A Southern California loan processor and real estate agent who attempted to steal nearly $1 million from the U.S. Treasury faced 12 to 18 months in prison based on sentencing guidelines, but a federal judge gave her a huge break this month.
In 2008 and 2009, Dena Maria Howard (a.k.a. Dena Walton) participated in what is commonly known as the “Old Quest” scheme to file false Internal Revenue Service tax returns for herself and others who paid her a fee in efforts to dupe the government.
She was arrested in 2011 after a grand jury indictment.
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IRS agents caught Howard's fraud before issuing a check, but prosecutors inside the U.S. Department of Justice urged federal Judge Josephine L. Staton to give the defendant a prison term or, at least, home detention because of her active role in the con game as well as a deterrent to future, similar scams.
But Staton was generous. She handed Howard, who was born in 1957, a punishment of probation for two years. She also waived all fines.
Go HERE to see the Weekly's March cover story on the Old Quest case.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.