4, including ex-boxing champ, sentenced in racketeering scheme
March 19, 2015 - 6:57 pm
Four people, including a former boxing champion, were sentenced in federal court Thursday in a multimillion-dollar racketeering scheme run out of a longtime limousine company that operated on the Strip.
The central figure in the scheme — which involved fraud, prostitution and drug trafficking — was Charles Horky, who operated CLS Nevada for two decades. Horky, 54, pleaded guilty in December to one felony count of conspiracy to conduct or participate in an enterprise engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity and is to be sentenced next month.
State transportation authorities revoked his license to operate the limousine company last year in the wake of an undercover FBI investigation into the wide-ranging scheme.
Two of his top aides — Kimberly Flores, 44, the office manager of the company, and Archie Granata, 71, an accountant and financial adviser — each pleaded guilty in July to the racketeering conspiracy charge.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Robert C. Jones sentenced Flores to two years in prison and ordered her to serve three years of supervised release after prison. Prosecutors had sought 30 months behind bars for Flores.
Jones also ordered Flores, who tearfully apologized for the embarrassment she caused her family, to share with other defendants in a $5.2 million forfeiture judgment.
Her lawyer Craig Drummond told Jones, “She made some extremely dumb decisions.”
Jones sentenced Granata, who has leukemia, to three years of probation with eight months of home confinement and fined him $2,000. The judge refused a request from prosecutors to give Granata some prison time and order him to share in the forfeiture judgment.
“I got myself in a bad situation, and I wasn’t strong enough to pull myself out,” Granata told Jones.
Both Drummond and Granata’s lawyer Richard Herman said their clients were not involved in prostitution and drug trafficking.
Limousine driver James Reda, 40, who has a felony record, was sentenced to 27 months in prison for his limited role in the four-year scheme, which took place between September 2008 and November 2012.
In his guilty plea to the conspiracy charge last year, he admitted providing prostitutes for Horky’s friends during visits here.
Jones also ordered Reda, who apologized for his actions, to serve three years of supervised release after prison and share in the $5.2 million forfeiture judgment.
The other limousine driver, Clarence “Bones” Adams, a former World Boxing Association super bantamweight champion, was sentenced to six months in prison despite a recommendation from prosecutors for probation and home confinement.
“You need to spend a little time in jail,” Jones told Adams, who pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge last year and admitted to playing a small role in the prostitution and drug dealing portions of the scheme.
Jones also ordered Adams, 40, who said he took responsibility for becoming involved the scheme, to spend a year of supervised release and perform 40 hours of community service after prison.
A federal indictment unsealed in December 2012 charged Horky and eight other defendants, including those sentenced Thursday, with conspiring to participate in the broad range of racketeering activities. One of the scams involved defrauding American Express and American Express card holders of more than $2.8 million through unauthorized charges, and another was a $2.4 million check-kiting scam.
The four-year criminal conspiracy was uncovered by the FBI with the help of months of court-approved wiretaps that provided an explicit look inside the prostitution ring authorities said Horky ran.
Horky admitted requiring drivers to pay him a cut of the illicit money they received, according to his plea agreement.
Additional defendants, including some of Horky’s limousine drivers, were charged in four separate indictments with trafficking in cocaine, methamphetamine and Ecstasy.
Most of the defendants in the long-running FBI investigation have pleaded guilty.