Businessman Pleads Guilty to Signing False Tax Return

An Orange County businessman acquitted in 1992 of hiring hit men to kill his secretary’s fiance has pleaded guilty to lying on a tax return, prosecutors said Friday.

Julius F. Schill, 62, of Mission Viejo had been accused by federal prosecutors in the earlier case of paying a mobster $21,000 to arrange the killing so he could have an affair with secretary Cynthia Asher, then 24.

Schill was indicted in July 1996 on three counts of signing false tax returns. He pleaded guilty to one of them, and faces up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine at sentencing Sept. 19, prosecutors said.

Schill formerly headed Auto Photo Systems Inc. in Tustin. In Los Angeles federal court on Thursday, he admitted using $230,000 in Auto Photo funds on personal expenses in 1990, mainly to fix up his home, without reporting the money as income to the Internal Revenue Service.

Schill also had been accused of failing to report similar use of company funds on his 1989 and 1991 returns. The amount in 1990 was by far the largest, Assistant U.S. Atty. Carmen R. Luege said.

Three men attacked Asher’s boyfriend, Wilbur Constable, in an Irvine parking lot in October 1991. Constable, a former Marine, survived the baseball bat-beating and a gunshot wound to the head.

Blake Yoon, 28, of Los Angeles, the main hit man, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years in prison. He said he felt disgust and shame when he learned Constable “had just gotten in the way of someone’s love interest.”

The other two, John Caravaggio and Scott Douglass Smith, both of New Jersey, pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Each was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

Richard J. Dota of Las Vegas, the reputed mobster, was convicted of organizing the murder-for-hire. Dota, 56, was sentenced to 35 years in prison--a term his lawyer called “a death sentence.”

Asher testified that she had refused Schill’s offers of a condominium, a car and a horse farm in return for sex.

But the defense contended she had already had an affair with Schill, which he had called off. Schill’s lawyer suggested Asher had the biggest motive to kill Constable: She was the beneficiary of his $180,000 life insurance policy.

Schill’s lawyer in the tax case, Hector Perez, didn’t return a call seeking comment.