Month: July 2022

Source: United States Department of Justice News

            Montgomery, Alabama – On Thursday, July 7, 2022, Thaddeus Dimarggio Holstick, a 43-year-old from Opelika, Alabama, was sentenced to 120 months in prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm, announced United States Attorney Sandra J. Stewart.

            According to Holstick’s plea agreement and other court records, in June of 2020, an officer with the Opelika Police Department (OPD) saw Holstick inside a convenience store having an argument with another man. Holstick and the other man eventually went outside and starting fighting. The OPD officer ordered the men to stop and, while attempting to separate them, saw a handgun tucked into Holstick’s waistband. Holstick has multiple felony convictions and is prohibited by federal law from possessing a firearm.

            Following his prison sentence, Holstick will be on supervised release for three years. There is no parole in the federal system.

            This case was investigated by the OPD and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Assistant United States Attorney Brandon W. Bates prosecuted the case.

Source: United States Department of Justice News

Baltimore, Maryland – August Candeloro III, a/k/a “Nick,” age 34, of Catonsville, Maryland, pleaded guilty yesterday to a federal charge of possession of child pornography. 

The guilty plea was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Erek L. Barron; Acting Special Agent in Charge Selwyn Smith of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Baltimore; Colonel Woodrow W. Jones III, Superintendent of the Maryland State Police; and Chief Melissa R. Hyatt of the Baltimore County Police Department.

According to his guilty plea, beginning in 2019 Candeloro began using a messaging application to send images depicting the sexual abuse of children.  After additional investigation, law enforcement executed a search warrant at Candeloro’s residence and seized his cellular phone from his bedroom.  The phone was found to contain conversations between Candeloro and other users of the messaging application.  Candeloro also joined private chat groups on the messaging application, many of which had chatroom names indicative of trading child pornography.  Candeloro posted links to a secure cloud storage platform in many of the chatrooms.  The secure cloud storage platform allows the user to create links containing encrypted files and chats with keys controlled by the user.  Candeloro’s phone also revealed over 2000 images of suspected child pornography, including images involving prepubescent minors and depicting sadistic and masochistic conduct.

On January 11, 2010, Candeloro was convicted of a second-degree sex offense involving a 13-year-old victim in Howard County Circuit Court.  As a result of that conviction, Candeloro was required to register as a sex offender.

Candeloro faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in federal prison and a maximum of 20 years in federal prison for possession of child pornography.  U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher has scheduled sentencing for October 6, 2022, at 10:00 a.m.  Candeloro has been detained since his arrest on May 17, 2021.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse.  Led by the United States Attorney’s Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims.  For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.justice.gov/psc.  For more information about Internet safety education, please visit www.justice.gov/psc and click on the “Resources” tab on the left of the page.         

United States Attorney Erek L. Barron commended the HSI, Maryland State Police, and the Baltimore County Police Department for their work in the investigation.  Mr. Barron thanked Assistant U.S. Attorney Judson T. Mihok, who is prosecuting the federal case.

For more information on the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office, its priorities, and resources available to help the community, please visit www.justice.gov/usao-md/project-safe-childhood and https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/community-outreach.

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Source: United States Department of Justice News

MOBILE, AL – A Dutch national was sentenced to 27 months in prison for robbing a gas station in Daphne in March 2020 and engaging in high-speed flight from a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Texas in June 2021.

According to court documents, Melvin Henrillien, 32, of Baytown, Texas, threatened a cashier as he robbed the Malbis Chevron gas station on March 24, 2020. As depicted on surveillance video, Henrillien kept his right hand in his waistband during the robbery and told the cashier that he “didn’t want to hurt” him. The cashier believed Henrillien was concealing a weapon and emptied $280 from the cash register into a plastic bag, which Henrillien took before fleeing the store. A short time later, Daphne police caught Henrillien, who had called 911 from his cell phone to report the robbery, walking along State Highway 181 two miles south of the Chevron. As part of his guilty plea, Henrillien admitted that he committed the robbery, that he took the victim’s property by threatening force and violence, and that his actions obstructed, delayed, and affected interstate commerce in violation of the Hobbs Act.

On June 21, 2021, while on conditions of release and awaiting trial in his robbery case, Henrillien approached a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint near Sarita, Texas. A drug-detection dog alerted for the presence of contraband in Henrillien’s car. A Border Patrol agent asked Henrillien to open the trunk of his car, which he did. As the agent began to search the trunk, however, Henrillien sped away from the checkpoint on U.S. Highway 77 toward Sarita. Henrillien fled for nine miles, reaching speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour. Agents eventually took Henrillien into custody at a highway rest area. Henrillien admitted to the agents that he ran because he knew he had a pending arrest warrant for absconding from supervision in his federal robbery case. Agents found two metal grinders containing a small amount of marijuana in Henrillien’s car.

United States District Judge Kristi K. DuBose ordered Henrillien to serve a three-year term of supervised release upon his release from prison, during which time he will undergo testing and treatment for substance abuse and will receive mental health treatment. The court did not impose a fine, but Judge DuBose ordered Henrillien to pay $280 in restitution to the robbery victim and $200 in special assessments.

U.S. Attorney Sean P. Costello of the Southern District of Alabama made the announcement.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Daphne Police Department, Homeland Security Investigations, and the U.S. Border Patrol investigated the case.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Justin Roller (Southern District of Alabama) and Christopher Marin (Southern District of Texas) prosecuted the case on behalf of the United States.

Source: United States Department of Justice News

DAVENPORT, IOWA – A Fulton, Missouri man, Chad Alan Craghead, 45, was sentenced on July 7, 2022, to 360 months in prison for Production of Child Pornography and Interstate Communications with Intent to Extort. Following his prison term, Craghead was ordered to serve five years of supervised release. Craghead will also be required to register as a sex offender.

Craghead engaged in “sextortion” over a period of nearly two years. At the time he committed these offenses, he was an elementary and middle school teacher and high school track coach. Craghead posed as a teenage boy online and obtained nude images of Minor Victim 1, a sixteen-year-old. After obtaining those images, he created a second false identity and demanded additional nude images of Minor Victim 1, threatening to disseminate the nude images he already had to her friends and family if she did not comply. Craghead extorted Minor Victim 1 over the course of several months, including sending photos of her home, referencing her parents and sister by name, and sending a photo of her sister.

Craghead also extorted Minor Victim 2. Craghead threatened to disseminate Minor Victim 1’s nude images if Minor Victim 2 did not comply with his demands for nude images and videos. Minor Victim 2 complied, sending Craghead sexually explicit videos of herself. Even then, Craghead continued to extort Minor Victim 2 by threatening to disseminate her images and videos if she did not continue to send him sexually explicit material.

Through several Snapchat accounts associated with Craghead, the FBI located numerous other minor female victims across the country, some as young as 12 and 13 years old, who either sent Craghead nude images or from whom he extorted or attempted to extort nude images. In one instance, Craghead took on the minor females’ identity, created a social media account, and obtained child pornography material with the intent to blackmail the senders, all while acting as the minor victim. Craghead told the victim he did it because she refused his demands. The FBI observed the same “sextortion” pattern of conduct with all identified victims. The victims reported feeling fear, distrust, and distress due to Craghead’s conduct.

U.S. Attorney Richard D. Westphal of the Southern District of Iowa made the announcement.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Muscatine Police Department investigated the case. This case was prosecuted by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa as part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s “Project Safe Childhood” initiative, which was started in 2006 as a nationwide effort to combine law enforcement investigations and prosecutions, community action, and public awareness in order to reduce the incidence of sexual exploitation of children. Any persons having knowledge of a child being sexually abused are encouraged to call the Iowa Sexual Abuse Hotline at 1-800-284-7821.

Source: United States Department of Justice News

SCRANTON- The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that Fredy Mendoza, age 34, formerly of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, was sentenced by United States District Judge Malachy E. Mannion, to 300 months’ imprisonment for methamphetamine trafficking, and 18 months’ imprisonment for committing pandemic unemployment fraud, to run concurrent with the methamphetamine trafficking sentence.

According to United States Attorney Gerard M. Karam, on July 23, 2021, Mendoza pleaded guilty to conspiring with several other individuals to distribute and possess with intent to distribute between 5 and 15 kilograms of methamphetamine in the Hazleton area between October 2019 and July 2020 and laundering between $40,000 and $95,000 in drug proceeds. He also pleaded guilty to distributing and possessing with intent to distribute over 50 grams of methamphetamine on December 9, 2019.     

Mendoza also pleaded guilty to committing pandemic unemployment fraud while incarcerated and awaiting trial on the federal narcotics charges. The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program was created by the March 2020 CARES Act, as part of the United States government’s efforts to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the public’s health and economic well-being. The PUA program was designed to provide unemployment benefits to individuals not eligible for regular unemployment compensation or extended unemployment benefits.

Mendoza pleaded guilty to conspiring with his codefendant, Christina Covey, formerly of Drums, Pennsylvania, to file false PUA applications on his behalf and for another federal inmate. The applications sought unemployment benefits for both inmates by claiming that they were laid off because of the COVID-19 pandemic and available to work, despite their incarceration on underlying federal drug trafficking charges. The conspirators subsequently filed false weekly certifications required to continue receiving PUA benefits, ultimately securing nearly $30,000 dollars, which were mailed in debit cards to Covey. Mendoza was ordered to pay $29,799 in restitution.

Covey was also Mendoza’s codefendant in the methamphetamine trafficking case. Covey previously pleaded guilty to both methamphetamine trafficking, and to conspiring to commit pandemic unemployment fraud.  She was sentenced by Judge Mannion to 48 months’ imprisonment for the methamphetamine trafficking, and 15 months’ imprisonment for committing pandemic unemployment fraud, five months of which were to run consecutive to the methamphetamine trafficking sentence.

The methamphetamine trafficking case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations, and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jenny P. Roberts.  The pandemic fraud case was investigated by the Postal Inspection Service and by the Department of Labor, Office of the Inspector General, and was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Phillip J. Caraballo.

On May 17, 2021, the Attorney General established the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to marshal the resources of the Department of Justice in partnership with agencies across government to enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud. The Task Force bolsters efforts to investigate and prosecute the most culpable domestic and international criminal actors and assists agencies tasked with administering relief programs to prevent fraud by, among other methods, augmenting and incorporating existing coordination mechanisms, identifying resources and techniques to uncover fraudulent actors and their schemes, and sharing and harnessing information and insights gained from prior enforcement efforts. For more information on the Department’s response to the pandemic, please visit https://www.justice.gov/coronavirus.

Anyone with information about allegations of attempted fraud involving COVID-19 can report it by calling the Department of Justice’s National Center for Disaster Fraud (NCDF) Hotline at 866-720-5721 or via the NCDF Web Complaint Form at: https://www.justice.gov/disaster-fraud/ncdf-disaster-complaint-form.

The narcotics investigation was part of an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) operation. OCDETF identifies, disrupts, and dismantles the highest-level criminal organizations that threaten the United States using a prosecutor-led, intelligence-driven, multi-agency approach. Additional information about the OCDETF Program can be found at https://www.justice.gov/OCDETF.

This case was also part of the joint federal, state, and local Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) Program, the centerpiece of the Department of Justice’s violent crime reduction efforts. PSN is an evidence-based program proven to be effective at reducing violent crime. Through PSN, a broad spectrum of stakeholders work together to identify the most pressing violent crime problems in the community and develop comprehensive solutions to address them. As part of this strategy, PSN focuses enforcement efforts on the most violent offenders and partners with locally based prevention and reentry programs for lasting reductions in crime.

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