Embezzlement

The former finance director and chief investment officer of Soka University of America has pleaded guilty to federal charges of embezzling nearly $1.8 million in university funds, authorities said Wednesday. Kiyoshi Hatanaka, 52, faces up to 10 years in federal prison at his sentencing Aug. 25. As the school's financing director from 1999 to 2006, prosecutors say, Hatanaka transferred the money from university banking and investment accounts to accounts he had created at California Bank and Trust.

Authorities have arrested a San Diego County bank employee on suspicion of looting $1.65 million from the account of a dead man and wiring the money to Mexico. San Diego County sheriff's officials said Wednesday that 22-year-old Diana Reyes was arrested at Washington Mutual's Spring Valley branch on charges of forgery, embezzlement and identity theft. She was released on bail.

The former manager of the Yucca Valley Airport has pleaded guilty to embezzling $1.3 million in state money. Prosecutors say Richard Demel pleaded guilty to seven counts of embezzlement Monday in San Bernardino. Deputy Dist. Atty. Lewis Cope says Demel applied for a state grant to repair airport runways in 2003. When the check came, he deposited it in a new bank account and disappeared. Airport officials did not learn about the grant until 2007 when the governor's office called for a status report on the runways.

Rep. Rick Renzi, a three-term Republican from Arizona, was charged in a federal indictment unsealed Friday with multiple counts of wrongdoing, including using his official position to promote a land deal that secretly brought millions to him and a business partner. The indictment, handed up by a federal grand jury in Tucson late Thursday and revealed by Justice Department officials at a news conference Friday, charges Renzi with 35 counts, including extortion, money laundering and fraud.

The bad news arrived in November, when workers at Casa Youth Shelter were told a fellow employee had allegedly embezzled more than $200,000 from the Los Alamitos nonprofit. The toll, however, may be much higher than they thought.

Responding to Republican charges of foot-dragging, the Democratic chairman of the House labor panel said Tuesday that it is pursuing its inquiry into a spending scandal at the Service Employees International Union but taking care not to interfere with a criminal investigation. The Education and Labor Committee's top-ranked Republican, Rep.

The Service Employees International Union has accused the head of its largest California local of misappropriating hundreds of thousands of dollars in an alleged corruption scheme that included payments to firms owned by his relatives and expenditures on his Hawaiian wedding and a Beverly Hills cigar club. Tyrone Freeman has been removed from the payroll of the Los Angeles-based local and faces formal dismissal pending an internal hearing, a union spokeswoman said.

When Gerald McAfee was hired as comptroller of a small hospital in Downey two decades ago, he quickly convinced his new boss to let him move $1.6 million of the hospital's money from low-risk, low-yield CDs into a more aggressive bond fund, authorities said. Four months after that authorization, hospital officials were shocked to learn that the account McAfee set up contained just $11, according to court documents.

They make subsistence wages tending to the sick and elderly, minus the dues paid to the union local whose charismatic former president promised again and again to make the caregivers' own lives better. Now, the workers are told, the same fallen leader, Tyrone Freeman, owes the Service Employees International Union more than $1 million that officials say he misappropriated from the Los Angeles local to enrich his relatives and himself.

A court-appointed conservator suspected of stealing more than $900,000 from the estate of a 92-year-old woman to feed her gambling addiction pleaded not guilty to embezzlement charges Tuesday. Jennifer Ann Wenger, 53, of San Juan Capistrano showed no emotion during the brief hearing at Central Justice Center in Santa Ana. She remains in custody on $1-million bail. Wenger was arrested Dec.