Ex-Sen. Griego sentenced to one more year in prison
ALBUQUERQUE — Wearing an orange jailhouse uniform, former state Sen. Phil Griego — already serving an 18-month prison sentence on public corruption convictions — was subdued Monday as a state district judge sentenced him to an additional year in prison for guilty pleas related to unlawful pocketing of campaign donations. Under a deal signed in late May, the 70-year-old former Democratic legislator from of General’s account filed Prosecutors embezzlement false San and Jose Office campaign a pleaded political had said and asked finance Griego two guilty action for counts reports stole an to committee two additional from of counts to perjury. cover his he 18 own had The months it up. campaign created, state for Attorney the then bank latest judge convictions not to impose while any Griego’s additional lawyer, time. Tom Clark, asked the With credit for good behavior at a state prison in Los Lunas that has special units for elderly inmates and those in poor health, Clark said Griego probably will get out sometime in May. Before Judge Brett Loveless announced the sentence, he asked Griego what he would tell someone running for office the first time about how to avoid the mistakes that led him to
prison.
Griego said he would advise: “Don’t ever think you know everything. If you have any questions, regarding your situation, financial or otherwise … go to [legislative] leadership or the Legislative Council and make sure you have taken the right steps. Make sure that you’re not violating any rule that you have sworn to keep. Make sure your constituents can stay proud of you.”
Griego said he would like to have the opportunity to speak to incoming freshmen lawmakers in January and tell them how to avoid the mistakes he made. But after the hearing, Clark said he didn’t know if that would actually happen.
In asking the judge for mercy, both Griego and his wife, Jane Griego, spoke about the death of their son, Phillip T. “Peepers” Griego, 40, in June. Because her husband was in prison, Jane Griego on her own had to make the decision to take their son off life support.
The couple didn’t have a funeral for their son because Phil Griego told his wife that he wouldn’t be able to attend a funeral without wearing prison clothes and being accompanied by two prison guards. Instead, Jane Griego said, the family will have a “celebration of life” for their son after Phil Griego is released.
In a soft and quivering voice, the ex-senator and one-time Santa Fe city councilor said, “Prison has taught me how important every breath is.”
Griego began serving prison time in March after a jury last year found him guilty of fraud, bribery and other charges centered on allegations that he misused his position during the 2014 legislative session to push through legislation authorizing the sale of a state-owned building on De Vargas Street to Ira Seret, owner of the adjacent Inn of the Five Graces. Seret paid Griego a $50,000 broker’s fee for his efforts.
Assistant Attorney General Zach Jones pointed out that Griego’s embezzlement of campaign funds took place the same year that Griego was working for Seret.
The campaign finance case originally involved 22 criminal counts — 20 of which were felonies — stemming from a state investigation of reports Griego filed between 2012 and 2016. These charges included 13 perjury counts and five counts of embezzlement.
An indictment said he took $7,337 from campaign funds, though affidavits from Mark Pinto, an investigator for the Attorney General’s Office, indicate there were more questionable transactions.
The offenses to which Griego pleaded include a $2,000 check from the New Mexico Optometric PAC in 2014 and $2,787 from a political action committee called Advance New Mexico that he had started himself with business partner Richard Carlisle.
Jones told the judge that Griego started the PAC with money he swiped from his campaign fund. An affidavit by Pinto said Griego transferred $4,000 from his campaign account to Advance New Mexico. A day later someone wrote two checks from the PAC to Carlisle’s information technology firm, the Carlisle Solutions Group.
Pinto found that Griego had written six checks on his campaign account totaling more than $12,000 between October 2015 and January 2016, none of which was reported in his campaign finance reports. Griego had written more than 40 checks from his campaign fund since 2012 that never were reported to the Secretary of State’s Office, as required by law, the investigator said.
State Attorney General Hector Balderas said in a statement Monday, “Griego will now be held accountable to the public for the additional crimes he committed against his own campaign donors and for betraying the public’s trust by inaccurately reporting campaign contributions.”
Griego, a former Santa Fe resident who represented a south-side City Council district in the 1980s and most of the ’90s, was first elected to the state Senate in 1996. He abruptly resigned from the Legislature a week before the end of its 2015 session following a closed-door Senate ethics investigation of the property deal.