Mickey Allen Weicksel, 39, faces a maximum penalty of 180 years in prison and $7 million in fines after he was convicted in federal court in Philadelphia of 14 counts of wire fraud, three counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Weicksel, formerly of Millersville, will be sentenced June 5.
Weicksel and his former partner, Barrylee Paul Beers, ran a business in Lancaster County called Paul-Allen Enterprises.
The two men carried out a scheme to secure loans to buy houses by giving false information to banks and mortgage companies; by misrepresenting the true sale price of the purchased houses; and by concealing the fact that sellers had agreed to kick back a substantial portion of the sale price to Weicksel and Beers, according to a press release issued by the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia.
Between June 1997 and September 1998, Weicksel and Beers bought more than 100 properties in the Lancaster area and received more than $4 million in kickbacks, according to the release.
Beers previously pleaded guilty to wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He will be sentenced May 15.
According to prosecutors, the kickbacks Weicksel and Beers secured from sellers were funneled through a bogus repair company called PRC.
"PRC had no office, no employees and performed no work," the original indictment read. "It existed only as a name under which defendants could receive kickbacks at the property settlements."
At the settlements, Beers and Weicksel inflated the price of the properties by adding on the cost of repairs that had not been done.
PAE collapsed when Beers and Weicksel fell behind on mortgage payments after stories about the company's questionable practices began running in the Intelligencer Journal in late 1997.
PAE, along with Weicksel and Beers, went bankrupt in 1999.
During bankruptcy proceedings in 1999, Weicksel testified he did not know what happened to the more than $4 million that flowed from PAE's coffers to PRC.
The case was investigated by agents of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service and of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Emily McKillip.
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