National Roundup

California
3 charged with collecting $3.5M for phony political groups
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Three men face federal charges for running two fraudulent political action committees during the 2016 election and collecting $3.5 million from unwitting donors, prosecutors said.

The defendants solicited donations to the Liberty Action Group PAC and Progressive Priorities PAC under the guise that the phony groups were affiliated with candidates for public office, according to a statement from the U.S. Justice Department.

An indictment unsealed last week names Matthew Nelson Tunstall, 34, of Los Angeles, Robert Reyes, Jr., 38, of Hollister, California, and Kyle George Davies, 29, of Austin, Texas. All face multiple charges including wire fraud and conspiracy. Tunstall and Reyes are also charged with money laundering.

It wasn’t immediately known if any of the men have attorneys who could speak on their behalf.

Between January 2016 and April 2017, the defendants allegedly collected contributions “based on false and misleading representations and used those funds to enrich themselves and to pay for additional fraudulent advertisements soliciting donations,” the statement said.

If convicted of all counts, Tunstall and Reyes both face a maximum total penalty of 125 years in prison. Davies faces a maximum of 65 years in prison.

Ohio
1969 bank heist solved after man’s ‘unassuming’ life in hiding
CLEVELAND, Ohio (AP) — Before Thomas Randele sold luxury cars and taught golf in suburban Boston, before he got married and had a family, federal marshals say he was Theodore John Conrad, who pulled off one of the biggest bank robberies in Cleveland’s history. The suspect’s disappearance was a mystery that lasted 52 years – a few months longer than he did.

Conrad was a 20-year-old bank teller at the Society National Bank in Cleveland when he walked out at the end of his workday on a Friday in 1969 with a paper bag containing $215,000, authorities said. That’s the equivalent of more than $1.7 million in 2021 dollars. The theft wasn’t discovered until a few days later, and Conrad was never seen again.

Authorities said Conrad had become obsessed a year earlier with the 1968 film “The Thomas Crown Affair” starring Steve McQueen about a bank robbery for sport by a millionaire businessman. Conrad told friends that taking money from the bank would be easy, even indicating plans to do so.

In the years since, the case was featured on shows like “America’s Most Wanted” and “Unsolved Mysteries” and investigators chased leads all over the country.

Federal marshals said Friday that marshals from Cleveland went to Boston last week and confirmed that Conrad had been living “an unassuming life” since 1970. He had been living under the name Thomas Randele in a Boston suburb close to where the original Thomas Crown Affair movie was filmed.

The U.S. marshals service of the northern district of Ohio said investigators matched documents Conrad completed in the 1960s with documents Randele completed, including a 2014 bankruptcy filing in Boston, and “additional investigative information led marshals to positively identifying Thomas Randele as Theodore J. Conrad.”

Thomas Randele died of lung cancer in May in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, using a date of birth as July 10, 1947. His real date of birth was July 10, 1949, and Conrad would have been 71 at the time of his death, prosecutors said.

U.S. Attorney Peter Elliott said his father, a career deputy U.S. marshal in Cleveland from 1969 until his retirement in 1990, “never stopped searching for Conrad and always wanted closure up until his death in 2020.” Elliott said documents his father unearthed from Conrad’s college days helped with the identification, but he would not say exactly how he found out about Randele.

“I hope my father is resting a little easier today knowing his investigation and his United States Marshals Service brought closure to this decades-long mystery,” he said in a statement. “Everything in real life doesn’t always end like in the movies.”

Cleveland.com reported that Randele had a family, became a local golf pro and sold luxury cars and “was a fixture in a small town.” An obituary said he got married in 1982 and they had one child together.

Charges of embezzlement and falsifying bank records remain against Conrad in U.S. District Court in Cleveland but will soon be dropped, Elliott said.

“Conrad was quiet,” he told Cleveland.com. “He was friendly, and he was well-known in the community. He just wasn’t who he said he was.”

Missouri
Former St. Louis officer acquitted of 2019 assault
ST. LOUIS (AP) — A former St. Louis police officer has been acquitted of felony assault in an altercation that happened at a convenience store while he was off duty.

Brandin Neil maintained that he was trying to arrest Bryan Boyle for disturbing the peace when he tackled him after the two men exchanged insults at the Crown Food Mart gas station on Aug. 8, 2019 because he believed Boyle was going to assault him.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported  that Judge Jason Sengheiser said in his ruling Friday that prosecutors failed to prove Neil lacked the authority to make an arrest while off duty, and he said that Neil used an appropriate amount of force in arresting Boyle.

The 29-year-old Neil left the St. Louis Police Department in fall 2019 after the charge was filed.

Boyle and two other witnesses for the prosecution described Neil as the instigator of the fight, and surveillance video showed Neil hitting Boyle in the face with his handcuffs as he brought him to the ground.

Sengheiser said in his ruling that part of the problem was that both Boyle and Neil were disrespectful to each other.

“That is really the central problem in this case,” Sengheiser wrote. “If either Boyle or defendant would have acted like a mature adult having a civil conversation instead trying to assert dominance, this incident would have been avoided.”

Boyle has a lawsuit pending against Neil and the city.