If the U.S. Secret Service is right, a January plot devised in a Costa Mesa Motel 6 to pass counterfeit $100 bills in Orange County wasn't a smart one.
Marcus Antonio Redick wanted to dupe a Huntington Beach Target store out of more than $600 worth of goods by placing two genuine $100 around four fakes sheets bearing Benjamin Franklin, according to a Secret Service report.
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But the alleged plot failed, in large part, because an alert cashier touched the bills and discovered some of the currency felt “weird.”
Lashana Gorrell, Redick's friend, proved more daring. She used eight counterfeit bills to walk out of the Target with $763 worth of goods, according to a government complaint.
Her cashier also reported those bills “felt funny.”
Alerted by Target security, Huntington Beach Police Department officers quickly stopped a vehicle containing Redick and Gorrell.
Law enforcement officers allege that Redick initially claimed ignorance of the counterfeit, but–in addition to possessing 35 genuine $100 bills–he had five more counterfeit bills stuffed in his left sock.
A raid on their Motel 6 room recovered 35 more pieces of funny money, according to a Secret Service report that also claims the two suspects committed these latest offenses while on bail for another counterfeit case filed in December in Santa Clara.
Gorrell, who was born in 1994, is currently free from custody on $25,000 bail.
A U.S. magistrate judge inside Orange County's Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse denied bail to Redick, who was born in 1981.
No trial date has been set, but Gorrell has been ordered back for a Feb. 18 arraignment.
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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.