Mac Martin Anderson, 59, of Corona was sentenced Thursday by U.S. District Judge Kenly Kiya Kato, who also ordered him to pay $482,833 in restitution.

Lee was a comic book writer, editor, publisher, and producer. He rose through the ranks of a family-run business that later became Marvel Comics. He was Marvel’s primary creative leader for two decades, expanding the enterprise from a small publishing house to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics and film industries.

Lee died on Nov. 12, 2018, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 95.

According to his February plea agreement, from 2015 to 2018, Anderson had a personal relationship with Lee. That relationship was explored in film footage shot by Jon Bolerjack. The hundreds of hours of footage allegedly revealed that in his final years, Lee was being manipulated by people around him, including Anderson, who served as a manager for the Marvel icon.

In 2018, The Hollywood Reporter published a report that claimed Lee was a victim of elder abuse. It’s unclear whether those allegations led to federal inquiries into Anderson.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Anderson sold Marvel-related items bearing Lee’s autograph to dealers, brokers and fans, but never included revenues on tax filings.

For tax years 2015 through 2018, income from the sold memorabilia totaled $289,460, $452,269, $414,166, and $80,590, respectively, the DOJ reported.

In total, Anderson admitted to profiting approximately $1,236,485 in reportable income from the memorabilia sales, resulting in an IRS tax liability of approximately $482,833, according to the DOJ.

As part of his plea deal, Anderson agreed to pay the IRS the owed amount.

The post Sales Of Marvel Comics Memorabilia Land Corona Man In Prison appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Frank Seung Noah, 64, of Corona pleaded guilty Friday to one count of tax evasion and two counts of wire fraud. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for each wire fraud count and up to five years in federal prison for the tax evasion count. U.S. District Judge Josephine L. Staton scheduled a May 8 sentencing hearing.

According to his plea agreement, Noah owned and operated Comis International Inc., a Cerritos-based logistics and supply-chain company that offered customs import brokerage services.

Comis was a customs import broker for Daiso, a popular Japan-based variety and value store with locations across the United States, including Southern California. In June 2024, Daiso celebrated the grand opening of a location at Menifee’s Town Center Marketplace, 30099 Haun Road. The 5,870-square-foot store features low-priced, quirky Japanese-inspired home decor, stationery, beauty items, food, and other products.

According to federal prosecutors, from 2007 to 2019, Noah provided Daiso with false customs duty forms and invoices to support his fraudulent requests for duty fee reimbursement. The forms differed from those Noah submitted to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He inflated the numbers, resulting in Daiso overpaying Noah nearly $3.4 million.

After Noah was indicted in 2022 for defrauding Daiso, he continued scamming his other clients out of more than $2 million using a different scheme. Prosecutors said he ripped off two other clients by invoicing and receiving funds from their companies and then pocketing the money instead of paying the customs duties to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

After Customs and Border Protection notified the victims about their unpaid customs duties, they asked Noah about the situation, and he sent them altered bank statements falsely reflecting that he had paid the customs duties, according to prosecutors.

Noah also failed to pay federal taxes, resulting in an IRS loss of approximately $2.4 million. Penalties and interest continue to accrue.

After agreeing with the IRS in 2014 that he owed more than $1 million in taxes, Noah actively avoided IRS attempts to collect the money.

Instead, he paid for two homes in his former girlfriend’s name. He used check-cashing businesses to avoid IRS levies on his bank accounts, lied to IRS collection agents, and spent thousands of dollars on country club memberships, travel and golf purchases, according to prosecutors.

The post Clients Bilked Out Of More Than $5 Million By Corona Businessman appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

The Democratic president had previously said he would not pardon his son or commute his sentence after convictions in the two cases in Delaware and California. The move on Sunday night comes weeks before Hunter Biden was set to receive his punishment after his trial conviction in the gun case and guilty plea on tax charges, and less than two months before President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House.

It caps a long-running legal saga for the younger Biden, who publicly disclosed he was under federal investigation in December 2020 — a month after his father’s 2020 victory — and casts a pall over the elder Biden’s legacy.

Biden, who time and again pledged to Americans that he would restore norms and respect for the rule of law after Trump’s first term in office, ultimately used his position to help his son, breaking his public pledge to Americans that he would do no such thing.

In a statement released Sunday evening, Biden said, “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”

The president’s sweeping pardon covers not just the gun and tax offenses against the younger Biden, but also any other “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

In June, Biden categorically ruled out a pardon or commutation for his son, telling reporters as his son faced trial in the Delaware gun case, “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.”

As recently as Nov. 8, days after Trump’s victory, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ruled out a pardon or clemency for the younger Biden, saying, “We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no.”

The elder Biden has publicly stood by his only living son as Hunter descended into serious drug addiction and threw his family life into turmoil before getting back on track in recent years. The president’s political rivals have long used Hunter Biden’s myriad mistakes as a political cudgel against his father: In one hearing, lawmakers displayed photos of the drug-addled president’s son half-naked in a seedy hotel.

House Republicans also sought to use the younger Biden’s years of questionable overseas business ventures in a since-abandoned attempt to impeach his father, who has long denied involvement in his son’s dealings or benefiting from them in any way.

“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Biden said in his statement. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.”

“I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” Biden added, claiming he made the decision this weekend.

The president had spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Nantucket, Massachusetts, with Hunter and his family, and departed for Angola later Sunday on what may be his last foreign trip as president before leaving office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Hunter Biden was convicted in June in Delaware federal court of three felonies for purchasing a gun in 2018 when, prosecutors said, he lied on a federal form by claiming he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs.

He had been set to stand trial in September in the California case accusing him of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes. But he agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges in a surprise move hours after jury selection was set to begin.

David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware who negotiated the plea deal, was subsequently named a special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland to have more autonomy over the prosecution of the president’s son.

Hunter Biden said he was pleading guilty in that case to spare his family more pain and embarrassment after the gun trial aired salacious details about his struggles with a crack cocaine addiction.

The tax charges carry up to 17 years behind bars and the gun charges are punishable by up to 25 years in prison, though federal sentencing guidelines were expected to call for far less time and it was possible he would have avoided prison time entirely.

Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month in the two federal cases, which the special counsel brought after a plea deal with prosecutors that likely would have spared him prison time fell apart under scrutiny by a judge. Under the original deal, Hunter was supposed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses and and would have avoided prosecution in the gun case as long as he stayed out of trouble for two years.

But the plea hearing quickly unraveled last year when the judge raised concerns about unusual aspects of the deal. The younger Biden was subsequently indicted in the two cases.

Hunter Biden’s legal team this weekend released a 52-page white paper titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden,” describing the president’s son as a “surrogate to attack and injure his father, both as a candidate in 2020 and later as president.”

The younger Biden’s lawyers have long argued that prosecutors bowed to political pressure to indict the president’s son amid heavy criticism by Trump and other Republicans of what they called the “sweetheart” plea deal.

Rep. James Comer, one of the Republican chairmen leading congressional investigations into Biden’s family, blasted the president’s pardon, saying that the evidence against Hunter was “just the tip of the iceberg.”

“It’s unfortunate that, rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability,” Comer said on X, the website formerly known as Twitter.

Biden is hardly the first president to deploy his pardon powers to benefit those close to him.

In his final weeks in office, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in law, Jared Kushner, as well as multiple allies convicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump over the weekend announced plans to nominate the elder Kushner to be the U.S. envoy to France in his next administration.

Trump, who has pledged to dramatically overhaul and install loyalists across the Justice Department after he was prosecuted for his role in trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election, said in a social media post on Sunday that Hunter Biden’s pardon was “such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice.”

“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” Trump asked, referring to those convicted in the violent Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

Hunter Biden said in an emailed statement that he will never take for granted the relief granted to him and vowed to devote the life he has rebuilt “to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”

“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction – mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” the younger Biden said.

Hunter Biden’s legal team filed Sunday night in both Los Angeles and Delaware asking the judges handling his gun and tax cases to immediately dismiss them, citing the pardon.

A spokesperson for Weiss did not respond to messages seeking comment Sunday night.

NBC News was first to report Biden was expected to pardon his son Sunday.

The post Biden pardons his son Hunter despite previous pledges not to appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.