Gabriel Omar Martinez claims he grew up with horrible parents, dropped out of high school, lived on the streets as a teenager and turned to drugs and alcohol.
In 2009, a tireless Martinez robbed seven Orange County banks in a three-month period while he was on parole from a tanning salon robbery conviction.
Martinez and his public defender argued the tanning salon crime and the armed bank robberies were part of one series of criminal activity and so punishment for the bank robberies should include a 33-month sentence reduction for time already served.
Assistant United States Attorney Mark P. Takla didn’t buy that weak logic and stated that Martinez
deserved a whopping 140-month prison trip.
This month, U.S. District Court Judge Andrew J. Guilford in Orange County agreed with Takla’s recommendations.
The 29-year-old bandit must also pay nearly $57,000 in restitution for money taken during the robberies from Wachovia Bank in Santa Ana, Banco Popular in La Habra, Wells Fargo in Fullerton (twice), Pacific Mercantile Bank in La Habra and Chase Bank in Brea (twice).
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.