Florida man sentenced to over four years for embezzling $5.8M from employer
Ten arrested in multi-location drug bust in Holyoke
Paul Schnitzer, 52, of Clermont, Fla., was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Boston to 54 months in prison and three years of supervised release.
Schnitzer was also ordered to pay $5,831,829 in restitution and forfeit assets he acquired through his scheme, including the balances of two financial accounts, subscription ownership shares in certain artwork, and up to $50,000 in cash held with luxury jeweler Bulgari.
Federal prosecutors said Schnitzer carried out the fraud between January 2022 and May 2024 while working as the finance director of a Florida-based company owned by a Massachusetts investment firm. Over that period, he made more than 100 unauthorized transfers from the company's operating account into his personal bank account. Many of the transfers were falsely labeled as 'equity distributions,' according to court documents.
To conceal the theft, Schnitzer used a company line of credit to replace stolen funds and further siphon money into his own account. Prosecutors said he also submitted falsified financial reports showing inflated cash balances to the company's owners and went so far as to spoof email addresses, posing as representatives from the company's bank and customers to mislead auditors.
Schnitzer was initially released while awaiting trial, but was arrested again in June 2024 after he removed his court-ordered location monitoring device. He was later found to have used a company credit card to make more than $10,000 in unauthorized purchases in August 2024.
Schnitzer pleaded guilty in the case earlier this year.
WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on WWLP.com.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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USA Today
28 minutes ago
- USA Today
Is America done with clean energy? Why wind, solar power are in peril
Since taking office, the Trump Administration has paused permits on all new wind and solar projects on public land, both onshore and offshore. New wind and solar power installations, and the cheap, clean energy they provide to America, may not survive the Trump administration. Building on public concerns and his own dislike of "ugly," "disgusting" wind turbines and "ridiculous" solar farms, President Donald Trump has issued a blizzard of directives and executive orders limiting new solar and wind projects across the county. In at least one case, the administration yanked back an already-issued permit. Instead, the administration is promoting energy production from oil, natural gas and coal, which the Biden administration had made more expensive through regulations Trump is now dismantling. 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'It looks like they are just trying to find any moment at which the federal government interacts with a project and putting it on this list," said Michelle Solomon, manager of the electricity program at Energy Innovation, Policy and Technology, an energy think tank based in San Francisco. The flood of new regulations began on Jan. 20 when the administration temporarily withdrew all permits for offshore wind projects. On July 7, all subsidies for wind and solar projects were ended, though federal subsidies for coal, oil and natural gas were left in place. On July 15, the Department of the Interior added multiple layers of review for all wind and solar projects on public land, including a requirement that the secretary of the interior sign off on each one. It was not clear whether these requirements will stop new projects from being permitted, but "at the very least it will slow decisions down – and a lot of the decisions are not controversial, they're routine,' Krakoff said. 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On Aug. 6, the agency announced it was reversing a permit for a 1,000-megawatt wind facility that had been approved in Idaho. 'They're canceling meetings and taking down web pages," Grumet of American Clean Power said, adding that he sees the moves as "an unprecedented effort to weaponize bureaucracy to undermine an American industry." In early August, Nevada's Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo complained to the secretary of the interior in a letter that solar projects deep in the project pipeline have been frozen. 'This is part of a pattern of targeting the renewable energy industry," said the Conservation Law Foundation's Krakoff. "It's pretty unprecedented to target an entire industry and undermine the rule of law." 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USA Today
28 minutes ago
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The only thing Alina Habba is enforcing is Trump's vengeance
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The Intercept
28 minutes ago
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Teen Immigrant's Release Propels Lawsuit to End ICE's Courthouse Arrests
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'I think that this ruling could definitely have an impact on these cases.' 'What's going on with this administration is that they are testing the limits of everything,' Gillman added. 'I think in Oliver's case, the court sent a resounding message back, saying, 'No.' ' The NYCLU, representing New York City-based immigrant advocacy organizations African Communities Together and The Door, is now asking a federal judge to overturn the Trump administration policies allowing for arrests in immigration court. They cite the cases of 10 people they allege were detained after showing up for otherwise routine immigration hearings. 'These policies are unlawful,' the lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, argues. 'Such arrests chill access to the courts and impede the fair administration of justice.' The parties are due for an initial hearing on October 10. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.) In the lawsuit, the NYCLU attorneys argue the Trump administration changed two key policies that have laid the groundwork for the arrests in immigration court. First, they say, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection rescinded a Biden-era policy that formalized a long-standing practice, banning so-called courthouse arrests. Second, the attorneys argue, the Executive Office for Immigration Review issued a new policy that empowered immigration judges to dismiss a broader category of cases than before. Those two changes, the lawsuit alleges, have put in place a new practice where the government's immigration lawyers move to dismiss cases verbally, a judge grants the dismissal, and then a migrant is detained shortly thereafter while still in the court building. 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Waiting for him in the small lobby were four ICE agents. Mata Velasquez speaks only Spanish, but the agents had paperwork in English and demanded that he sign it, according to both Mata Velasquez's lawyers and his uncle. His uncle described them as wearing civilian clothes, not ICE uniforms. Mata Velasquez was then detained and sent to the ICE detention center located in Batavia, about 40 miles east of the courthouse. 'He was really scared when they pressured him to sign this form,' his uncle, who requested anonymity for fear of being targeted by ICE, said in an interview. 'My nephew is a good person. He doesn't have a criminal record or any tattoos. He's a good person, he's a kid.' Mata Velasquez's lawyers, in their successful petition to have him released, said he was afraid while in the Batavia facility and routinely harassed by others. 'Oliver is terrified and experiencing the harms of being in a carceral setting for the first time,' that petition said. 'He has experienced harassment from at least 10 other detainees, many of whom are much older than him. Officers threatened to place him in solitary confinement and Oliver is very scared of being put in such isolating conditions.' Solitary confinement is a standard practice at the Batavia facility, which uses the isolated cells more than all but four other ICE facilities in the country. Prior reporting by The Intercept and its partners found that solitary confinement is a frequent tool used by ICE, and occasionally results in detainees taking their own lives. Mata Velasquez ultimately spent 26 days in the Batavia facility before Vilardo, the federal judge in Buffalo, ordered him released. 'Rarely do we ever get somebody's outright relief granted,' said Jillian Nowak, managing attorney at Prisoners' Legal Services of New York. 'And I'm hoping we can use this as a foundational decision to pump the brakes on some of these detentions.' Read Our Complete Coverage Facing an uphill battle in getting all courthouse arrestees released, the legal advocacy organizations are shifting their strategy to challenge as a system what they argue are unlawful policies. Belsher, of the NYCLU, said doing so is necessary to combat the Trump administration's crackdown on migrants. 'This is a broader strategy of the government's, right? Just flood the system,' Belsher said. 'They are causing enormous harm by just doing unlawful things at scale.' Every individual case requires intensive resources. 'They are doing this to hundreds of people,' she said, 'and thousands of people are terrified to go to their hearings because of it.' The lawsuit argues that allowing the courthouse arrests to continue will only enable ICE to detain more people, putting more strain on detention centers that are already at or over capacity. Through June, data shows that ICE has doubled arrests compared to 2024. The majority of those arrested have no criminal record, despite the rhetoric published by ICE and the White House. 'Due to the increase in arrests and related overcrowding at many of its detention facilities, ICE has been detaining noncitizens swept up in immigration courthouse arrests in transitional holding facilities for prolonged periods — in some cases over a week — where they lack access to counsel and are in conditions wholly inadequate to safely and humanely detain people,' the suit alleges. In Western New York, CBP offices at the Peace and Rainbow bridges as well as other CBP stations have been used to detain migrant families including toddlers and those with life-threatening diseases. Statewide, four county sheriffs have newly agreed to allow ICE to detain migrants in their jails. In New York City, arrests and detentions in the federal building at 26 Federal Plaza have raised alarm among immigration advocates. Gillman, one of Mata Velasquez's lawyers, said she hopes the Vilardo ruling and subsequent NYCLU lawsuit shifts the tide. 'As the judge wrote in his decision, the government … can't just kind of change the goalpost and say, 'Now we're just going to go out and arrest people without any type of process, without any type of due process,'' she said. 'As a lawyer, the legal decision that the judge made is very, in my mind, impactful.'
