After a day of twists and turns in which a former executive of the Verona-based business Nexus was set to go to trial, he entered a guilty plea. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
On Tuesday, three years after he was first indicted on federal tax evasion charges, Richard Moore pled guilty to two of 18 felony counts. Moore was a former part owner and executive vice president of the company Nexus, which made millions of dollars connecting people in immigration detention with bonds – through coercive conduct he was found legally liable for in a civil case.
This week's snowstorm prevented the trial from starting on Monday as it was scheduled after multiple delays. Tuesday began with a last-minute hearing, in which Moore tried to offer a conditional guilty plea, which Chief U.S. District Judge Elizabeth K. Dillon rejected. Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute explains that by entering this plea, a defendant can appeal an adverse decision of a specific pretrial motion. If the appeal court agreed with him, he could then withdraw the guilty plea. In Moore's case, that may have been his attempt to limit prosecutors from bringing up his luxury expenditures at trial. Federal prosecutors claimed in court filings that over the ten years he was withholding taxes from the IRS, Moore spent about $11 million on luxuries including expensive cars and his wedding. Dillon had ruled last week that such evidence would be allowed where relevant.
After an afternoon recess, Moore pled guilty to two counts of withholding taxes taken out of employees' paychecks in late 2019 and early 2020. In the plea agreement, prosecutors offered to drop the other 16 counts against him, as long as Moore agreed to pay restitution to the IRS for the entire scope of his criminal conduct, going back to 2015. That total is more than $3 million.
Moore will remain out on bond until the sentencing hearing, which has not yet been announced. He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.
Moore spoke briefly during the hearing, saying, "I helped run a company that grew and grew and grew, that wasn't prepared for all that growth. … There were mistakes made. At the end of the day, that's my responsibility." Dillon said the charges went beyond "mistakes" and asked if Moore agreed his conduct was willful. After briefly conferring with his attorney, Mario Williams, Moore said yes.
One of Dillon's orders filed in the case last month notes that Michael Donovan, Moore's husband and the founder of Nexus, is also the target of an ongoing investigation that may relate to non-payment of taxes.
