Man Charged After $33 Check Reads $644,933

A Culver City man accused of trying to steal more than $644,000 from the state by adding a few extra digits to his tax refund check was charged Thursday with forgery and attempted grand theft.

State officials, who said the case is one of the largest of its kind in state history, say Mathison B. Coleman, 56, allegedly increased the amount of his $33.62 state refund check to $644,933.62 before submitting it to his bank in Manhattan Beach.

Coleman, who was scheduled to turn himself in to Manhattan Beach police this morning, faces as much as three years in state prison if convicted.

His attorney, Robert Corbin, declined to discuss the case.

“It’s a situation where my client is going to enter a plea of not guilty and more than that I can’t comment,” Corbin said.

Officials said they were flabbergasted by the case.

“Now wasn’t that chutzpah? Can you believe it? This is classic. I’ve never seen a case like this,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Gilbert Garcetti, who heads the district attorney’s Torrance branch. “It goes back to that old adage that judges often tell: If you’re going to steal, don’t steal for five or 10 dollars. Go for the big stuff.”

According to prosecutors, Coleman is accused of whiting out the dollar sign on his check before typing in the new figure. He then allegedly photocopied the check onto pink paper, apparently in an effort to disguise the alteration, and mailed the photocopy with a deposit slip for his checking account to the Manhattan Beach branch of Wells Fargo Bank.

“His account had $197 in it at the time, so when the bank got the check they said . . . ‘This is a lot of dough,’ and they looked at it real closely,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Martin Oghigian, who filed the charges in Torrance Superior Court.

Bank examiners turned the questionable check over to the state controller’s office, which launched its own investigation.

“It’s pretty outrageous to try to get away with altering a check and raising the amount by that much,” said Ed Fong, a spokesman for the state controller’s office. “Any time you talk about a check that’s for hundreds of thousands of dollars, whether or not it’s legitimate, you’ve got to realize that people immediately will scrutinize it.”

Fong could not confirm that the attempted theft ranked as the largest of its kind in the state but said it “probably is one of the largest.”