Concrete Caper Cracked: Tracy Man Sentenced to Prison

A Tracy man was sentenced Monday to 70 months in federal prison in connection with an overbilling scheme at the Suisun City office of a maintenance and construction firm serving Bay Area refineries, federal prosecutors said on Tuesday.

Brian Federico, a 50-year-old concrete subcontractor, devised a scheme to overbill Matrix Service Company in a scheme involving fake companies and invoices and downstream kickbacks, prosecutors said.

He recruited three local managers from Matrix Service Company, including Kevin Laney, the head of the company’s Suisun City office, to approve the overinflated invoices and submit false invoices to Federico’s subcontracting firm, and then directed them in how to distribute the gains, prosecutors said.

Federico collected around $875,000 through the scheme, and Laney around $412,000.

Matrix discovered the suspicious billing in its Suisun City office in 2010 and ultimately had to reimburse customers more than $1.3 million.

Federico and Laney were both indicted in 2012 on charges of mail conspiracy and mail fraud. They were convicted this summer after a three-week bench trial, prosecutors said. Laney was sentenced on Nov. 13 to five years in prison by U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalez Rogers. Rogers also sentenced Laney and Federico to three years supervised release and ordered them to pay $1.287 million in restitution. Federico was also ordered to pay a $50,000 fine.

Federico was granted bail pending an appeal, while Laney was ordered to turn himself in on Jan. 15, 2016.

-Bay City News Service