Haidl gets probation, $40,000 fine in tax fraud

Former Orange County Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl was sentenced Monday to two years’ probation, a $40,000 fine and 200 hours of community service for tax fraud.

Haidl, a Newport Beach businessman and onetime assistant to convicted former Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona, was accused of tax fraud in a scheme to help pay his son’s legal bills in a sexual assault case. He was given probation rather than prison time because of his cooperation in the federal corruption case against Carona.

The sentencing is one of the final notes in a sweeping case that rocked the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and forced Carona to resign.

Haidl was accused by federal prosecutors of filing a false income tax return after his son Gregory was charged along with two friends of sexually assaulting an apparently unconscious 16-year-old girl and videotaping the incident. The elder Haidl pleaded guilty to tax fraud and agreed to cooperate in the government’s case against Carona in exchange for prosecutors’ recommendation of leniency.

Haidl became the government’s star witness in the case against Carona and at times wore a hidden microphone during conversations with the former sheriff.

During two weeks on the witness stand in Carona’s well-publicized trial last year, Haidl testified that he bribed Carona with cash and luxuries in exchange for access to the Sheriff’s Department.

On recordings of the taped conversations, which were repeatedly played in court, Carona said he would deny receiving money from Haidl, made racist and sexist remarks, and called himself the “most lethal” politician in Orange County.

During a sentencing hearing in January, U.S. District Judge Andrew Guilford told Haidl that if he had not cooperated “so fully and thoroughly” he would be serving time in jail.

Haidl apologized at the time.

“I apologize to this court, I apologize to the public, I apologize to my family. . . . I accept full responsibility for everything I’ve done,” he said.

Gregory Haidl was released from prison in 2008 after serving about three years of a six-year sentence on the sexual assault conviction.

Carona was acquitted in 2009 of all but one charge, witness tampering. He is appealing that conviction.

paloma.esquivel

@latimes.com