A convicted rapist who cut a plea-bargain deal in March with an Orange County Superior Court judge overseeing a case about a scheme to import more than $200,000 in counterfeit Disney pins from China, was sentenced today to eight years in prison. Larry James Allred cut the deal with Judge Robert Fitzgerald over the objections of the prosecutor, who believes the Walnut 58-year-old could have gone up the Jungle Cruise river for 25 years if his conviction had been deemed a third strike.
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Larry James Allred Cuts Deal That May Pin Him to Cell for 8 Years for Selling Fake Disney Pins
Allred was convicted in 1975 of kidnapping a woman at gunpoint from a shopping mall, raping her and then, while on parole in 1978, kidnapping two girls ages 16 and 17 at gunpoint and subjecting them “over a seven-day ordeal to multiple rapes and other sexual crimes,” Deputy District Attorney Chuck Lawhorn told City News Service.
The new third-strike law initiative voters passed in November allows judges to disregard non-violent crimes that previously produced strike counts for prosecutors, but Lawhorn adds jurists can still put the previously violent away for life or long prison stretches.
In February 2011, U.S. Customs and Border Protection intercepted a package at LAX that was addressed to Robert Edward Smyrak, 54, of Anaheim. Inside, agents found more than 150 pounds of counterfeit Disney pins. After an investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations, as well as the Anaheim Police Department, Smyrak and Allred were arrested on April 14, 2011–when they still had more than 91,000 fake pins.
The duo had planned to pass them off as official Disney merchandise online for about a buck a pin, when the official collectible pin price range is $6.95 to $14.95. In all, the government found the pair imported some 80 shipments of counterfeit Disney merchandise from China that, had the products been the real deal, would have fetched nearly $2 million.
Robert Edward Smyrak and Larry James Allred: Two Knuckleheads Bootlegged Disney Pins
Smyrak pleaded guilty on Sept. 28, 2011, to felony manufacturing and sale of counterfeit goods and was sentenced to a year in jail and three years of probation.
Allred, who has been in custody since June 2011, will have to do 80 percent of his time behind bars because of his prior convictions, according to Lawhorn, who noted Fitzgerald also ordered Allred to make $201,000 in restitution.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.