The former director of finance and accounting at Gulfstream Aerospace Corp.'s Long Beach facility was sentenced this week to 11 years and change in federal prison for embezzling more than $10 million from his employer over a 13-year period.
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United States District Judge John F. Walter in Los Angeles sentenced Marvin Jay Caukin, 66, of Calabasas, to 135 months in prison Monday morning and remanded the defendant into custody at the conclusion of the hearing. The judge also ordered Caukin to pay $10.25 million in restitution and to forfeit to the government his interest of at least $2.4 million in properties in Calabasas and Toluca Lake and about $70,000 in cash and cashier's checks.
Caukin pleaded guilty in January to conspiracy to commit mail fraud, admitting that he participated in a long-running scheme to defraud the luxury jetliner company by submitting fictitious business invoices. According to court documents, the invoices were from bogus companies that had been set up by Caukin's relatives and associates, and had names that were similar to actual businesses involved in the aerospace industry.
Once Gulfstream issued checks in response to the invoices from the bogus vendors, Caukin used the funds to pay for his mortgage, car, credit card bills and professional escorts, according to prosecutors.
The scheme ran from soon after he was hired by Gulfstream in the fall of 2000 until around May 2013, when he was terminated by the company for failing to disclose a prior embezzlement conviction in federal court and lying about a job he supposedly had while he was actually in prison.
He'd previously served 33 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to four counts of wire fraud in 1994, when he was convicted of stealing more than $2 million from USA Petroleum Corp. in Agoura Hills.
Caukin “proved that short prison sentences do not deter him when he resumed embezzling just after being released from a combined 39-month sentence,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo filed with Walter. “… [F]rom 1994 until 2013, when defendant was fired [from Gulfstream], the only years defendant was not continually committing fraud were those in which he was incarcerated.”
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