“This defendant is a walking crime-spree,” Michael Wheat, a special federal prosecutor, told the judge in court, saying she holds sway with police and has tampered with grand jury witnesses in the past.
Wow. “A walking crime-spree.” That’s pretty harsh. Who is the defendant?
Katherine Kealoha. She was a prosecutor in the Honolulu DA’s office. She is also married to the former Honolulu chief of police.
And both of them were convicted of consipracy and obstruction of justice on Friday. Also convicted: two officers with the Honolulu PD.
This whole case is kind of bat guano insane, and Hawaii is not my usual beat. So I didn’t find out about this story until yesterday, and completely missed any run-up to it. This particular set of convictions were the result of the Kealoha’s staging the theft of a mailbox. No, really. A mailbox.
The five defendants were accused of conspiring to frame Gerard Puana, Katherine Kealoha’s estranged uncle, for the alleged theft of the Kealohas’ Kahala mailbox in 2013 and then lying to federal authorities to cover their scheme.
Prosecutors said the Kealohas were trying to smear Puana and Katherine Kealoha’s grandmother Florence Puana because they were catching on to the fact that the Kealohas had used the proceeds from a reverse mortgage on Florence Puana’s home to bankroll a lavish lifestyle.
(Noted: one of those five, former HPD Major Gordon Shiraishi, was acquitted on all charges.)
So that’s a little more understandable, I guess? They tried to frame the uncle (who they didn’t get along with anyway) to keep the money faucet flowing.
I know real estate in Hawaii isn’t cheap, but how much did they get out of this reverse mortgage?
Prosecutors said Katherine Kealoha burned through $135,000 of Florence Puana’s money in six months.
By the way…
And the insanity doesn’t end there.
More (I apologize for the length, but this does give a fairly detailed account):
During the trial, prosecutors portrayed Katherine Kealoha as the ringleader of the conspiracy. She invented an alias, Alison Lee Wong, to forge documents, and tried to have her grandmother declared incompetent to silence her, prosecutors told the jury.
Jurors watched a deposition from Puana’s mother, Florence Puana, who was unable to testify in court because of her failing health.
Gerard Puana testified that Katherine Kealoha came to them with an idea about taking out a reverse mortgage on her grandmother’s home to help buy a condo her uncle wanted. Kealoha said she would consolidate her debts — which prosecutors described as massive — and promised her uncle and grandmother that she would pay off the loan.
Wheat noted that Kealoha tampered with potential witnesses, including sending letters trying to convince them Alison Lee Wong is a real person.
“Well, it’s pretty clear who Alison Lee Wong is,” Seabright said. “It’s Katherine Kealoha.”
Kealoha had an innocent man incarcerated and tried to silence her grandmother “after engaging in an outright theft of their money,” Seabright said.
“To be clear, it was her own grandmother she did this to,” he said.
She also got her firefighter boyfriend to lie about their affair to a grand jury and convinced the man whose childhood trust she controlled that his mother would go to jail if he didn’t lie and say Kealoha gave him his money, Seabright said.
And a little sting at the end:
You also didn’t see where she spent money to fly the boyfriend between islands , pay for his hotel rooms, and so on. The worst part? Her husband was the Chief of Police, and she was having an affair with a fireman. Ohhh, the shame of it all.
Mr. Pritchett:
You’re right, I didn’t see that. There was a brief throwaway comment in one of the linked articles about her “lavishing money on her firefighter boyfriend”, but beyond that, I didn’t see much about the extent of her spending on him.
So she spent nearly $25,000 on a celebratory breakfast for her husband, the chief, while she was cheating on him with a firefighter? The heart is a curious thing.