DETROIT — A man from Chicago was found guilty of stealing $700,000 from a casino in Michigan. An employee was tricked over the phone into putting the money in a designer bag and going 85 miles (137 kilometers) to deliver it.
U.S. Attorney Mark Totten said, “This case shows how important it is for people, businesses, and organizations to be careful and diligent about phone and internet scams.”
The crime happened at the Four Winds Casino in Hartford, Michigan, in 2023. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians runs the casino. The FBI said that a key employee who deals with cash got a call and text messages telling her to get $700,000 for a tribal leader right away.
The employee walked out of the casino with a Michael Kors bag full of cash and drove off. No one stopped her.
The person on the other end of the line finally told her to go to a gas station in Gary, Indiana. Police say that’s when she gave the money to Jesus Gaytan-Garcia, one of two guys in a minivan who met her.
It was helpful for the police to talk to her about the call, the texts, and the money transfer at the gas station, according to a court document from Assistant U.S. Attorney Erin Lane.
Seven months later, in March 2024, Gaytan-Garcia was caught after police were able to connect him to the car that was used to get the cash.
In federal court in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Thursday, he was found guilty of two crimes. Tiffany Brown of the U.S. Attorney’s Office said that other people who may have been involved in the theft are still being looked into.
Investigators said they found $18,000 in a safe at Gaytan-Garcia’s home in Chicago. Someone wrapped the money and wrote the date of the theft on it.
“He lived in that house with his family and other families, and the floors move,” Parker Douglas, the defense lawyer, said Friday. “Other people could get to the money there.” My point was that there wasn’t any solid proof that this man did this at this time. The judges didn’t agree.
Lane said that searches of Gaytan-Garcia’s trailers in Indiana turned up proof of money transfers, old coins, money from the Civil War, and foreign cash.
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