McGregor Scott, U.S. attorney, stands next to a 1967 Ford Shelby GT 500 at a warehouse in Woodland on Sept. 16, 2019. The car was one of 150 owned by Jeff Carpoff, who pleaded guilty in a massive Ponzi scheme in connection with the company DC Solar. The company’s attorney, Ari Lauer, was sentenced to 11 years and five months in federal prison on Monday.
Randy Pench
Special to The Bee
A Bay Area lawyer will serve 11 years and five months in prison for helping to orchestrate what prosecutors said was the largest fraud scheme in the history of the sprawling federal court district that includes Sacramento.
Ari Lauer pleaded guilty in October 2025 to 23 counts of fraud in the case of DC solar, a Benicia company that served as a front for a nearly $1 billion Ponzi scheme that duped major corporations and sophisticated investors including Berkshire Hathaway chair Warren Buffett.
“This was an egregious, massive fraud — and Mr. Lauer, in my view, played a key role in that fraud,” Sacramento federal judge Dale Drozd said Monday prior to imposing his sentence. “It was clear he was motivated by pure greed.”
DC Solar was run out of Benicia by a married couple, Jeff and Paulette Carpoff, who sold investors on the idea of purchasing solar generators that would be mounted on trailers and leased to third parties. The investors would receive tax benefits for doing so, along with payments from the leases.
Walnut Creek-based Lauer, 61, was their lawyer, working on many of the biggest deals and engaging with employees and others who were suspicious that not all was above-board.
The company never made more than a handful of generators, rearranging them as new investors came in to take a look and filing off identifying numbers so the trailers and generators they did have would be easier to disguise. In the end, Drozd said Monday, the fraud amounted to nearly $830 million.
The FBI raided the company’s offices in 2018, and guilty pleas by most of the principals soon followed. Lauer was the lone holdout, waiting until a few weeks before trial to admit guilt.
In an unusual show of support for someone convicted of such a significant crime, about 50 people attended Lauer’s sentencing hearing on Monday, including his sister, children, two rabbis and members of his religious congregation.
Lauer’s defense submitted more than 130 pages of letters attesting to his involvement in the community, his efforts to be a good father and the honest legal work he had provided to many clients. Drozd said that he had never received so many letters in support of a defendant in a criminal case.
But he said the magnitude of the fraud, as well as Lauer’s decision not to cooperate early on with authorities, contributed to the length of the sentence he imposed.
“Nobody is all good, and nobody is all bad, and that is certainly true here,” Drozd said. “But sometimes good people do very bad things.”
Lauer, wearing a dark gray suit, white shirt and burgundy striped tie, choked up twice as he read a statement to the court and admitted that greed was a motivator in his actions.
“I would like to be able to explain to the court, my family, the prosecutors, and the victims, why I did this,” Lauer said. “I don’t have a full answer to that question yet. I know part of it was greed.”
Throughout the scheme, Lauer said, he persuaded himself that eventually the company would right itself and that the investors would be made whole.
“I also told myself lies about how DC Solar would turn it around, everything would work out in the end, and no one would get hurt,” he said in a statement filed with the court that closely tracked what he said to the judge. “I clung to those beliefs to justify closing more deals, but I knew what I was doing was wrong.”
His lawyer, Edward Swanson said that Jeff Carpoff told Lauer that everything would be ok, and that the lawyer had relied on that.
But Drozd appeared skeptical.
“In my view, Mr. Lauer was not drinking the Kool-Aid,” Drozd said. “He was making the Kool-Aid.”
Drozd declined, however, to impose the full sentence of nearly 25 years requested by federal prosecutors.
Deputy U.S. Attorneys Audrey Hemesath and Nicholas Fogg said that as a major player in the scam, Lauer should be sentenced nearly as long as Jeff Carpoff, who is serving 30 years in federal prison.
Such a sentence would respect the magnitude of the crime while also deterring other lawyers from engaging in such schemes in the future, they said. And the prosecutors argued that Lauer’s decision to wait eight years after the initial FBI raid to enter a guilty plea should result in a longer sentence.
But Drozd said an appropriate sentence for Lauer would be more along the lines of the sentences handed out to other co-conspirators. Paulette Carpoff was sentenced to 11 years and three months in the case.
Drozd ordered Lauer, who lives in Lafayette and has been out of custody on his own recognizance since his indictment in 2023, to turn himself in to federal authorities no later than noon on May 5. He set a restitution hearing in the case for April 27.
Lauer was stripped of his law license in December, but said if he ever earned it back he would devote himself to providing no-cost legal services to the poor.
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Sharon Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Sacramento Bee. She has reported and edited for news organizations across California, including the Los Angeles Times, Reuters and Cityside Journalism Initiative. She grew up in Dallas and earned her master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.