A former attorney and judge from northeast Arkansas who is already serving a 40-year federal prison sentence was given a concurrent 21-month sentence Thursday for submitting a false burglary claim to an insurance company.
Bob Sam Castleman, 65, received the 40-year term in September, after federal prosecutors used murder allegations leveled against him by his son to increase his penalty in a methamphetamine-conspiracy case.
Castleman, once a municipal judge in Pocahontas, has never been charged with murder, but prosecutors were allowed to present evidence of it at his sentencing in the drug case if they could show, by the greater weight of evidence, that he killed a co-defendant to stop the man from testifying against him. Meanwhile, state prosecutors have said they will wait until Castleman's federal cases are over before deciding whether to pursue a murder charge against him in the April 14, 2013, death of 34-year-old Travis Perkins of Pocahontas. Castleman's federal drug convictions are on appeal.
The case for which he was sentenced Thursday was a wire-fraud conspiracy case from 2013. Castleman pleaded guilty in January, admitting that he filed a false insurance claim in 2012. The claim stated that while he was jailed on the federal drug charges, his house, which sits on a farm between Pocahontas and Imboden, was burglarized, and that the stolen items included his valuable collection of American Indian artifacts.
FBI agent Ed Jernigan testified Thursday, under questioning by Assistant U.S. Attorney Anne Gardner, that the claim included items Castleman had never owned, as well as items he owned that weren't actually stolen. Some of those items turned up later at his ex-wife's house, Jernigan said.
Through defense attorney Blake Hendrix of Little Rock, Castleman disputed the amount of actual and intended loss resulting from the false claim, which affects the penalty range recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.
Gardner said Castleman sought $186,807.88 from The Hartford, an insurance company, with $157,428.03 of that claim stemming from the appraised value of the artifacts alone. However, she said the maximum amount the insurance company would have paid out, had Castleman not been caught, would have been $113,250.
The Hartford paid Castleman $18,121.95 on July 16, 2012, with $7,797 of that for the stolen artifacts. Castleman then disputed the evaluation, causing the insurance company to hire an artifacts appraiser for $6,000 and, later, an attorney for nearly $3,000, but no additional money was paid after Castleman was charged with fraud.
Because Gardner didn't dispute the amount the insurance company paid Castleman for items stolen other than artifacts, U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker ordered Castleman to reimburse the insurance company $16,786. That includes the $7,797 it paid him for the artifacts, plus amounts the insurance company paid for the appraiser and the attorney. Hendrix said there was an actual burglary.
Metro on 05/20/2015