Local News in Brief : Probation for Inspector
A U.S. Postal Service inspector has been sentenced to five years’ probation and a $1,000 fine for warning the targets of a massive telemarketing fraud investigation of an impending federal raid.
“I can’t explain why I did it,” Charles M. Yarton, 60, told U.S. District Judge Robert J. Kelleher in Los Angeles. “I’ve been coming in this building 20 years, and I never even thought I’d be coming into this building in the condition I’m in today.”
Yarton, an 18-year veteran of the Postal Service, had admitted that he told the suspected operators of a $10-million telemarketing scam that they were about to be searched, allowing them to destroy documents before authorities arrived.
The prosecutor in the case, Terree Bowers, urged the judge to send Yarton to prison. “It is difficult to understand why defendant would warn a boiler room operator of a planned search,” Bowers said in a memorandum to the court. “The act transcends mere bad judgment; it borders on sabotage.”
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