(Rone Tempest / Los Angeles Times)
On the surface it seems an odd partnership: a prominent member of a secretive Utah polygamist sect and the Armenian immigrant owner of a prosperous chain of Southern California truck stops.
But testimony in the federal court criminal trial in Salt Lake City of Los Angeles fuel distributor Lev Dermen is that he and Jacob Kingston, a member of the Mormon breakaway sect known as the Order, as well as relatives of Kingston, engaged in a $470-million fraud of a government biofuel program. Kingston has testified at the trial in exchange for a lighter sentence.
In his opening statement to the jury, Dermen’s attorney, Mark Geragos, said the Kingston sect has a long history of defrauding the government and that Jacob Kingston, not Dermen, as the government claims, was the true mastermind of the alleged fraud. The LA Times continues the story here: