20-year term in plot to kill judge

A convicted con man who plotted to have a federal judge, prosecutors and FBI agents killed in a scheme for revenge was sentenced Friday to 20 more years in prison.

John Arthur Walthall, 61, a former Laguna Beach resident, was already serving a 14-year prison sentence in Lompoc for defrauding an elderly couple out of $5.5 million by claiming he could extract gold from abandoned mines.

Walthall hatched a grisly plan for retribution against the federal prosecutors, agents and judge who helped put him behind bars, according to authorities.

On Friday in Santa Ana, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney sentenced Walthall to an additional 20 years — the maximum sentence — for one felony count of solicitation to commit a crime of violence.

A jury convicted him in July.

“Mr. Walthall is a manipulative, angry, cruel and sadistic man,” Carney said during the sentencing. “He concocted his diabolical, murderous scheme so he could get out of jail and continue a life of crime.”

Walthall said he would appeal the sentence.

In 2012, jurors convicted Walthall of four counts of wire fraud and one count of failure to appear in court.

Prosecutors contended during his most recent trial that once he was behind bars, Walthall prepared a detailed revenge plan against the judge and others and approached two inmates, Antonio Rodriguez and Crisanto Diego Trejo-Ortiz, to help him carry out his revenge plot.

The plan, prosecutors said, was for hired hands to kill the prosecutors and FBI agents who helped win the conviction against Walthall.

Judge Andrew Guilford would be kidnapped and forced to exonerate him. Then the judge would be tortured and shredded by a wood chipper, according to court papers.

Walthall would pay up to $1 million per victim, according to court papers.

But the two inmates alerted the FBI, and Walthall later laid out his plans to an undercover agent, court documents state.