Only an attentive bank teller stood in the way of Herman Regusters’ plan to turn a stolen $474,150 federal tax-refund check into a cache of gold coins.
Regusters was sentenced Friday by U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn to two years in prison followed by three years of probation.
“Fighting crime is a community effort,” Internal Revenue Service special agent John Harrison said. “This demonstrates how looking after each other prevented somebody from being out a lot of money.”
The stolen check was one of about 6,700 U.S. Treasury checks – worth about $18 million – that a financial crime ring stole from a Los Angeles post office in 2002 and 2003, according to federal authorities and court records.
The ring’s leader, Talcum Marsh, instructed a Postal Service employee to steal government checks worth more than $1,000 from the mail, records show.
Marsh and others were sentenced in the scam last year in California.
The check Regusters obtained was a payroll-tax refund bound for Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, records show.
Regusters and several associates contacted Centennial Precious Metals Inc. in Denver, asking to buy gold coins, records show.
Regusters gave a fake name – Steven Ackerman – and spun a story about how Sinai Temple was tied to a fictitious Sinai Temple Investments.
Over several weeks, “Ackerman” and others, posing as assistants “Karen Stein” and “Barbara Goldstein,” arranged to use the stolen check to buy 1,408 gold coins from Centennial Precious Metals, records show.
They told the company to send the coins to Sinai Temple Investments in San Bernardino, Calif., giving the address of an empty office that the crime ring leased.
On Sept. 18, 2002, Regusters mailed the stolen check to Centennial Precious Metals as payment for the coins, records show.
The next day, Centennial Precious Metals tried to deposit the check into its account at Bank of Cherry Creek in Denver.
That was when the bank clerk raised questions.
“It was the check itself, the largest IRS refund check she’d ever seen, and the fact that it came from a metals dealer” that caught her attention, said IRS agent Harrison.
Federal authorities immediately froze the money.
Scam participants abandoned their attempt to buy coins at Centennial Precious Metals, and neither the company nor the government lost any money.
Federal prosecutors were notified and built a case against Regusters based on his intent to steal more than $474,150 from the government.
Regusters “was not involved with any of the other checks,” his court-appointed attorney Lisa Moses said.
He is now in the custody of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com.
