Wed Ict 16, 2024
\As Ron White says, you cna't fix stupid. Here a former Police Chief committed a felony fraud for $14,.388. There is ethical failure and then ther is just plain stupid.
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A federal jury has convicted Christopher Filline, the former Castroville police chief, of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for participating in a scheme to destroy his own SUV in 2016.
He reported the vehicle was stolen and claimed an insurance settlement, but was indicted four years later and was found guilty Tuesday.
A Castroville animal control officer participated in the scheme, along with a third man who doused Filline’s 2007 Lincoln Navigator with gasoline and set it on fire, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.
Filline then filed a false report with the Lytle Police Department and a false insurance claim with Farmers Insurance Group. The insurance company paid out $14,388 for the supposedly stolen vehicle, a U.S. Attorney’s Office statement said.
Filline, who’d been Castroville’s police chief since 2013, was fired soon after federal prosecutors announced the charge in January 2020 that accused him of hatching the insurance fraud plot.
Ambrose Rymers, the animal control officer — and himself a former police chief of the small city of Sabinal in Uvalde County — pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge within days of Filline’s arrest. He is set to be sentenced Wednesday and is facing up to five years in federal prison, according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson.
The man who set Filline’s SUV on fire was identified as Oscar Hernandez, according to the spokesperson. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced to time served in in 2022 but this year was sentenced to four months in prison for violating the terms of his supervised release.
Filline, 58, whose sentencing hearing is set for Jan. 22, could face up to 20 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.
Professor Elam 
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