A parole agent pleaded guilty Tuesday to exchanging embezzled California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) funds for narcotics prescribed to a parolee.
Scott Patric Keblis copped to felony embezzlement by a public employee and misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s office.
It was part of a plea deal with the court that had the judge immediately sentencing the 50-year-old Chino resident to 90 days in Orange County Jail and three years of formal probation. Keblis was also ordered to pay restitution, and he is now “ineligible to ever hold any office of honor, trust, or profit in California,” prosecutors say.
Keblis was a CDCR parole agent on Nov. 5, 2015, when Corrections officials received an anonymous tip that he was doling out of state bus passes in exchange for narcotics prescribed to a parolee.
On Nov. 23 of that year, Keblis obtained two bus passes and two $40 Target gift cards from the CDCR, claiming he needed to give them to a parolee under his supervision. Later that day, Keblis drove to Huntington Beach to meet with a different parolee, one who was not under his supervision, in his state vehicle. Keblis exchanged the bus passes, gift cards, and $30 of his personal money for 26 of the parolee’s prescription hydrocodone pills.
Internal Affairs of the CDCR launched an investigation, and on July 27 of last year Keblis was arrested by CDCR Internal Affairs.
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.