Glendale Man Opens Own Defense Against Tax Evasion Charges

A Glendale man who contends that federal income taxes are illegal opened his defense in U.S. District Court on income tax evasion charges Thursday.

Francis A. Marafino Jr., 33, faces six criminal counts for his alleged failure to pay federal income taxes between 1991 and 1993, cheating the government out of $23,384, said the prosecutor, Deputy U.S. Atty. Paul Stern.

“There is evidence he didn’t pay taxes as far back as 1985, but we’re here today to prosecute him for just three years’ worth of tax evasion, from 1991 to 1993,” Stern said.

If convicted, Marafino faces a maximum of 18 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines.

Marafino, an executive at a Glendale software company, is representing himself in the federal trial. He has also filed two civil suits against many of the government officials involved in his prosecution, claiming they violated his civil rights.

His defense Thursday consisted of questioning his employer’s bookkeeper, in response to charges he avoided withholding taxes. During a break in the trial, Marafino, accompanied by four supporters, called the charges ludicrous. “The Internal Revenue Service, the judge, they’ve denied me my due process,” he said. “I’m being railroaded.”

Marafino’s supporters, who declined to give their names or say whether they pay federal income taxes, said the trial was rigged and “an utter fraud.”

“We’re talking about a revolution in this country,” one supporter said. “There’s a widespread movement that’s worried that there will be a revolutionary war. The government is taking our rights. . . . There will be bloodshed.”

“We don’t care what motivates these people,” said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Central District of California. “It’s a case of tax evasion. His political beliefs, that’s not the issue. This is simply a case about tax cheating.”

Marafino dismissed any notions that he had committed a crime, but refused to elaborate.

“When this is over, you’ll see,” he said. “I’ll be able to talk then.”

Marafino has filed two civil suits in federal court against, among others, Stern, agents of the IRS and U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson, who is presiding over Marafino’s criminal trial. The civil suits are scheduled for a preliminary hearing next month.

While prosecutors said they are familiar with cases such as Marafino’s, they also said Marafino’s alleged crimes were “highly sophisticated and complex.” Tax evasion cases brought against people who claim the government lacks jurisdiction to either tax or prosecute citizens are not plentiful but common enough to warrant coverage in a recent issue of the United States Attorney’s Bulletin, a newsletter for Department of Justice officials, Mrozek said.

The newsletter, from April, includes an article titled “The Gold Fringed Flag: Prosecution of the Illegal Tax Protester.”

The flag argument, according to the article’s author, is a common ruse used by criminal defendants to avoid prosecution, and who contend that placing a gold fringe on the flag invalidates the flag and is an indication that the authority that displays the flag is illegitimate.

It rarely works, according to Jennifer Ihlo, a senior trial attorney for the Department of Justice’s Tax Division, who wrote the article.

“The often patently frivolous arguments routinely made by illegal tax protesters are not confined to oral representations,” she wrote, referring to the civil suits that many defendants file to counter criminal prosecution.

“That’s what his civil suits are about,” Mrozek said.

Prosecutors alleged Marafino not only failed to file and pay income taxes, but also concealed his financial assets by closing bank accounts in his own name, using cash extensively, not renewing his driver’s license, not registering his vehicle in his own name and tinkering with his employer’s computerized payroll program “to ensure that little or no federal taxes were withheld from his paycheck.”

“It was very complicated,” Mrozek said. “But it is still tax evasion and that’s a crime we prosecute.”