U.S. POLITICIAN BLEW PARTY FUNDS ON INTERNET GAMBLING


Wednesday July 6, 2011 : Another Linwood Payment Solutions casualty?
 
The US enforcement ‘sting’ payment processor Linwood Payment Solutions  may have claimed another victim, according to reports in The Denver Post Tuesday.
 
The daily reported that felony-theft arrest warrants have been issued in respect of former Larimer County Republican Party chairman Larry Carillo, who stands accused of embezzling thousands of dollars in party funds and spending some of it on internet gambling.
 
In a 17-page arrest affidavit, Carillo is accused of stealing $17,696 from the Republican Party and using the money to pay telephone and cable-television bills and to cover gambling debts.
 
After a police investigation, the case was handed over to District Attorney Ken Buck, who is acting as a special prosecutor.
 
"We started going through receipts and piecing things together because there was no accounting done in the two years Carillo was in office," said Larimer County's assessor and treasurer of the county GOP. "There was a lot of stuff that just didn't make sense."
 
Carillo served as party chairman from February 2009 to February 28, when he resigned after other party officials confronted him about failing to file six campaign-finance reports in 2010.
 
Last month, Fort Collins Police Services fraud investigator Frank Bishop examined the party's bank statements at Bank of Colorado and First National Bank dating from January 2009 through August 2010.
 
His affidavit reveals that 21 withdrawals from party accounts by Carillo during that period were "pre-authorised" and made by "Linwood Payment Solutions," which was created by Homeland Security officials to identify and prosecute illegal online gambling and money laundering.
 
The report does not clarify which online betting company accepted Carillo’s action – several operators were named as users of the Linwood facility.