Diamond stock scheme results in tax evasion indictment of former Las Vegas man
www.reviewjournal.com/news/crime-courts/diamond-stock-scheme-results-tax-evasion-indictment-former-las-vegas-man
By JEFF GERMAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
A Florida man has been arrested and brought back to Las Vegas on charges of evading hundreds of thousands of dollars in income from the sale of stock in a much-scrutinized diamond company.
Marco Glisson, 58, was apprehended by Internal Revenue Service agents last week at Miami International Airport as he was coming back from Europe.
He was charged here in December on two counts of tax evasion in a federal indictment that was unsealed after his arrest.
Glisson, a former auto worker who once lived in Las Vegas, pleaded not guilty to the charges on Tuesday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Bill Hoffman and was allowed to remain free on $250,000 bail. His trial is set for Sept. 24.
In a December criminal complaint, IRS Agent Bret Kressin said Glisson owed the government more than $664,000 for the tax years 2006 and 2007.
Glisson was accused of hiding income from the sale of $1.8 million in unregistered stock in CMKM Diamonds, a Las Vegas-based company investigated by federal authorities on several fronts.
CMKM executives were among those indicted by a federal grand jury here in September 2009 in an alleged scheme to defraud investors out of $60 million in unregistered company stock. The case is set for trial in October.
“Although CMKM Diamonds purported to be a diamond mining company, the company did not actually engage in any substantial mining activities, nor any economically viable business of any kind,” Kressin wrote in his complaint. “In reality CMKM Diamonds was a publicly traded corporate shell used to perpetuate a massive pump-and-dump securities fraud scheme ... from 2020 to 2005.
“As part of the scheme, the perpetrators fraudulently issued more than 700 billion unregistered shares of CMKM stock.
Glisson, once an assembly line worker at a General Motors plant in Wisconsin, was not charged in the CMKM fraud case. But he faced civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly continuing to sell the company’s stock after the federal agency had de-registered it in 2005.
On the eve of his trial in Las Vegas in April 2012, Glisson struck a deal to pay the SEC $4.8 million to settle the case against him. Without admitting or denying guilt, the deal called for Glisson to pay $2.8 million in profits from trading the stock, $670,000 in interest and a $1.4 million civil penalty.
The SEC contended Glisson, who made himself known through Internet chat rooms, became a national clearinghouse for CMKM stock, setting the buying and selling prices. In one 15-month period, he is alleged to have unlawfully generated $4.4 million in revenues.
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