He posed as a professor, mayor and EPA agent, feds say. Now NC man is going to prison
A 64-year-old man was charged with an elaborate fraud scheme in the 1990s that cost his victims $350,000 and resulted in several years at a federal prison in North Carolina.
He got out in 2003. But 18 years later, prosecutors say he did it again.
Charles Gilbert Murphy was sentenced Monday to just over six years in prison after he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft last year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina said in a news release.
He was also ordered to pay $909,763 in restitution to dozens of victims, according to the release.
“This was a case involving a serial con artist who, in the course of evading the repayment of restitution to victims of his prior federal offense, engaged in a new, and more extensive fraud scheme, harming others,” U.S. Attorney G. Norman Acker III said in the release.
A defense attorney representing Murphy did not immediately respond to McClatchy News’ request for comment Monday.
According to court documents, Murphy is accused of creating at least six companies and opening bank accounts for them using family member’s names — including his wife and daughters — due to his poor credit from a prior fraud conviction.
The companies purported to provide environmental cleanup services, and some were later used to sell “high-end coffee machines to gas stations,” prosecutors said in an indictment.
Murphy used fake bank statements and tax returns for his companies to apply for loans, the indictment states. He is also accused of using the companies to solicit “entrepreneurs” to purchase exclusive rights for environmental cleanup services in a given geographical region.
According to the indictment, Murphy induced his victims using fake documents that showed money had been set aside for services in the areas where they bought the exclusive rights.
He also impersonated a professor, a mayor and an agent with the Environmental Protection Agency to make the companies look like good investments, prosecutors said.
FBI agents reportedly interviewed Murphy about the alleged fraud in July 2018.
“After being warned that lying to the FBI was a federal offense, Murphy nevertheless made numerous materially false and fraudulent statements during the interview,” the indictment states.
Court documents from Murphy’s 1999 fraud case were not publicly available, but prosecutors said it was “strikingly similar” to the current scheme.
Murphy was indicted by a grand jury in October 2019 and arrested a few days later, court filings show. He has remained in the Albemarle District Jail in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, since.
After pleading guilty in February 2020, Murphy’s defense attorney asked that he be released to home detention with electronic monitoring until his sentencing date, citing the COVID-19 pandemic. His attorney wrote that Murphy was at high risk given his age and history of high blood pressure.
He also said the jail lacked masks and adequate cleaning supplies, inmates were unable to socially distance themselves and detainees were cycling in and out of the facility in just a few days.
But prosecutors rebuffed the motion, saying Murphy failed to address the issue that got him stuck in jail from the onset — the risk he allegedly posed to the public given that this is his second offense.
“Under the defendant’s proposed release plan, he would be placed back into the custody of the very family that he used to commit the offenses of conviction,” prosecutors said.
A judge agreed, and denied the request in November.
This story was originally published March 15, 2021 at 6:13 PM with the headline "He posed as a professor, mayor and EPA agent, feds say. Now NC man is going to prison."
