Broker Pleads Guilty to Fraud

A Ventura mortgage broker who bilked investors out of nearly $4.6 million pleaded guilty Monday to three counts of mail fraud.

Federal prosecutors said they will seek a prison term of 18 months for Larry Curtis Waltz.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Angela J. Davis said she also will insist that Waltz, 57, be required to repay his 49 victims, a requirement under federal sentencing guidelines.

U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Morrow will sentence Waltz on June 10, but some of the investors who entrusted their money to him believe they’ll never see it again.

“I don’t have any hope of getting my money back,” said David Kupp, 65, a retiree who lost his home and life savings.

Over the course of a decade, Kupp said, he gave Waltz about $400,000. The money was to be used to finance mortgages for people buying or refinancing homes. Kupp was to receive interest payments from the borrowers each month.

After several years, he also was to get his principal back, but when the notes came due, he sunk his money back into attractive new deals Waltz presented him.

Most of the deals were bogus. Waltz made up the identities of most of the borrowers and showed his investors phony paperwork, authorities said.

Kupp and others received monthly payments, but authorities allege that they were drawn from money given to Waltz by other investors.

“He’d have been a lot kinder to us if he’d come over in the middle of the night and shot us,” said Kupp, who had come to consider Waltz a close friend.

A former transportation coordinator for the film industry, Kupp, of Ventura, has lived for more than a year in a motor home parked in his daughter’s driveway in Mariposa. He said his wife moved in with a relative for a time to make ends meet, and the two recently got jobs as ranch caretakers.

“This wasn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my retirement,” Kupp said.

In a letter he sent in January 2001, Waltz confessed to his investors, claiming that he used their money for “risky investments which you did not authorize.”

Because Waltz voluntarily told authorities about his crimes, he was eligible for a lighter sentence, Davis said. If he had not turned himself in, he would have faced a 27-month prison term if convicted.