“I’m a regular human being that’s been struggling all their life and made a mistake. Everybody deserves a second chance.”
That’s what Rashia Wilson of Tampa, Florida, the self-styled Queen of Tax Fraud, told a federal courtroom during a resentencing hearing on tax fraud and identity theft charges.
It’s a far cry from the boastful attitude that she had before her arrest, taunting authorities online with statements like:
I’m Rashia, the queen of IRS tax fraud, … I’m a millionaire for the record. So if you think that indicting me will be easy, it won’t. I promise you. I won’t do no time, dumb b——.
She told a courtroom that she didn’t write those words and that her Facebook account had been hacked, a charge that prosecutors found absurd.
And those infamous money shots? She says they weren’t hers: they belonged to the owner of the Hush Gentleman’s Club where she worked. She had a job, she says, as an event promoter. The name of her business? First Lady Entertainment.
She also says now that, despite what she agreed to in her plea agreement, she didn’t steal millions. She now says it was only about $200,000, even though she spent $30,000 on her 1-year-old’s birthday party and $90,000 on a 2013 Audi (bought with a money order). Her behavior prompted U.S. District Judge James. S. Moody Jr. to remark at her sentencing, “She knew what she was doing was wrong. She reveled in the fact that it was wrong.”
Now, Wilson says that while she knows she was wrong, “I’m not the person the world is trying to make me out to be. I’m not this whole first lady of tax fraud person.”
But Wilson did commit tax fraud. Wilson stole personal information from taxpayers and used it to file tens of thousands of fraudulent returns, cheating taxpayers out of millions. The feds referred to her scheme as Operation Rainmaker because of the amount of money that was raining down. Investigators worked for two years to gather evidence against Wilson and a host of other fraudsters including Wilson’s boyfriend, Maurice “Thirst” Larry, and a friend, Marterrence “Quat” Holloway.
She blames a lot of her behavior on her background. Born into poverty to a coke addict and a father in prison, Wilson dropped out of school in the 7th grade. Prior to conviction on tax charges, she had been arrested 40 times and held felony convictions for grand theft and burglary.
Wilson says she’s working to change all of that. She took a lot of flak for her poor spelling after her Facebook page was made public: it became common knowledge that she failed the 5th and 6th grades before finally dropping out. It was something of a joke – this idea that the IRS was duped by someone with only a middle school education. Wilson has since passed GED tests and received a high school diploma. She now works in the prison library.
She has a lot of time to contemplate how to become a better person. At her original sentencing, the then 27 year old Wilson received a 21 year prison sentence for her crimes, including 210 months for wire fraud, 24 months for aggravated identity theft and 18 months on gun charges. She must also pay restitution of more than $3 million.
The gun charges complicated her sentencing. She pleaded guilty to gun charges and in charges filed three months apart, she pleaded guilty to tax fraud charges. After being sentenced on the gun charges, the judge used that conviction as a prior conviction when determining her sentence on the wire fraud charges. That, her lawyers alleged, was improper. A federal appeals court agreed and threw out her sentencing. Her conviction stood but the case was sent back to U.S. District Judge James S. Moody Jr. for resentencing. At resentencing, Judge Moody confirmed her 21 year sentence.
Wilson is currently scheduled to be released in January 2031. The mother of three, when she is released, her children will all have graduated from high school. Her youngest child will be 23.
Do you plan to do a blog about Trump?
I’ve written a few pieces about the President.
If the question is whether he gets a post a la Rashia Wilson, the answer is that all of the folks in this series have been convicted of a tax crime, so that’s the missing piece here. If that changes, I’ll write that story.