At least in two respects, Dennis O. Brown is a lucky Californian.
Brown wanted to steal $492,142 from the federal treasury and has a younger brother, Edmund, who was dumb enough to file a fraudulent 2008 federal income tax return in his own name for that amount.
The plot might have worked if it hadn't been tied to ridiculous Rancho Cucamonga-based scam artists that charged $3,000 per person for seminars to teach greedy, gullible morons how to raid a “secret government account” kept outside of widespread public knowledge because, get ready to chuckle: the United States is actually owned by England.
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The American Revolutionary War must have been a hoax.
Anyhow, the Browns fell for the scam and into the waiting hands of on-the-ball IRS criminal division agents, who knew of the con game and nabbed more than 400 such filings claiming $89 million in fictitious income tax withholdings.
Instead of giving Edmund Brown a massive refund check they sent him a $5,000 bill as a civil penalty for cheating and arrested Dennis.
Assistant United States Attorney Charles E. Pell wasn't impressed with Dennis Brown's character. Pell knew that the defendent's past included striking a police officer and twice lying under oath in court–including offering false testimony to help a man who beat a woman escape a conviction, according to court records. Brown also tried to destroy evidence in the IRS scam.
The federal prosecutor wanted Brown to serve one year in prison, but here's where the tax cheat found luck again.
This month inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, U.S. District Court Judge Josephine Staton Tucker punished Brown, who was born in 1965, with zero days in prison, two years of probation and a $4,000 fine.
But was Tucker a mere puppet? Did an organization that waves a red flag with five gold stars save Brown through ultra-secret back channels? Except apparently people in the Inland Empire, everyone knows England doesn't own the U.S.
China does.
Errr.
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.
