Former University of Southern California and Detroit Lions football star Johnnie Morton, Jr. faced up to five years in prison for repeatedly lying to a federal grand jury in 2009, but caught a break this morning in Santa Ana.
U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney, a onetime football star himself at crosstown rival UCLA, displayed no preseason animus to Morton, who made a cameo appearance in Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire.
Carney sentenced Morton, the 40-year-old first-round NFL pick in 1994, to a sentence of two years of probation and a $100 fine in the wake of a plea bargain.
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Morton knowingly gave false testimony about his close ties to 32-year-old Irvine businessman Nick Chhorvann (AKA Neang Chhorvann), $2 million in transactions and a deal involving Titan Water System, according to court records.
Carney
allowed Chhorvann–accused of making an unlawful money transaction–to get his passport back after his arrest and to
travel to Thailand, Cambodia and Hong Kong in July 2011. Now, Chhorvann–born in 1979–is a fugitive who has not shown up to scheduled sentencing hearings inside the
Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Orange County. U.S. marshals are
sure to someday locate him. When they do, he'll face 10 years in prison
just for fleeing.
Morton, who lives in Redondo Beach, also played football for the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs.
The IRS criminal division participated with federal prosecutors in the money laundering investigation.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.