County Tax Clerk Charged in Check Theft Scheme

After a far-flung, 3 1/2-year investigation, a clerk in the Los Angeles County tax collector’s office was arraigned Friday on charges of stealing more than 225 property tax checks that were cashed by others at banks all over the world.

Investigators said property tax payments totaling more than $12.4 million and dating to 1992 were stolen by Jesus M. Templo, including checks from Cher and actor Charlie Sheen.

The stolen checks were allegedly given to an international ring of forgers and “passers” who eliminated the county as the payee and substituted the name of fictitious businesses in Los Angeles and abroad. Many of the checks were cashed at local banks, while attempts were made to cash checks of much higher amounts at financial institutions in Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Britain, investigators said.

Some of the stolen checks were also duplicated, boosting the actual amount of the checks presented for payment to about $32 million.

However, the actual loss was just under $3 million, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Individual taxpayers suffered no losses and were not penalized, county officials said.

Templo, 26, was arrested without incident Wednesday while at work in the county Hall of Administration and was charged with conspiracy to commit grand theft. He was being held in the Men’s Central Jail, with bail set at $250,000.

Twenty-eight others have been arrested and convicted during the lengthy investigation, and felony warrants are outstanding for three more people believed to have fled to China.

“It was somewhat involved,” Sheriff’s Det. Early Lincoln said about the investigation.

The hunt for evidence spanned the globe and involved the sheriff’s forgery fraud detail and agents from the FBI, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Postal Service and the Monterey Park and Alhambra police departments.

Lincoln, who has been involved with the case for more than three years, said 225 checks were stolen and altered, then cashed or deposited at banks.

But he said a total of more than 1,650 checks were apparently taken over a seven- to eight-month period from October 1992 to May 1993. The remainder have not been located, nor were they altered or negotiated, Lincoln said.

He declined to comment on whether the checks were taken from mail or from inside the tax collector’s office, a huge operation that handles more than 6 million property tax checks per year.

Joseph Spillane, internal controls compliance officer for the tax collector’s office, declined to comment on Lincoln’s report that a far larger number of checks were missing. “The number I have in regards to Mr. Templo or the investigation by the Sheriff’s Department is about 200,” he said.

Templo, who has worked for the county almost seven years, was removed from the tax collector’s cashiering operation and assigned to another job after the investigation began, Spillane said.

Lincoln said sheriff’s investigators were able to focus on a particular section of the tax collector’s office where the checks may have been removed.

The Sheriff’s Department became aware of the problem after Kent Condon, a Riverside County businessman who owns two properties in the San Fernando Valley, received a delinquency notice for taxes that he had paid.

Condon noticed that one of the canceled checks for his property taxes had been altered. The word “cash” and a string of asterisks appeared where he had typed “Los Angeles County Tax Collector.”

The $675.39 property tax payment to the county had instead been deposited into an account at a Walnut bank. On the back was scrawled an account number and a signature with only a large looping J legible.

As the investigation proceeded, law enforcement agencies were contacted by other taxpayers who received delinquency notices and penalties, even though their property tax payments had been cashed.

Investigators believe the stolen checks were given to Antonio B. Quesada, who they say headed the organization of check forgers and passers. He is to be sentenced Aug. 13 after accepting a plea bargain, Lincoln said.

The group obtained fictitious business licenses and opened bank accounts in the names of the companies. The payee line on the property tax checks was altered to read the name of the fictitious business and the checks were then “laundered” through the bank accounts, investigators said.

Treasurer-Tax Collector Larry Monteilh said that since the investigation began in late 1992, his office has tightened procedures involving property tax payments.