3/13/24
Janet Mello, the former civilian Army employee who looted more than $100 million from a youth program for military families, is notorious for spending the money on designer accessories, luxury cars and high-end real estate.
Parcel company drivers delivered so many boxes of Louis Vuitton, Coach, Gucci and other designer brands to her North Side home that they nicknamed her “the Gucci Goddess.”
It turns out that Mello, 57, also accumulated a lot of ordinary, workaday stuff: old lawn mowers, motorcycle and car parts, ladders, boxes of dishware, farm implements, a 1980 Nissan pickup, six trailers and two John Deere tractors. That’s just for starters.
The federal government wants to sell those items to fund the restitution Mello owes. And they want to do it quickly, because the stuff is deteriorating from disuse and the depredations of “rodents and rust,” according to court filings.
The odds and ends are stored in Gonzales County, 80 miles east of San Antonio. Court documents don’t say where in Gonzales County or in what kind of storage structure.
“Many of these items, most notably the vehicles, have not moved in months if not years,” federal prosecutors said in a recent court filing. “Rodents and rust appear to have damaged some of the items, which are also suffering from lack of use. As a result, it is essential that the items be sold before their value diminishes any further.”
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez signed an order appointing a receiver “to take possession and arrange for the sale” of the belongings. The sale “is both necessary and appropriate to prevent waste and dissipation of the assets of the Defendant and to ensure funds are available to apply towards the Defendant’s upcoming restitution debt,” the judge said.
Rodriguez appointed Daniel Kubinski, founder and co-owner of Crowned Eagle Realty in San Antonio, as receiver. As compensation for his services, Kubinski will collect up to 5% of the sale proceeds, plus “reasonable and necessary” expenses, including auto mileage to and from Gonzales County, according to the judge’s order.
The order requires Mello and her husband, Mark, to cooperate fully with the receiver and to surrender keys, passwords, entry codes and any other information or records necessary for him to get hold of the property and sell it.
The miscellaneous items slowly deteriorating in Gonzales County are in a different category from the expensive things Mello acquired with her ill-gotten money: condos, homes, at least two huge estates and large parcels of empty land in prime locations in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Maryland and Washington. Not to mention more than 80 vintage and high-performance cars and motorcycles, some of them worth more than $150,000 apiece.
That really valuable stuff already has been seized under forfeiture laws that allow the government to take possession of property used to commit crimes or purchased with the proceeds of criminal activity.
“However, given the volume of items, not all the personal property will be forfeited,” prosecutors wrote. There are just too many lower-value items gathering dust in Gonzales County. Thus the need for a receiver.
Mello pleaded guilty last week to stealing $108 million from the Army, one of the biggest thefts of public funds in Texas history.
Mello, once the salutatorian of her high school graduating class in Guam, pleaded guilty to five counts of mail fraud and five charges of filing fraudulent tax returns.
She exploited lax financial controls at the Army’s Installation Management Command to divert $108 million to a bogus company she created.
As a financial program manager, Mello helped run the 4-H Military Partnership Grant program, which hires contractors to provide training and curricula to the service branches so children from military families can participate in 4-H, a network of youth groups that encourages children to undertake hands-on projects in agriculture, health, science and civic leadership.
When Mello created her company, CHYLD, in 2016, she said it provided 4-H services to military personnel and their families, but prosecutors said its only purpose was as a repository for money illegally diverted from the Army.
The government mailed more than 40 checks to CHYLD totaling $108 million. The checks were sent to mailboxes Mello rented at UPS stores, which she claimed were CHYLD’s addresses.
“Today was the beginning of the long process where she pled guilty,” Mello’s lawyer, Albert Flores, told reporters after her guilty plea. “She’s accepting responsibility for her actions. She’s very remorseful for what she’s done.”
Her sentencing is scheduled for May 29.
Professor Elam 
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