Betting Center Supervisor Is Convicted

The former supervisor of the horse race betting center at the Antelope Valley Fair pleaded no contest Monday to embezzling $26,500 in fair money and handed over $10,000 toward restitution.

Jack L. Farmer Jr., 46, of Glendale entered the plea in Lancaster Superior Court to a felony charge of embezzlement by a public official. He is the third ex-fair official to be convicted of misusing fair funds or property in the past four years.

Farmer faces up to four years in state prison at his sentencing on April 21. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Elliott Alhadeff and attorney Robert A. Adelman, who represented Farmer, both said Farmer likely will only be fined and ordered to repay the fair.

Adelman blamed his client’s problems on a gambling addiction he termed “pathological gambling disorder.” Adelman said Farmer was addicted long before he became supervisor of the fair’s wagering center in 1989 and that Farmer has been seeing a psychiatrist for treatment.

Farmer will report to the state prison system on Jan. 21 to undergo a 90-day psychiatric evaluation. Superior Court Judge Thomas Stoever will consider those recommendations at sentencing.

Farmer, who was fired from the fair in April, was accused of siphoning money from the state-run fair’s wagering center between January, 1990, and February, 1992. Authorities said he took money on 128 occasions in amounts of $100 to $400 from a fair account used to provide cash credit card advances to patrons.

Alhadeff said he will ask at sentencing that Farmer be ordered to repay the entire amount owed the fair plus a fine. Adelman said Farmer, who is now working as an auto salesman, made the $10,000 payment to the fair as a voluntary gesture in anticipation of his sentencing. Farmer previously had claimed that former fair manager Jim Pacini also took fair funds during his tenure, but a sheriff’s investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing. Pacini abruptly resigned last month, but fair officials insisted it was not related to the embezzlement case.

Former fair manager C.W. Adams, Pacini’s predecessor, was convicted in March, 1990, of misdemeanor grand theft of fair property. And Farmer’s predecessor, Gary Lee Williams, was convicted in October, 1989, of embezzling up to $3,000 from the wagering center.