Robert Rizzo sentenced to 33 months in prison for tax evasion
LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Former Bell city manager Robert Rizzo has been sentenced to 33 months in federal prison for tax evasion.
Rizzo was ordered to surrender on May 30. He was also ordered to pay $255,984 in restitution to the IRS. After his release from custody, Rizzo was ordered to be on two years supervised release.
The sentencing was separate from the corruption charges related to his job as Bell's city manager. He was charged for failing to pay his taxes and lying to the Internal Revenue Service.
But Chief Judge George H. King acknowledged that the federal and state cases are somewhat related because if Rizzo hadn't stolen the money from the citizens of Bell, he would not have the extra income to commit tax fraud.
When handing down his decision, King said Rizzo conspired to defraud the United States by causing a tax preparer to create a tax return claiming false losses.
"He claimed various personal expenses that were phony expenses," King said in court.
The sentence will run consecutively to any sentence he may receive for state corruption charges on Wednesday. He pleaded no contest to 69 corruption-related counts related to his actions as Bell's city administrator and faces 10 to 12 years in prison in that case.
Bell's former assistant city manager, Angela Spaccia, was sentenced last Wednesday to 11 years and eight months for her role in the corruption case. The judge called Spaccia a "con artist" during the hearing and ordered Spaccia to pay over $8.2 million in restitution to city of Bell.
