United States Attorney A. Lee Bentley, III announces that U.S. District Judge Mary S. Scriven yesterday sentenced Lawrence S. Hartman, a/k/a Larry Hartman, a/k/a Larry Hart, a/k/a Lawrence Scott Hartman-Grosser (48, Costa Rica; a U.S. lawyer formerly of New York and Florida), to 10 years in federal prison for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud…
…According to evidence and testimony presented at the trials of Hartman’s co-conspirators, from at least as early as July 2004 through at least March 13, 2008, Hartman, along with Paul Robert Gunter (Odessa, Florida), Simon Andrew Odoni (originally of the UK), Richard Sinclair Pope (originally of the UK) and others, engaged in a sophisticated investment fraud and money laundering scheme. The scheme involved worthless stock in hijacked dormant publicly-traded companies in the United States that was sold to victim-investors, primarily in the United Kingdom. The scheme used boiler room telemarketers, mostly in Spain, who employed high pressure and misleading sales techniques. The victim-investors wired more than $127 million to Gunter’s bank accounts in the Middle District of Florida. Hartman and his co-conspirators used the victim-investors’ funds to perpetuate the fraud scheme and for their own personal enrichment. Victim-investors’ funds were used to buy, among other things, luxury items including an airplane, two vessels, vehicles, including the Jaguar and a Ferrari, and real property in the Caribbean islands, England, and Florida.
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