Naval Procurement Officer Prince Receives Four-Year Sentence for Poker-Lifestyle-Feeding $2.7M Fraud
Naval Lieutenant Randolph M. Prince has been sentenced to more than four years in prison for a long-running fraud which netted the long-time procurement officer more than $2.7 million, and according to prosecutors’ allegations, fueled a lifestyle of flashy cars, high-stakes poker, and even a second home.
Prince, 45, known as “Kaz”, pled guilty in August to wire fraud and lying on his income tax returns in connection with a scheme through which he and two partners in the fraud billed the Navy for products purportedly ordered from firms run by Prince’s partners. Prince, who lives and worked in the Norfolk, Virginia area, then marked the nonexistent items as having been received by the Navy, when they didn’t actually exist, and the three men divvied up several million dollars’ worth of Navy supply funds.
Prince’s partners in the scheme, naval flight officer Lt. j.g. Courtney Cloman, and former sailor Clayton Pressley III, also pled guilty to charges stemming from the procurement fraud. Pressley earned $644,000 from his role in the procurement-fraud scheme, and he’s already been sentenced to two years. Prince also claimed that Pressley was the organizer of the fraud scheme, which involved at least three sham companies set up for billing purposes.
Cloman faces a sentencing hearing in early February.
As the active government employee most central to the scheme, which involved the sale of inert (“fake”) training bombs to the military, Prince faced the most significant penalties. Naval prosecutors sought more than seven years in prison for Prince on the charges, while Prince’s defense counsel sought as little as two years. Prince could have faced as much as 20 years in prison on the two counts on which he pled guilty. That wasn’t likely, however, and the four-plus years falls in the middle, though Prince was also ordered to pay the full fruits of the fraud, $2,719,907.
The allegations regarding Prince’s high-stakes poker lifestyle were not detailed in the criminal complaint, which was filed in July of 2018. It is known that Prince has no recorded cashes on prominent poker-tournament databases, meaning that he was either a cash-game player, or that the “poker” claims refer to something such as video poker — actually more akin to slots than true poker. In any event, Prince appears to have amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars in gambling losses that helped drive, in part, his fraudulent activities.
“It’s a shame that he squandered an otherwise outstanding 27-year Naval career,” Prince’s defense attorney Shawn Cline told the Virginian-Pilot. Prince was a career Navy man, having entered the service at age 18. “He suffered from a terrible gambling addiction and abused a position of trust to fuel that addiction.”
“When his time in service is remembered, it won’t be for the fact that he rose from the lowest enlisted ranks to the grade of Lieutenant, or that he served in a dangerous war zone in direct combat when his nation needed him most. It will be the events of this sentencing hearing that are his legacy,” added Cline. “Rather than being something with which he can look back on with pride, he will spend the rest of his life hoping that the people with whom he interacts are not aware of the time he spent serving in the Navy.”
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