A federal judge this week sentenced an Orange County man who imported more than 8,200 counterfeit erectile dysfunction pills from communist China to a term of one year in prison plus a $5,000 fine.
Undercover law enforcement agents caught Nathan Welter selling fake Viagra, Cialis and Levitra on Craigslist in 2013 and weren't happy that the Yorba Linda man boldly continued his counterfeit operation after his arrest.
A federal prosecutor believed Welter deserved a 30-month prison trip and a requirement to relinquish the $18,000 he made in the weeks leading up to his arrest.
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Welter–who used multiple addresses and multiple names (including Mike Smith and Mike Williams) to receive the foreign shipments–originally pleaded not guilty but, facing a potential 30-year sentence, eventually confessed.
Inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, U.S. District Court Judge Josephine L. Staton recommended that the defendant be housed inside the federal penitentiary at Lompoc.
At the time of Welter's arrest, the dealer had an unsold inventory worth more than $100,000 of the pills.
According to court records, prosecutors also convicted this defendant of a liquor store robbery when he was 20 years old in 1994. Between that crime and his latest one, Welter worked at Circuit City, a carpet cleaning company and a strip club as a bouncer. He and his wife also owned a tanning salon in Orange and a restaurant, Epic Noodle. The nation's economic crash under President George W. Bush left him with huge debts and in search of creative ways to support his family.
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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.
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