A 70-year-old retired colonel in the California Army National Guard pleaded guilty today in federal court to running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded at least 28 victims approximately $2.7 million, according to a U.S. Department of Justice announcement.
Timothy Melvin Murphy, a resident of Orange and at one point the commanding officer of the Guard's base in Los Alamitos, admitted to federal prosecutor Robert J. Keenan that he made false promises to dupe individuals into investing in his Capital Investors, Inc. of Orange County.
]
Murphy is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter
on June 15. He faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and a fine
of more than $5 million. He also will likely have to pay restitution to
his victims.
The crook's illegal scheming apparently was second
nature. In May 2002, authorities reprimanded him in a public forum for
misusing investors money. The rebuke obviously wasn't enough to scare
him straight.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
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.