Collier County Tax Preparer Convicted In Multi-Million Dollar Tax Fraud Scheme

Fort Myers, FL – A federal jury has found Augustin Dalusma guilty of 12 counts of filing false claims against the Internal Revenue Service and three counts of making or subscribing to false tax returns. He faces a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison for each count of filing a false claim and up to three years’ imprisonment for each count of making a false tax return. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for January 27, 2020.

Dalusma was indicted on September 26, 2018.

According to evidence presented at trial, between 2012 and 2015, Dalusma, a tax preparer, falsified information in tax returns for 630 of his clients, fraudulently qualifying them for thousands of dollars in tax refunds that they were not lawfully entitled to collect. In total, the false claims filed on behalf of his clients exceeded $4 million over the four-year period. Dalusma also falsified his own tax returns from 2012 through 2014, significantly underreporting his own income to evade more than $30,000 in taxes for each of those years.

This case was investigated by Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation. It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Simon R. Eth and Trial Attorney Eyitayo St. Matthew-Daniel of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.

Read more: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/collier-county-tax-preparer-convicted-multi-million-dollar-tax-fraud-scheme

Jimmy Kimmel Live: Trump Definitely Booed at UFC Event

A Dying Town -- When a rural hospital dies, the community around it starts to follow suit.

On the evening of December 28, 2014, Kourtney Bogan got an urgent call from her younger brother in Clarksville, a rural town of 3,200 bordering Oklahoma in far northeast Texas. Their mother, Gayla Bogan, who’d been fighting a respiratory infection over Christmas, was in bad shape. Kourtney jumped in her car and drove over. “When I got there, she was gasping for air, like she couldn’t breathe or something was blocking her airway,” Kourtney said. “I was panicking. She kept saying that she couldn’t breathe.”

Kourtney and her brother, Bristian, tried sitting Gayla upright in a chair, but it didn’t help. A minute later, she became “nonresponsive,” Kourtney said. She called 911. Within five minutes, an ambulance had arrived at the house, and workers loaded Gayla into the vehicle. They sped off to the nearest emergency room—a 30-minute drive to Paris Regional Medical Center in neighboring Lamar County.

Kourtney didn’t know it at the time, but Gayla, a 47-year-old who served as a church usher and worked as a nurse at a local nursing home, was having a heart attack. As the ambulance sped northwest on a thin strip of oak-lined highway, paramedics tried desperately to revive her.

The timing couldn’t have been worse.

If Gayla had gone into cardiac arrest just two weeks earlier, the travel time to the nearest hospital would have been only a few minutes. East Texas Medical Center had operated a rural hospital with an emergency room in Clarksville. But in December 2014, ETMC shuttered the Clarksville hospital along with two other facilities in surrounding Gilmer and Mount Vernon—casualties of low patient volumes, cuts to reimbursement rates from Medicaid and Medicare, and the cost of treating the uninsured. The closures rocked the small communities, upending what had been reliable sources of health care for decades.

Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/a-dying-town/

What Happens When the Texas Governor Shares the Worst Day of Your Life on Twitter?

On Saturday morning Krista Chacona, a criminal defense lawyer in Austin who specializes in mentally ill and indigent clients, got a news alert on her phone from a local TV station. Late the night before, Governor Greg Abbott posted an alarming video on his Twitter account to his some 314,000 followers. The video shows a man on a street corner in downtown Austin having some kind of episode. He flings a pole at a car, then picks up a temporary street sign and does the same. The car is damaged, but no one is hurt.

The video was posted by a Twitter account called @AustinSkidrow, a participant in the social media campaign against the Austin City Council’s efforts to decriminalize homelessness in June, which have been the subject of a bitter and divisive political fight in the city. Abbott, for whom messing with blue cities is a perennial political winner, has threatened Austin with some kind of state crackdown. He’s repeatedly highlighted individual incidents of crime in Austin using his Twitter account. With the video, he wrote: “Austin’s policy of lawlessness has allowed vicious acts like this.” He demanded the city “compel order.” In the replies, one man called the homeless “savages,” and another compared them to zombies.

As it turns out, the video was from February 2018, putting the incident well before anything the city council did. When the age of the video was pointed out to Abbott, he responded in the traditional manner of the internet, tweeting that his wrongness had only made him more right. Moreover, the city council in no way legalized or encouraged attacks on vehicles of the kind in the video. But as Chacona lay in bed reading the article, she realized she knew the case well: She had represented the man in the video in court.

“I was furious. It’s reckless,” Chacona said. “He didn’t even bother to check the facts.” The facts were that the man wasn’t homeless, and in fact had never been homeless. He has been diagnosed with mental illness and has developmental and intellectual disabilities. On the day of the “attack,” he was experiencing a mental health crisis. “He was never able to articulate to me what was going through his mind that day,” Chacona said. Arrested for felony criminal mischief, the man was ruled incapable of standing trial and his case is still pending.

Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/what-happens-when-the-texas-governor-shares-the-worst-day-of-your-life-on-twitter/

It's a shame nobody has a video of the tree that fell on Gov. Abbott and caused his paralysis for redistribution. It appears that he could use a refresher course in empathy.

Julian Castro's Presidential Campaign Told Staffers They May Want to Look for Other Work

Former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro will refocus his 2020 presidential bid on Iowa, Nevada and Texas and has informed staffers layoffs may be coming, CNN reports, citing people familiar with the plans.

Castro's campaign has been considered a long shot since it launched in January. Last month, the candidate — who's polling in the single digits — warned that if he couldn't raise $800,000 by the end of October, he'd be forced to withdraw.

Donors helped Castro meet that goal, and CNN reports that he has no immediate plan to drop from the race. However, citing its unnamed source, the network said top campaign leadership wanted to be as "clear as possible" with staffers that they're free to look for other work.

Observers have been waiting for the crowded Democratic presidential field to narrow, and the news from Castro's camp is another recent indication that time may soon be at hand.

Read more: https://www.sacurrent.com/the-daily/archives/2019/11/04/julian-castros-presidential-campaign-told-staffers-they-may-want-to-look-for-other-work

TEA Clearly Thinks Some HISD Trustees Are Fibbing, To Put it Delicately

Well it's official. The Texas Education Agency's investigation team has recommended the TEA replace the Houston ISD elected school board with a state-appointed board that will be in charge for a while. It'll still be up to Commissioner Mike Morath to pull the trigger.

In a massive report backed up with recovered emails and crowded with allegations of dysfunction and corruption that drips with sarcasm when it addresses the counter claims of several of the trustees, the TEA investigators carefully fill in more of the picture revealed in August, when the first news of what the investigators found was disclosed.

When contacted about the report, the HISD press office directed all inquiries to the TEA.

To recap: several of the trustees are accused of serial meddling and exceeding their authority by directing administrative staff and school staff to bow to their bidding. Five of them — Diana Davila, Sergio Lira, Holly Maria Flynn Vilaseca, Anne Sung and Elizabeth Santos — stand accused of violating the Texas Open Meetings Act by engineering a coup d'etat of the interim superintendent's position, conducting a walking quorum by meeting in private with their candidate Abe Saavedra to do so.

Read more: https://www.houstonpress.com/news/tea-investigators-recommend-replacing-hisd-board-11385175

Accused Santa Fe Shooter May Be Incompetent To Stand Trial

Three psychiatric experts have declared Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the teenager accused of the 2018 mass shooting at Santa Fe High School, incompetent to stand trial according to the Houston Chronicle. Pagourtzis’ trial was scheduled to begin Feb. 18 in Fort Bend County and may be delayed.

Pagourtzis, 19, is charged with capital murder and attempted murder in the shooting rampage that killed 10 people and wounded 13 in May 2018.

The Chronicle reports psychiatric evaluations took place over the last several weeks, according to the suspect’s attorney.

Defense attorney Nicholas Poehl said prosecutors will not contest the findings, the Galveston County Daily News reported.

Read more: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2019/11/04/350760/trial-of-accused-santa-fe-shooter-may-be-delayed-over-inability-to-stand-trial/

Grapevine HS teacher fighting termination for telling students he was gay

A Fort Worth man who says he is being fired from his position as a teacher with the Grapevine-Colleyville ISD because he is gay has filed complaints with both the EEOC and the Office of Civil Rights challenging his firing.

The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District has denied Josh Hamilton’s claim that he is being fired because he is gay. Kristin Snively, the district’s executive director of communications, provided Dallas Voice with this written statement:

“To be clear, Mr. Hamilton’s sexual orientation has absolutely nothing to do with the reason Mr. Hamilton has been proposed for termination. Mr. Hamilton has been proposed for termination for good cause due to violations of the district’s electronic communications policy, violations of student privacy, failure to follow written directives, and violations of the Texas Educator’s Code of Ethics. In GCISD, we hold all employees to high standards for their interactions with our most important people, our students. His conduct is not acceptable for an educator in GCISD.”

Hamilton has a bachelor’s degree in communications, a master’s degree in education and a Ph.D. in language and literacy. He started working at Grapevine High School as the oral interpretation teacher/coach and professional communication instructor in August 2017, beginning with a team of eight freshman that later became seven.

Read more: https://dallasvoice.com/grapevine-hs-teacher-fighting-termination/

Come on Grapevine, I always thought you were a bit more progressive.

Political groups in Texas prepare to reach out to Latinos ahead of the 2020 census

If counted accurately, the 2020 U.S. census is expected to show a boom in Texas’ Latino population. That’s why groups in the state say they plan to focus their efforts on making sure Latinos here fill out the form and get counted.

Jolt, a group working to increase the number of young people of color who vote in Texas, says it plans to start hiring people in January to reach out to Latinos in Austin, Dallas and Houston, as well as some rural parts of the state.

Antonio Arellano, the group’s interim executive director, said Jolt plans to “mobilize the largest number of Latino census-takers in Texas history.” He said it plans on hiring Latinos and other “culturally competent” people to reach out to those communities.

“We are going to make sure that Latinos are well-educated and well-versed on the ramifications of not being counted,” Arellano said. “We are going to highlight the importance of their power.”

Read more: https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2019/11/political-groups-in-texas-prepare-to-reach-out-to-latinos-ahead-of-the-2020-census/

Former City of Memphis Employee, Vendors, and Others Indicted for Million-Dollar Fraud Scheme

Memphis, TN – Former City of Memphis Division of Housing and Community Development employee Leon Blackmon Sr. and eight other relatives or acquaintances were indicted for their roles in a government-contracting scheme that defrauded the City of Memphis (City) and taxpayers by causing the City to pay out at least $1.6 million to City vendors, of which at least 50% of said funds resulted from fraud. D. Michael Dunavant, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee announced the indictment today.

Those charged in the indictment include the following named defendants:

Leon Blackmon Sr., 70, Memphis, TN., former City of Memphis employee

Leon Blackmon Jr., 41, Memphis, TN.

Karl "Shun" Blackmon, 46, Memphis, TN.

Larry Donnell Banks Jr., 42, Memphis, TN., Banks Lawncare & Landscaping

Charles M. Bell, 33, Memphis, TN., Charles Bell’s Lawn Care

Shaunita Lacole Callicutt, 39, Arlington, TN., A Perfect Edge Lawn Service, L&S Lawn Maintenance, and Professional Mowers of Memphis

Sharon D. Taylor, 59, Memphis, TN., Sharon’s Lawn Service

Teressa Lynn Taylor, 61, Memphis, TN., TLT Beautiful Lawns

Henry J. Taylor, 68, Memphis, TN., Hank’s Lawn Service

Mendel L. Wade, 55, Memphis, TN., Lisdel Lawn Service

According to the indictment, from 2009 to 2016, Leon Blackmon Sr., an Analyst with the City of Memphis-Division of Housing and Community Development (HCD), maintained the City-owned lots and properties list and selected vendors to maintain those lots under the City HCD Maintenance Program. He received, reviewed, approved vendor invoices for the HCD Maintenance Program, then submitted check requests to the City requesting that those vendors be paid.

It was a part of the scheme that Leon Blackmon Sr., Leon Blackmon Jr., and Karl Blackmon recruited family, friends, associates or employees from their auto businesses to establish lawn companies and to become City vendors. The Blackmons directed these individuals to obtain business tax licenses, to apply for and obtain U.S. Post Office Boxes and to open business bank accounts. Some of the City-owned lots and properties were already maintained by City employees or neighboring property owners. Some of the City-owned lots and properties were inaccessible and could not be maintained. However, vendors still submitted fraudulent invoices to Leon Blackmon Sr.’s attention for alleged work conducted. In return, he submitted check requests to City officials for payment to vendors via U.S. Mail service.

As a part of the conspiracy, Leon Blackmon Sr., Leon Blackmon Jr. and Karl Blackmon received proceeds from the City checks sent to vendors via U.S. Mail. From 2009 and continuing through 2016, the City paid approximately $1.6 million under the HCD Maintenance Program to participating lawn care companies based on invoices those companies submitted to Leon Blackmon Sr. in his role as the HCD Analyst. At a minimum, approximately 50% of the City-owned lots and properties shown on those billed invoices were fraudulent. When federal agents asked Leon Blackmon Sr. whether he had personal or family relationships with City vendors and received any proceeds from City checks, he denied both.

All defendants are charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and multiple individual mail fraud charges. They face individual sentences of up to five years imprisonment for the conspiracy offense and up to twenty years for the mail fraud offense. Additionally, Leon Blackmon Sr. faces up to five years imprisonment for false statements to federal agents.

Read more: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdtn/pr/former-city-memphis-employee-vendors-and-others-indicted-million-dollar-fraud-scheme