A federal judge in Florida on Tuesday sentenced Orlando “businessman” Frank Amodeo to 22 years in prison for stealing $181 million in payroll taxes – one of the largest employment tax frauds in U.S. history.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Randy Gold in the Middle District of Florida, a tax and money-laundering specialist, prosecuted the case. Gold will be regaling his colleagues for years about this one.
A diminutive disbarred lawyer with a messiah complex, Amodeo owned a Lear jet and once predicted he would dominate world business.
In fact, Amodeo was pocketing withholding taxes that he was supposed to be remitting to the Internal Revenue Service through a web of payroll check processing companies he owned. He pleaded guilty to five felony charges last September. At a sentencing hearing earlier this month, a psychiatrist testified that Amodeo was ”manic, delusional and grandiose” and “mentally ill,” the Orlando Sentinel reported.
But it was Amodeo’s high-profile political activities that made the case especially weird.
He owned a shadowy “security consulting” firm that sent three employees – including an ex-Secret Service agent named Kevin Billings – to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006 to guard a dual U.S.-Congolese citizen named Oscar Kashala, who was running for president.
Billings and two other Amodeo employees were thrown into jail on trumped-up charges of trying to overthrow the government. After their release, they flew to Paris, where Amodeo’s jet picked them up for a return flight to Florida.
Kashala, the failed Congolese presidential candidate, also was a client of the Washington lobbying firm Dutko Worldwide. Through Kashala, Amodeo hired Dutko to assist him with international business deals. Dutko lobbyist Sally Painter, a former Clinton Commerce Department official active in North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion issues, tapped him for $100,000 to sponsor a NATO conference in Riga, Latvia in 2006.
That $100,000 contribution — plus another $5000 he donated to the Republican Party of Florida the day before — got Amodeo into a meeting at the White House in October 2006, where he sat two seats down from President Bush at a meeting to discuss an upcoming NATO summit in Latvia.
At the time, Amodeo was under active Justice Department investigation in Florida for the missing withholding taxes. He was known to be erratic and manic, a string of lawsuits alleging fraud had been filed against him, he’d been disbarred as a lawyer, and had already been convicted once of felony fraud in Georgia. Moreover, his company’s murky foray into Congolese politics had been on the front page of the Orlando Sentinel. But the Secret Service still let Amodeo into the White House to sit with the president. Good work, Secret Service.
As for Dutko’s Painter, she later told me for this profile I wrote of her for the Wall Street Journal she’d had no idea of Amodeo’s criminal jeopardy. After his lobbying contract expired, Dutko sued him for failing to pay his bill. The case was settled.
Read a copy of Amodeo’s indictment here. The Orlando Sentinel’s stories on Amodeo are here. He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge John Antoon II.
