Former Law Enforcement Officials Charged in 2019 Sham Raid, Extortion Attempt
U.S. federal prosecutors charged four individuals with threatening a Chinese national and his family with violence and deportation during a 2019 sham raid at the victim’s home in Orange County, California.
The defendants include two former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, Steven Arthur Lankford and Glen Louis Cozart, and two former foreign military officials, Max Samuel Bennett Turbett and Matthew Phillip Hart. Cozart, Turbett, and Hart now own private investigation, risk management, and security services companies.
The U.S. Department of Justice claims that a wealthy Chinese national contacted Turbett in December 2018 to help locate and recover assets from an individual that she was having a business dispute with. Turbett then allegedly hired Cozart who brought on Lankford to help locate the individual.
Prosecutors allege that Lankford, who was working at the sheriff's department at the time, used a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department database to find the victim’s home address, against department policy, before assembling a team of people to conduct a sham raid of the victim’s home.
The four men allegedly drove to the victim’s house in an unmarked police vehicle, identified themselves as police, and entered the businessman’s home, a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) news release said. They allegedly forced the victim, his wife, and two children into a room for hours, took their phones, and threatened to deport him (a legal permanent U.S. resident) unless he complied with their demands. They allegedly slammed the businessman against a wall and choked him. Fearing for his and his family’s safety, the victim signed documents relinquishing his multimillion-dollar interest in a China-based company that makes rubber chemicals, prosecutors said.
The man’s business partner—a Chinese businesswoman who was not indicted—allegedly financed the bogus raid to resolve longstanding legal disputes with the victim over the company. She reportedly hired the men to locate the victim and obtain his signature on a settlement agreement to transfer $37 million in assets to her. By November 2019, all defendants had been paid for their efforts, the DOJ said.
The defendants allegedly told the victim that he would be arrested and deported if he reported the incident to the police, but he immediately contacted the authorities after the defendants left his home. It is unclear if the victim ended up losing any money, Mercury News reported.
Turbett's attorney told the Associated Press that “We are disappointed that five years after the incident in question and days before the statute of limitations expired, the United States Attorney chose to bring these charges based on the word of an unreliable witness motivated by financial gain.”
The superseding indictment filed on 1 August charges the defendants with one count of conspiracy to commit extortion, one count of attempted extortion, one count of conspiracy against rights, and one count of deprivation of rights under color of law. If convicted, the defendants could face up to 20 years in federal prison for each extortion-related count and up to 10 years for each deprivation of rights count.
