In Dec. 2008, a federal grand jury in Southern California indicted Eric Letvin for a engaging in a criminal conspiracy involving the selling of counterfeit Cisco Systems, Inc. hardware in league with an Orange County business and a Chinese manufacturer.
Three years later, Letvin–the owner of Prima Computers in Mountain View–pleaded guilty in exchange for a reduction in charges and now knows his punishment, according to court records.
This week inside Orange County's Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney sentenced Letvin to a prison term of . . . zero days and also waived all potential fines.
Why the generosity?
]
The answer is a secret.
Carney and the prosecutor, Jennifer Lynn Waier–arguably the most knee-jerk secretive Assistant United States Attorney in the Santa Ana field office of the U.S. Department of Justice–sealed their reasonings from public view.
According
to the indictment, Letvin–who was born in 1969–used Hammerhead Peripherals in
Fountain Valley to obtain and sell at least 114 of the Chinese copies of Cisco's computer hardware.
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.