3 More Former Deputies Guilty in Skimming

Three more former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were convicted in federal court Monday of appropriating for themselves more than a million dollars seized from drug peddlers and money launderers, bringing to 26 the number of former deputies convicted thus far in a wide-ranging money-skimming scandal.

The former deputies, like others convicted in recent years, were members of elite narcotics investigation teams that formed the heart of the Sheriff’s Department’s drug enforcement operations.

These three were found guilty of splitting cash taken in three separate sting operations, each getting about $250,000, according to Assistant U.S. Atty. Barbara Scheper. She said other funds had eventually been either returned to authorities or paid to other parties.

Sentencing by U.S. District Judge David Kenyon was set for Nov. 28 for Jack Gray, 42, of Arcadia; Thomas Mulligan, 51, of Long Beach, and Leo Michael Newman, 47, of Whittier. Also convicted of helping them launder the cash was a Montebello gun store owner, George Papac, 40.

The former deputies were convicted on counts of theft, money laundering, conspiracy and tax fraud.

Papac was found guilty of receiving $20,000 from them for helping to launder the cash and then lying about that to federal investigators.

The trial before Kenyon lasted three weeks. In addition to the 26 former deputies convicted so far, five of their associates have been convicted, and two cases involving several other former deputies are pending.

Scheper said that the former deputies convicted Monday for the most part kept their thefts in cash and often paid for items either in cash or with cashier’s checks they purchased with cash.

Gray, for example, bought a $70,000 home in Bullhead City, Ariz., putting up $40,000 of that price in cash and cashier’s checks, Scheper said.

Mulligan, she said, paid a mortgage on a house he had purchased earlier with monthly cashier’s checks.

The sting operations occurred between 1986 and 1989, and the biggest came in October, 1988, when five deputies, including two convicted earlier, seized $600,000 in drug money from a car in Long Beach.

The next day they divided it among themselves, according to testimony, by simply splitting it into five equal-sized piles, not even counting it. Each man got about $120,000.

Some of those convicted have justified the thefts by saying they disagreed with government policies of splitting the proceeds of drug forfeitures, and felt they were as entitled as the government to a share of the money.

No one over the rank of sergeant has been accused of involvement in the thefts, although a key prosecution witness in the latest trial as well as several others, former Sgt. Robert R. Sobel, has claimed publicly that higher-ups knew about many of the thefts.