taking Bribes Is Illegal?
Armando Granillo, whose defense in federal court in Santa Ana was basically that taking bribes was a normal part of doing business, must also spend six months in a halfway house after being released from prison. The 45-year-old, who worked in Fannie Mae's Irvine office, was convicted in March on three counts of wire fraud.
Granillo, whose job was to review applications by real estate brokers who wanted to list
Fannie Mae foreclosed properties, asked a Tucson, Ariz., broker in late 2012 to
pay him a 20 percent kickback on the broker's commissions. The broker told the feds, who taped a meeting in Phoenix where Granillo vowed to shoot the broker more listings in exchange for $11,200. Later, when Granillo went to pick up the money, he left in cuffs instead.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.