Santa Fe man pleads guilty in fake driver’s license scheme

Montano tells court longtime drug addiction led to forging checks for cash

Victor Montano of Santa Fe, who was accused of creating fake driver’s licenses so he could cash forged checks in a scheme to feed his drug addiction, pleaded guilty Wednesday to 16 felonies.

State District Judge T. Glenn Ellington sentenced Montano to a year in jail, plus five years of supervised probation that will include six months of inpatient drug treatment. Because of the time he’s already served in jail while waiting for his case to be adjudicated, Montano only has about two months left in jail.

“You get to decide whether this is a turning point in your life,” Ellington told Montano, 39. “You’ve damaged your relationship with a lot of people.”

Speaking to the court, Montano said, “I apologize to everybody, everybody that I’ve hurt.” He said he’d been using drugs, including heroin, for about 20 years. More recently, he said, he used methamphetamine.

In reaching a plea deal, prosecutors dropped about half the counts with which Montano had been charged.

Ellington imposed a sentence that is harsher than Deputy District Attorney Peter Valencia’s recommendation. Valencia did not recommend any jail time beyond what Montano had served.

Montano’s lawyer, Marcus Edwards, who said he’s known Montano for about 15 years, told the judge his client comes from a supportive family and had no prior felonies.

Montano admitted that he stole information from his family’s construction business to create the phony checks — many of them made to look like they came from companies that did business with his family’s company.

His actions first came to the attention of police in December 2015, when Nichole Holt, 35 at the time, tried to cash a fraudulent check for $1,900 at Wal-Mart, 3251 Cerrillos Road, using a phony driver’s license. Montano was waiting for Holt in his car in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

Detectives found that Holt had a total of four false driver’s licenses and several blank, phony checks. After searching Montano’s home on Agua Fría Street, police seized electronic

equipment, including a lamination device, laptop computers, printing and scanning devices, several uncashed forged checks, and blank driver’s license cards.

Forgery and other charges against Holt are pending in District Court.

About four months later, Montano was arrested again after police caught another woman with a fake ID attempting to cash a forged check for about $900 at a local bank. Police again searched Montano’s house and found numerous New Mexico driver’s licenses, as well as one from West Virginia. And again, there were uncashed forged checks, including two made out for $8,765.45. These were duplicates of checks from the Allstate insurance company.

Police also found a laser engraver, check paper with security features, a custom rubber stamp kit and a laminator.