A previous Corvallis attorney was sentenced in federal court docket Wednesday to three decades in jail for defrauding his customers and remaining aspect of a actual estate expense plan.
Ronald Dean Lords, 53, pleaded responsible in July to a person depend each of wire fraud, revenue laundering and filing false returns.
He was given 36 months in federal prison for just about every rely, to be served concurrently. He was also provided a few many years of supervised release for the to start with two indictments and one yr of supervised launch for submitting fake returns. People will run at the similar time.
U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy presided. Federal defender Andrew Nelson represented Lords and Assistant U.S. Legal professional Timothy Racicot represented the prosecution.
Lords defrauded various victims by convincing them to spend their dollars in his development enterprise, Eagles Landing Building, from June 2011 to September 2018 in Ravalli County, federal court files claimed. Lords informed them he would make month to month fascination payments, use their income to develop homes and repay them immediately after the freshly developed houses were marketed.
He explained he would return their cash inside of 30 times of any request. Many of Lords’ victims ended up persons who he had set up legal relationships with and had been doing the job with for many years prior, that means he realized their fiscal predicaments.
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Fairly than utilizing the money to fund the promised design projects, Lords utilized it to make desire payments to prior investors and misplaced significantly of the dollars in the futures marketplaces and by depositing the funds into trading accounts. When some of the impacted people asked for their principal again, Lords admitted he misplaced more than $1 million in the futures current market and failed to have the income to return to them.
Lords also unsuccessful to declare $432,608 he obtained from victims in 2015 as “other cash flow” on his taxes, resulting in unpaid taxes of $152,734 for that yr.
At Wednesday’s hearing, target impression statements were given by two men and women Lords took money from. Judge Molloy stated there were being 14 victims in complete. Lords’ legal professional noted he has made sizeable strides in repaying a handful of the victims.
“I certainly consider the person has no moral conscience and must be sentenced accordingly,” Stan Hendricksen stated. He was a single of Lords’ targets and has not acquired repayment nonetheless.
Lords apologized for his actions when addressing the court, indicating he wanted to fork out back again the amount of money he stole in whole to the victims.
Ahead of imposing the sentence, Judge Molloy reported he hoped jail time for Lords would prevent comparable prison exercise in the neighborhood. Molloy famous he was in particular anxious about how Lords’ steps impacted the physical and psychological nicely-remaining of the victims.
Lords has been disbarred from practicing legislation in Montana. He is purchased to not engage in any gambling or wagering actions when released from prison. He is also prohibited from moving into casinos.
He was initially charged with 19 counts — 6 for wire fraud, nine for funds laundering and 4 for submitting bogus tax returns. All of all those counts but a few ended up dismissed at Wednesday’s sentencing.
The situation was investigated by the FBI and Interior Revenue Service’s Prison Investigation Division.