LOS ANGELES A former state Assemblyman was sentenced to a day in custody and three years of supervised release, including one year of home confinement with electronic monitoring, in connection with a scheme to claim that almost $200,000 in credit card transactions he conducted instead were conducted by someone who stole his identity.
Carl Washington, 47, a former Baptist preacher who represented a Gardena-to-Paramount Assembly district from 1996 to 2002, was ordered to pay nearly $194,000 in restitution for bilking First City CU, LA Financial CU, and Farmers and Merchants Bank by claiming charges he racked up on their credit cards were made by someone else.
In sentencing Washington, the judge emphasized the defendant’s many years of public service.
Washington was terminated from his job as the Probation Department’s director for intergovernmental relations and legislative affairs. He was among nearly 50 employees arrested since January 2012 in a yearlong probe of alleged misconduct.
Washington began to run up large debts and file bogus police reports with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department in the summer of 2011, blaming his debts on identity theft. After filing the false police reports, Washington sent copies to the credit reporting agency Experian and demanded the information related to his bad debt be removed from his credit report, prosecutors said.
Once Experian removed this data from his credit report, Washington submitted applications for new credit cards, failing to disclose all his outstanding debts and the fact he had negative information reported by other financial institutions removed from his credit report.
The scheme was exposed when he attempted to refinance two car loans, and the credit union noticed that prior auto loans were not showing up on his credit reports because he claimed an identity thief had secured those loans. LA Financial CU then sought to freeze his credit cards and reported his actions to authorities.
