Death Row Inmate Kills Time by Allegedly Defrauding IRS

Convicted murderer Luis M. Mata has been on Arizona’s Death Row for almost nine years.

A few years ago, the 35-year-old Mata decided he wasn’t going to just twiddle his thumbs, so he went into the business of preparing federal tax returns.

On Wednesday, a Los Angeles federal grand jury indicted five Los Angeles-area residents on charges of filing false tax returns. All are relatives of Mata, who, according to the indictment, had filed 17 false returns “seeking income-tax refunds totaling $35,118.”

In each instance, an Internal Revenue Service investigator said, Mata’s relatives mailed him their W-2 forms and a short-form federal tax return, and Mata prepared the returns on a typewriter in his prison cell.

The IRS was alerted to Mata’s activities partly because he also allegedly filed a bogus tax return seeking a refund for an Arizona resident named Paul Leslie--who lives in a nearby cell awaiting execution for an infamous Phoenix hatchet murder.

“(Mata) said he did it and had nothing to lose,” IRS special agent Daniel Bolda said. Apparently, Bolda added, Mata was to get a small commission for his tax work. Mata, already sentenced to death, was not indicted.

Asked how a Death Row inmate could go into the tax-return business, Michael Arra, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Corrections, said, “I don’t know.”

On the other hand, Arra said he wasn’t surprised.

“It’s the type of thing that goes on (in prison) all the time.”