Ex-Commodities Trader Pleads Guilty to Fraud

A former Beverly Hills commodities trader who once had close ties to powerful California Democrats has pleaded guilty to charges of bilking three investors and a securities firm of nearly $300,000, state prosecutors said Thursday.

Mark R. Weinberg, 38, pleaded guilty to 11 felony fraud counts in Van Nuys Superior Court on March 17--exactly one year after a jury in the same courthouse convicted him in another case of defrauding clients of nearly $900,000.

Weinberg pleaded guilty to four counts of grand theft and seven counts of writing checks on insufficient funds from 1989 to 1991, according to Deputy Atty. Gen. Tricia Ann Bigelow.

As part of a plea bargain, Weinberg will be sentenced to five years in state prison by Superior Court Judge John Fisher on April 30. However, the sentence will run concurrently with the eight-year, eight-month sentence that Fisher imposed in the other case last year.

Bigelow said Weinberg developed various schemes to collect money from people and the investment firm of Bateman Eichler Hill Richards. The worthless check charges “stem from Weinberg promising to make repayments and the checks always coming back bad,” the prosecutor said.

The state attorney general’s office prosecuted Weinberg after Fisher ruled that then-Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner could not handle the case because of his close relationship with Weinberg.

Weinberg contributed more than $200,000 to Reiner’s 1984 campaign, $84,000 to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s campaign in 1985 and another $54,000 to Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) the same year.

While he was making these hefty contributions, the FBI used Weinberg to infiltrate the Genovese organized crime family, for which he invested up to $10 million, according to testimony at last year’s trial.

Bigelow said that in light of last year’s stiff sentence, the plea bargain was fair. Fisher “takes a serious approach to white-collar offenders, which is commendable,” she said.