A federal grand jury in Southern California has indicted three individuals who allegedly conducted a brazen, two-year conspiracy that stole more than $185,000 in postage stamps from U.S. Post Offices in Orange County and Los Angeles.
According to the Dec. 19 indictment, Neil Lee Turner (AKA Tylar Rogers), Melissa Lillian Valenta and John Patrick Cassaro (AKA Jeffrey Paul Gleason) face a combined 34 felony charges for the scheme.
Post offices in Newport Beach, Irvine, Rancho Santa Margarita, Santa Ana, Mission Viejo, Huntington Beach, Garden Grove, Whittier, Norwalk and Sierra Madre were targeted with forged bank checks, according to the 17-page indictment.
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The charges include theft of government property, conspiracy, possessing of forged instruments and passing false checks.
It's
unclear what potential punishment the defendants might face if they are
eventually convicted of crimes that the grand jury believes occurred
between October 2010 and July 2012.
According to court records, postal inspectors have so far only arrested only Valenta, who was born in 1985. (Turner was born in 1978 and Cassaro in 1966.)
The case has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter with a Feb. 12 trial date.
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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.