Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said that Darden Media Chairman Calvin Darden Sr's son, Calvin Darden Jr, has been hit with a multimillion-dollar charges for alleged fraud tied to the acquisition of Maxim magazine and other schemes. The charges claimed that the Staten Island, New York native lied extensively in several schemes, which involved him impersonating his father on phone calls and emails, Bloomberg said in a report. The report also said that Darden Jr also tricked lenders into loaning him over $8 million to acquire bawdy men's title Maxim.
The US government also said that Darden Jr defrauded an unnamed company based in Taiwan of $500,000 for an exhibition game of the National Basketball Association his father would reportedly arrange. According to a criminal complaint, Darden Jr also provided false information that he and his father had met with New York Knicks owners and NBA officials to support his claim of arranging an exhibition game, forged his father's signature on several documents and impersonated his father in emails to the Taiwanese company.
Prosecutors have said that with regard to the Maxim purchase, Darden Jr provided a botched back account statement and claimed that the account was his fathers as collateral to lenders. The statement reportedly showed his father's stock holdings in three, publicly-traded companies, where Darden Sr is a director, Bloomberg quoted prosecutors.
The US government also added that the younger Darden created and used a phony email to fool a lender, which purportedly came from a bank employee verifying the stock holdings of Darden Sr's stock holdings.
Bloomberg said the government recounted how Darden Jr used a Russia-based e-mail service to spoof the lender, who had already placed $5.5 million into an escrow account, to be able to obtain the release of $4.9 million that would go towards the acquisition of Maxim.
The news outlet said that Darden Jr was arrested yesterday and is set to appear before a federal magistrate judge in Manhattan today. Court records show that darden Jr is not new to the fraud scheme, as he was convicted previously in 2005 by the Manhattan district attorney's office in a separate fraud scheme.
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