Fraudulent broker facing prison after conviction
Airbus A330-200 takes off into a setting Miami sun. Image courtesy of Creative Commons.
Aircraft broker Timothy J Beverley is facing decades in prison after being convicted of tax and wire fraud.
A federal jury in Miami, Florida, convicted 61-year-old Beverley of filing fraudulent tax returns, wire fraud, and filing false monthly reports with the US Probation Office.
Beverley is due to be sentenced on 5 January 2018. He faces a statutory maximum prison sentence of 20 years for the wire fraud offences, three years for each of count of filing fraudulent returns, and five years for making false statements.
According to evidence presented at Beverley’s trial, he was working as a broker at Majestic Jet Inc, a charter company in Pompano Beach, Florida, when he stole more than $1.5 million from the company between 2010 and 2013, by directing escrow agents to wire funds from the sale of aircraft into bank accounts that he controlled.
He also stole money directly from Majestic’s bank accounts and used it to pay for personal expenses, including his rent and a boat.
When he committed the offences, he had been on supervised release after serving nearly five years in prison for fraud and money laundering offences committed when he was president and CEO of Tyler Jet LLC, which refurbished and sold aircraft. As a condition of his supervised release, he was required to file monthly reports with the US Probation Office listing his net earnings from employment, but he failed to disclose the money he stole from Majestic in those reports between November 2009 and October 2012.
Beverley also failed to report the stolen money in his personal tax returns from 2010 to 2013.
He faces a further period of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and monetary penalties – as well as prison – when he appears before US District Court Judge Beth Bloom in January.
Beverley was sentenced to six years in prison in 2004, after pleading guilty to a charge of engaging in monetary transactions by financial institutions affecting interstate and foreign commerce and derived from unlawful activity. His co-defendant Gregory A Hopper, who was Tyler Jet’s chief financial officer, was sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment after admitting the same charge – one of 34 related to wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering.
They were each ordered to pay $18.2 million in compensation to their victims, who lived across the US. Tyler Jet went bankrupt in 2002.
