Woman sentenced to 37 months
A former Republic, Wash., title company owner hoped to be a multimillionaire when she stole more than $670,000 and poured it into a get-rich-quick scheme. Instead, she got three years in a federal prison.
U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush sentenced Donna Burbank to 37 months Thursday in a hearing that lasted five hours. It was the minimum standard penalty under federal guidelines the court wrestled with for much of the afternoon.
She could have gotten 46 months, and Assistant U.S. Attorney George Jacobs recommended 42. Assistant U.S. Defender Gerald Smith called for a lighter-than-standard sentence, citing a mental evaluation that he said showed Burbank suffered from “deep-seated psychological problems,” including a faulty “self-concept.”
The 49-year-old defendant’s victims said she suffered from greed when she fell for a common scam known as the Nigerian Letter. According to Burbank’s confession to the FBI, she got a letter in January 2001 from a Dr. Udo Udoma, who offered her a share of his $21.5 million fortune if she would help him skirt financial regulations in transferring the money out of his native Nigeria.
The FBI says con artists such as the fictitious Udoma use the ploy so often that, as one agent put it, anybody who falls for it “deserves a whack with a stupid stick.” The scam artists persuade their victims to put up more and more of their own money – or any money they can lay hands on – to cover expenses that supposedly will lead to vast rewards.
Burbank told authorities she began by sending $20,000 of her own money.
Eventually, she and her now-estranged husband were invited to Newark, N.J., where Udoma associates identified as Lemmy Stephens and Oneil Hall showed them four packages of black paper the size of paper currency.
The men washed five of the papers in what they said was a chemical that cost $125,000 a bottle, and the papers turned into $100 bills.
After that – even when her husband became convinced it was a scam – Donna Burbank gutted the family’s assets and then began stealing from her title office customers, including individuals and federally insured banks and credit unions to buy what Quackenbush dubbed the “magic chemical.”
She raided her escrow trust fund and took money she was supposed to have transferred to and from banks in real estate transactions, leaving people holding the bag when the deals collapsed.
In some cases, the failed transactions were covered by title insurance policies Burbank issued as an agent of Stewart Title and Guaranty, and the company wound up paying about $500,000 to reimburse victims.
A number of individuals still lost substantial sums.
“We had just retired. Our savings are gone,” Curlew resident Karen Dubuque told Quackenbush.
“Our credit was completely destroyed.”
Dubuque said she and her husband lost $11,236 after reimbursement by Stewart Title.
Danville resident Bill Kingston said the $951 he and his wife lost was a lot of money to them.
Most Ferry County residents are farmers, miners or loggers barely making a living in a sour economy, he said.
Most of the victims trusted Burbank, he added.
“I hope you find it in your heart to give her the longest possible time you can give her,” Kingston told Quackenbush.
Although Burbank pleaded guilty last August to embezzling from federally insured financial institutions, attorneys were unable to answer several questions Quackenbush asked at her long-delayed sentencing hearing Thursday.
What was the government doing about catching the people who swindled Burbank, he demanded.
Jacobs said he had no details but had been told that one of the suspects had been arrested in New York.
Quackenbush also wanted to know whether the federally insured money Burbank stole exceeded $400,000, a threshold that could add a year to her sentence.
After hours of haggling, Smith stipulated that the amount exceeded $400,000.
The court also agreed with difficulty that the total amount stolen – which Burbank was ordered to try to repay – was approximately $670,130.