Charges held in Somerset money-laundering case
Scott Beveridge/Observer-Reporter
John F. Kusajtys and his daughter, Jennifer Lee Hoberman, both of Fallowfield Township, leave a district court after being freed on bond in March.
Tyler James Hoberman
Charges against three people from Somerset Township who deny allegations they used a house-flipping company as a conduit for profits from illicit cannabis sales were allowed to proceed Wednesday following an unusually long hearing in Bentleyville.
District Judge Curtis Thompson – acknowledging authorities faced a lower burden than they will have to meet as the case progresses – held all charges against Tyler Hoberman, 30, his wife, 31-year-old Jennifer Hoberman, and her father, John F. Kusajtys, 62, for trial in Washington County Common Pleas Court.
Thompson ruled at the end of a nearly five-hour preliminary hearing, during which the co-defendants’ attorneys raised questions about whether the case amounted to a prosecution of the couple for offenses to which the husband pleaded guilty two years ago and, as part of that deal, state prosecutors granted the wife immunity.
“I think there are serious due process issues in light of the prior prosecution, and we look forward to raising those issues in the Court of Common Pleas,” said David Berardinelli, who represents Jennifer Hoberman, following the hearing.
The government contends the current charges deal with separate crimes from the previous ones.
In a related civil case, the couple is also trying to recover $576,000 that was seized from them as supposed proceeds of criminal activity last year.
Assistant District Attorney Rachel Wheeler called the two investigators – Fayette County Detective Steve Kontaxes and Trooper Justin Duval – who filed the charges on March 8. The government contends all three family members were involved in using a company called 1st Choice Home Improvement LLC to launder money Tyler Hoberman made from alleged drug deals.
The charges finally came almost six months after a Sept. 18 search of the family’s house on Hess Road, when police said they found evidence including financial records, some small bags of marijuana and large, empty food-saver bags allegedly used to package marijuana.
Kontaxes – a certified financial crimes investigator whose multiple jobs include captain in the Perryopolis police and controller for the defense contractor Bechtel Corp. – said that he had reviewed 1st Choice’s financial records and concluded that “the business was being held entirely for the purpose of money laundering.”
For example, he said there was no sign of a payroll or spending on materials by the family company. Court papers say that early as 2011, Tyler Hoberman was buying properties in the area.
Testimony on Thursday showed at least some of them were foreclosed houses that were later sold for tens of thousands of dollars in profit.
“These are all things that we’ve seen before,” Kontaxes said.
Cross-examined by one of the defense attorneys, he conceded that it did seem that improvements were being made on the houses in question.
The defense, meanwhile, questioned the prosecution’s narrative that these proceeds were from an ongoing drug operation and were the only source of income for their clients. In particular, Kusajtys’ attorney, John Schwab, said his client was a retiree whose wife was still employed.
The case against Kusajtys – who like his daughter and son-in-law is charged with being an employee of a corrupt organization, dealing in the proceeds of unlawful activity, and conspiring to commit each of those offenses – relies mainly on an initial investment of about $70,000 that Kusajtys made in the company when it was started and listing his name as a principal in its registration documents.
Court papers also cite a statement by Tyler Hoberman that authorities in Pennsylvania learned about secondhand from counterparts in Ashtabula County, Ohio, on Sept. 1, when local sheriff’s deputies responded to a report Kusajtys had made of a burglary at an unoccupied house he owns with his wife.
When the deputies arrived, Hoberman was there, as was his truck, in whose bed deputies allegedly found $1.25 million. During that encounter, he allegedly told the deputies the money belonged to Kusajtys, who’d been a partner and driver in Hoberman’s old marijuana distribution network. Those funds were seized by local authorities.
Kusajtys declined to press charges on the purported burglary; however, the incident prompted a compliance check by Washington County probation officials who were supervising Hoberman following his March 2017 guilty plea to charges including drug delivery and dealing in the proceeds of unlawful activity, which in turn led to the search of the family’s house.
In 2017, Hoberman had surrendered a total of $2.4 million in his plea agreement with the state attorney general’s office and secured immunity for his wife from prosecution in the case.
The previous plea agreement is helping to fuel questions about the case by the couple’s attorneys, who contend there is overlap between money from those crimes and the purported new ones at issue in the more recent case. Wheeler and the state attorney general’s office, which is fighting the Hobermans’ bid to get their money back, maintain that the most recent case arises from separate alleged offenses.
The latest set of charges came the week before a hearing before Common Pleas Judge Gary Gilman over the petitions filed by Berardinelli and Meagan Temple, Tyler Hoberman’s attorney, for the return of assets from Jennifer Hoberman’s and 1st Choice’s accounts. The attorneys had contended that no criminal case had been filed in connection with the confiscated funds.
Police hadn’t cited any new instances of Tyler Hoberman allegedly selling marijuana until Thursday, when Wheeler added a drug delivery charge based on allegations that Hoberman had driven – in a truck registered to 1st Choice – to meet two other men at an address in New Eagle. There, one of the men was seen putting a “large dark bag” in the trunk of a sedan parked at the back of the property, police allege.
Police said they found 10 pounds of what lab results later showed to be marijuana when they pulled over the same man and car later that day.
Investigators haven’t alleged that Hoberman received a specific amount of money from that purported drug sale. Nor have they tied it to any specific bank transactions. Wheeler maintained it shows Hoberman was engaged in drug dealing during the period in question.
“Everyone knows that no one is distributing 10 pounds of marijuana and receiving nothing in exchange,” she said.