A year ago, jewelry store owner Safieh Fard did something her sister and two of her sons did the year before: plead guilty in Santa Ana federal court to charges related to mortgage scams the family pulled with Newport Beach oceanfront properties for years. But heading into sentencing, the then-50-year-old asked to withdraw her plea, a request U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney granted.
Not that it mattered in the end.
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See also:
Sushama Devi Lohia and Aida Agusti Castro are Prison Bound for Family Home Loan Scams
Gabriel S. Joseph Acused of $5 Million Scam That Duped Newport Beach Mortgage Broker
Mortgage Scheme is “Most Sophisticated and Arrogant Fraud” Judge David O. Carter Has Seen
A federal jury last Wednesday convicted Fard of one count
of conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and one
count of conspiracy to launder the proceeds of bank fraud obtained after
submitting fraudulent mortgage applications.
Fard owned Belvedere Fine Jewelry on Via Oporto, but from 1997 through 2004 she had a side business with sister Sedigheh Bahramian and sons Mohsen Kikalaye and
Ahmad Kikalaye: buying and flipping pricey beachfront properties.
But it wasn't enough that the family made tons of dough the old fashioned way (buy low, sell high). First, as a joint investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, IRS Criminal Investigation division and U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations of Orange County discovered, Fard and her co-conspirators lied up a storm on their mortgage applications. For instance, Fard falsely stated
she earned more than $40,000 a month, despite claiming no taxable income on
her federal income tax returns during the scam's eight-year run.
sales on their federal income tax returns. Her sons received lump sum payments by either check or wire transfers that were moved between various bank accounts before landing in one under the name of Ahmad Kikalaye. He would then make withdrawals just under the $10,000 federal reporting requirement. Some of that money was used to buy more properties.
Fard is now scheduled to be sentenced on April 8, 2013. This time, she does not have a plea to withdraw. The last time, her lawyer was going to argue for probation because of the jeweler's declining health. Having watched the one-year delay of justice, we'll see if Judge Carney is in any mood to entertain that.
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.