Posted on 12/24/2013 11:45:41 AM PST by raccoonradio
SALEM (MA)— The owner of two small convenience stores in Salem and Lynn will be sentenced next month to two years in jail by a judge who said yesterday that Peter Jhonny Limat’s breach of the public trust warrants time behind bars.
“The money that pays for food stamps doesn’t come out of thin air,” said Salem Superior Court Judge Howard Whitehead. “It comes out of the pockets of working people, and it goes to people who supposedly cannot afford the necessities of life.”
But many of the customers at Limat’s two stores — Boston Street Market in Salem and J&M Mini Mart in Lynn — weren’t using their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or “SNAP,” cards to buy food, Limat admitted earlier this month. Instead, prosecutors said, Limat, 38, of Lynn, would let people use the cards like they were using an ATM and then take half the money for himself. A customer who wanted $50, for example, would let Limat charge $100 to the card, which he would report as food sales. Each of them would get $50 in cash. The Department of Agriculture would then reimburse Limat for the full amount, sending the money directly to his bank account.
In fact, many of the cardholders simply left their cards with Limat, coming by to collect cash when they knew their benefit would be refreshed each month, a prosecutor said.
Over the course of a year, Limat conducted some $800,000 in food stamp transactions, prosecutor Phil Mallard told the judge earlier this month. More than half those transactions — a half-million dollars worth — were for purported food sales of more than $100, something Mallard argued was practically impossible given the limited inventory of both stores.
Mallard and the judge conceded it’s probably impossible to determine how many of those transactions were fraudulent, aside from the $2,100 collected by an undercover agent during an investigation. But Limat was earning enough to generate an income tax bill of $83,000 in 2011, according to a tax return his attorney, Geoffrey Nathan, submitted during yesterday’s sentencing hearing.
Whitehead said the size of that tax bill suggests that Limat, at least in 2011, was earning close to a quarter of a million dollars after deductions for business expenses like rent and payroll.
Last month, Limat’s pastor testified that Limat had been “tithing” $25,000 a year for the past decade.
But Nathan, a privately hired Boston defense attorney, argued that his client and his family are now struggling to get by.
The 2005 BMW that Limat bought needed a new transmission, and every cent Limat earns as a Haitian interpreter now goes to the state Department of Revenue to satisfy a state cigarette tax arrears, Nathan said.
Both Nathan and Limat yesterday placed the blame on customers looking for cash.
“This ‘scam,’ according to a New York Times article, is a fraud committed by the person walking into the store,” Nathan said.
Limat echoed that later in the hearing, telling the judge, “You are not the boss of them, you go by them.” He said his customers claimed they had no time to go to the ATM.
The judge agreed that customers who sought cash in order to purchase banned items like cigarettes, alcohol or even tattoos with their public benefits were partly to blame. But he said Limat facilitated those efforts.
“Why shouldn’t the facilitator of that not be punished?” the judge asked.
Nathan pleaded with the judge for no jail time, telling him that Limat’s family, including an autistic son, would be devastated, his children “forced” into foster care or to live with grandparents in New York because Limat’s wife works full time.
“There is an innocence that would be lost were Mr. Limat to be incarcerated,” Nathan insisted.
But the judge suggested that Limat profited from the crime and needed to pay a price.
“There has to be a deterrent,” Whitehead said. “I do think a sentence of incarceration has to be imposed.” He told Limat he would have to serve two years in jail.
Mallard had asked for three to five years in state prison. The maximum penalty for the crime of electronic benefits fraud is 10 years in prison.
Whitehead agreed to delay sentencing until Jan. 13, on the condition that Limat wear a GPS monitoring bracelet and not leave the state.
He also warned Limat that if he does not show up, the two-year sentence is off the table and he could face up to the maximum prison sentence.
“Drop. Bucket.”
NO kidding! I’d wager that if we could completely stop waste, fraud and abuse, that we would have a budget surplus!
If people only knew how widespread and common this is - especially with Mom and Pop grocery stores around the inner-city and in depressed areas heads would explode.
My personal estimate (educated guess here) would be less than half a cent on the dollar of expenditure for entitlements goes towards fighting fraud and on top of that there is no incentive for any investigator to find fraud because the supervisors are Kool-Aid drinking proponents of the redistribution programs. I would even bet that in many areas of the country you might hit as high as 50% fraud.
Government healthcare is also being looted along with Bush’s prescription program to tens of billions of dollars.
Fraud in government programs administered by liberals is out of control and nobody will do a thing. It’s found in everything - taxpayer funded daycare - migrant work housing and section 8 housing - inner-city youth programs where employees don’t even show up and get paid - etc etc etc.
It’s easy to catch this stuff and prove it, but there are not even consequences for the individuals that abuse the system - only the big guys and that is rare enough.
The food stamp program along with the food banks (and clinics for illegal usurping criminal invading alien colonizers) are just part of the dems and Obama’s push towards socialism/Marxism.
Just like Obamacare.
They are continuing to build a voter base...mostly based on fraud and other illegal traitorous acts.
Has nothing to do with food or health.
Too ad we can’t return to the days of giving the poor a sack of rice, a sack of beans, and a wheel of surplus cheese.
Now we hand out "free" EBT/SNAP cards and let the "indigent" buy whatever they feel like. From the ones I usually see in line ahead of me at the grocery store, it's generally more expensive stuff than I feed my family - and the people are a whole lot fatter than us. Most of them don't look very needy. One Mexican woman ahead of me at the Dollar Store I saw buying over $60 worth of cheap party favors. She didn't look needy at all. But she did look "entitled" at least in her own eyes. The cashier happily took her card.
But what do I know? I just pay for it.
One of Howie’s favorite topics and good for him.
I hate to shock you (snark) but the Democrats want to encourage as much cheating as possible. These are Democrat voters.
What state do you live in?
The judge did a good job and I hope that it sends some fear up and down the spines of other crooked store owners.
What I described is in California.
A first for me was to see a group of women use EBT cards at a nail salon! I was getting a foot massage (I paid hard earned cash because I was having foot cramps) I said what the hell did those women just use to pay to get their nails done?!!! No one answered me and couldn’t wait to get me out of there. I called the welfare office and they couldn’t have cared less.
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