fraud scheme<\/a> centered around her family\u2019s Porsche restoration and resale business.<\/p>\nBoth the judge and a prosecutor acknowledged that Andrea Nicole Doherty, 38, was placed in a difficult position by her father\u2019s questionable business practices that he engaged in while running a company that was registered under her name. But they said that when he died in 2021 and left her with a financial mess, she should have closed the business and filed for bankruptcy.<\/p>\n
Instead, Doherty continued her father\u2019s \u201cpuffery\u201d and false promises to customers and ended up operating a Ponzi-style scheme that finally came crashing down in 2024, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Hill told the judge\u00a0Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tried to save something that wasn\u2019t savable,\u201d Doherty told U.S. District Judge Andrew Schopler through tears. She apologized to the victims of her crime and said she would spend the rest of her life trying to make up for what she did, though she acknowledged that with such a steep restitution order against her, \u201cit will never be enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
Doherty pleaded guilty in December to three counts of wire fraud, admitting that she stole more than $827,000 from five customers during the years after she took over CPR Classic following her father\u2019s death. As part of her plea agreement, she also agreed to pay restitution to more than 60 additional individuals, including many who had filed civil lawsuits against her and CPR Classic claiming they were owed money, vehicles or both.<\/p>\n
Defense attorney Megan Foster argued that Doherty hadn\u2019t used the scheme to enrich herself. Instead, Doherty used the fraud proceeds to try to keep afloat a company that she believed was her father\u2019s legacy, that she had worked for her entire adult life and that also employed her husband and brother.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was robbing Peter to pay Paul,\u201d Foster told the judge.<\/p>\n
Schopler agreed, saying that unlike many other fraud cases he\u2019s seen, Doherty was not funding a lavish lifestyle. But he said that in crafting a proper sentence, he had to \u201ctake into account the enormity of the crime\u201d and the \u201cmassive loss to dozens and dozens of people.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to a prison term of one year and nine months, the judge ordered Doherty to pay $500 per month in restitution once released from custody.<\/p>\n
Though prosecutors alleged that CPR Classic was engaged in widespread fraud, Doherty pleaded guilty to charges involving three specific cars.<\/p>\n
She admitted that in 2022 and 2023, she sold a 1973 Porsche 911E Targa to two different buyers, accepting $216,050 from one buyer and $200,000 from the second buyer. She delivered the car to the second buyer while making excuses to the first about delivery delays. She also waited months to inform the car\u2019s owner that it had sold, and when she did finally send him a check, it bounced.<\/p>\n
Later in 2023, she made a similar series of transactions, agreeing with the owner of a 1972 Porsche 911S that she would sell his car. The next day, a buyer agreed to purchase it and wired her $280,000. Doherty delivered the vehicle to that buyer, but did not transfer its legal title nor inform the car\u2019s original owner that it had been sold. Months later, she sold the same car to a different buyer for $275,000. The original owner transferred the title to the second buyer, unaware that someone had already paid for the same car months earlier.<\/p>\n
Her third guilty plea related to a 1983 Porsche 930T Slantnose that she sold for $130,000 after agreeing with the car\u2019s owner to sell it for at least $150,000. In order to complete the sale at the lower price, she forged the owner\u2019s signature on the vehicle\u2019s legal title \u2014 but she placed the forged signature on the wrong line. She later delivered the car to the buyer without providing the legal title and failed to inform the car\u2019s owner that it had sold.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t recognize the person I became during those years,\u201d Doherty told the judge.<\/p>\n
Hill, the prosecutor, acknowledged that many of the victims were financially well off, given how much money they were spending on the vehicles. But he said at least one victim viewed the car in question as a significant part of his retirement portfolio.<\/p>\n
Court records show Doherty\u2019s father had millions of dollars of civil judgments against him stemming from previous business ventures. Foster, the defense attorney, said he started CPR Classic under Doherty\u2019s name to shield the company from those civil judgments.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody agrees the defendant was left in an awkward position\u201d by her father, the prosecutor acknowledged Friday in court. But he said Doherty would have never faced criminal charges if she had shuttered the business once he died.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO A San Diego federal judge on Friday sentenced a Fallbrook woman to nearly two years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[7,1312,138,10629,181,23,100,3054,74,84,76,75,1696],"class_list":["post-411572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-california","tag-courts","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-fallbrook","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-north-county","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-county","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-top-stories-sdut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}