Vanessa Van-Kellogg was both an Orange County postal clerk and a prolific magician, of sorts.
During her shifts at El Toro's main post office in Lake Forest from October 2011 through January 2013, at least $6,000 in stamps disappeared without payment from the branch's inventory.
If you don't think that's simultaneously a petty and monumental criminal feat, consider this: In a little over a year, she stole the equivalent of about 13,330 first-class stamps.
Who was she mailing?
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We may never know. There won't be a trial. This month, a federal grand jury for the Central District of California indicted the postal employee for committing $102.30 in the thefts during a 2012 shift and she quickly signed a misdemeanor plea agreement acknowledging the remainder of the embezzlement in exchange for potential leniency.
At a future sentencing date inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, Van-Kellogg, who was born in 1965, faces a maximum punishment of incarceration for a year and a $100,000 fine.
She will be ordered to pay the post office full restitution, according to court records.
A prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice's General Crimes Section in Los Angeles handled the case.
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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.