BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A Texas man has been sentenced to 50 years in prison for stealing $1.2 million worth of fajitas over nine years.
Fifty-three-year-old Gilberto Escamilla was sentenced Friday after pleading guilty to theft by a public servant. The Brownsville Herald reports he told the court the fajita scheme spun out of control.
Escamilla had been intercepting fajitas that he ordered through the Cameron County juvenile center where he worked and delivering them to his own customers.
His scam was uncovered when he missed work for a medical appointment and an 800-pound (360-kilogram) fajita delivery arrived at the center, which doesn’t serve fajitas.
Escamilla was fired in August and arrested after authorities checked vendor invoices and obtained a search warrant that uncovered county-funded fajitas in his refrigerator.
That’s a shitload of fajitas. If, for the sake of argument, a single fajita is worth 5 bucks, 1.2 million dollars worth of fajitas is 240,000 fajitas. I’m going to take a couple of Gaviscon now, just having thought about it.
What’s a single fajita? I just made fajitas last night (and it was gooo-oood!) and it’s the definition of a hot mess!
I used to work in banking. Employees in certain positions were required each year to have a contiguous two full weeks of vacation, with no contact with the office. This is typical of banks. And the story of how this guy got caught is an example of the reason for this policy.
A 53-year-old guy steals a million bucks worth of fajitas and draws what is effectively a life sentence.
If only he’d been a politician (or a six-time bankrupt “super” businessman) he would’ve been crowned King.
Brown-man justice at work again. No civilized country has anything that remotely resembles such savage sentencing. I would say that a 3-year stretch would be ample for nonviolent property theft. Lending institutions routinely misappropriate properties worth much more but that’s OK.