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Two of his cohorts are former postal carriers, one of whom already admitted collecting more than three dozen bogus checks along their routes, and another was a Passaic bank employee who cashed them.
She and one of the letter carriers were ready to testify against Maximo Diaz before he copped a plea Wednesday that still exposes him to several years in federal prison.
Diaz, 22, of Newark, told U.S. District Judge Jerome B. Simandle that the crew submitted individual income tax returns to the IRS using fictitious names, employer information, and deductions, “with the objective of generating tax refund checks issued by the United States Department of the Treasury,” U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said in a statement.
Most of the refund checks were mailed to actual addresses on postal routes assigned to letter carriers Roberto Rivera and David Roman, who were paid to deliver them to Diaz, federal investigators said.
Diana Nunez, then an employee at Valley National Bank’s Passaic branch, cashed more than three dozen bogus checks for Diaz, they said.
Simandle sentenced Rivera to a year and a day in prison and Nunez to three months, both on April 16. The case against Roman is still pending.
Simandle is scheduled to sentence Diaz in U.S. District Court in Camden on Sept. 10.
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