Citron Sentenced to Year in Jail and $100,000 Fine

After sternly scolding him for “gambling with public money,” a judge Tuesday sentenced Robert L. Citron, the once revered but now disgraced former Orange County treasurer, to one year in County Jail and fined him $100,000 for skimming interest earnings from schools, cities and small agencies to put into a county account.

“You failed in your oath, you failed in your obligations,” Los Angeles Superior Court Judge J. Stephen Czuleger told Citron before pronouncing his sentence. “Visiting vengeance on you would be very easy.”

Instead, Czuleger acknowledged Citron’s remorse, his cooperation with authorities, his frail health and his wife’s dependence on him, before handing down--and then setting aside--a six-year state prison term for the man blamed for the $1.64-billion in securities trading losses that pushed the county into bankruptcy in December 1994.

Before sentence was pronounced, Citron stood before the judge, his hands shaking, his voice trembling, and said, “My life is in your hands.”

If the 71-year-old former official qualifies, authorities said, he may be eligible for a work furlough program that would allow him to serve his jail sentence at home.

But Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Ron Wilkerson said that Citron must first be evaluated by the county’s medical staff and deemed fit before he could be assigned to the program, under which county inmates clean offices, pull weeds and pick up litter.

Citron was ordered to report to the jail Jan. 10.

The Orange County district attorney’s office had sought a seven-year prison term and a $400,000 fine.

Citron will continue to receive his $89,000-a-year county pension, although Czuleger ordered Citron to pay for his incarceration and his probation supervision, in addition to the fine.

In comments from the bench, Czuleger noted that Citron’s lawyer had called his client’s case a tragedy--a view that the judge did not share, saying, “Tragedy implies [events] completely beyond the control of the individual. But there was a time when these actions were in the defendant’s control.”

Citron listened attentively, glancing over his shoulder at his wife, Terry, who cried softly while Czuleger said that he would substitute a year in jail for the six-year prison term. He also ordered the former treasurer to serve five years of supervised probation and perform 1,000 hours of community service.

Then the Citrons and a few friends left by way of a judge’s office, avoiding the jumble of reporters and television crews who had crowded the courtroom along with attorneys and county officials eager to learn the fate of the quirky man with a penchant for turquoise, Chryslers and the occult.

After the hearing, Citron’s lawyer, David W. Wiechert, said that Czuleger, with whom he had once worked in the U.S. attorney’s office, had sent a strong message that “the right thing to do is admit your crimes. . . . [Citron] did all he could, coming in on the first day to admit his guilt.”

Citron’s sentencing closes a colorful chapter in the largest municipal bankruptcy ever, a story that began to unfold in late November 1994 with the discovery of massive losses in the $21-billion investment pool that Citron managed.

Within days of that discovery, panicked county officials went to Citron’s Santa Ana home and hastily talked him into resigning the treasurer and tax collector post he had occupied for 24 years. Shortly thereafter, one of the nation’s wealthiest counties filed for bankruptcy.

In April 1995, Citron pleaded guilty to six felony counts of defrauding and misappropriating interest from the accounts of the 200 agencies, school districts and municipalities that had deposited their reserves in the county-run investment pool.

Citron did not personally benefit from his fraudulent dealings, which were designed to bolster the county’s financial position by allowing the county to earn interest from the smaller agencies’ money.

Ronald S. Rubino, the former county budget director, recently pleaded guilty to falsifying public records, a misdemeanor, after his trial this summer ended in a hung jury that had voted 9-3 for his acquittal.

Citron’s former assistant, Matthew R. Raabe, is scheduled to go on trial in January on the same charges Citron faced. Still pending are civil accusations to remove from office two supervisors sitting at the time of the bankruptcy, Roger R. Stanton and William G. Steiner, as well as Auditor-Controller Steven E. Lewis.

Over the past two years, Citron has sat through dozens of interviews with investigators from the county as well as from federal agencies, testified several times before grand juries and at Rubino’s trial, and assisted county lawyers now suing the brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch & Co. and others for $3 billion.

Citron’s sentencing, delayed since last December, became a sideshow to the bankruptcy as details of his life began to emerge. Instead of the esteemed county treasurer with uncanny investment savvy he was once thought to be, Citron was exposed as a college dropout with the math skills of a seventh-grader, and an abject failure in business who had lucked into a job with the county collecting delinquent taxes.

Psychologists testified that his ability to think and reason has been in a steady decline for years and that he ranks in the lowest 5% of the population on standard tests that measure the deterioration of frontal lobe brain functions.

“He’s a pariah,” Wiechert said. “Even poverty organizations wouldn’t accept him” to do community service, until a Santa Ana charity took him as a volunteer in February.