OAKLAND
Ex-DMV aide gets prison for fraud

Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, April 21, 2007


A former state Department of Motor Vehicles employee in Oakland was sentenced to more than two years in prison Friday for her role in a scheme in which DMV workers accepted cash bribes for processing documents for illegal immigrants.

Leneka Pendergrass, 29, of Oakland received between $8,000 and $12,000 in bribes, according to federal prosecutors. She was among five DMV employees who accepted the bribes and issued more than 200 fraudulent driver's licenses and state identification cards from 2003 to 2005, authorities said.

At a hearing Friday in Oakland, U.S. District Judge D. Lowell Jensen sentenced Pendergrass to 27 months in prison. She is to surrender on Sept. 6 to begin serving her sentence.

Pendergrass apologized in court. "I do understand the severity of the crimes that I have committed," she said. "No one can really punish me more than I've punished myself."

Pendergrass pleaded guilty last year to one felony count of conspiring to commit "honest services mail fraud," a crime in which an official does not provide honest services. Prosecutors said she entered false information into DMV computers after those seeking identification paid a bribe to Keith Williams, who served as a broker or liaison between DMV workers and illegal immigrants.

Williams, who was not a DMV employee, has pleaded guilty in connection with the scheme and is to be sentenced next week.

In court Friday, Pendergrass' attorney, Ian Loveseth of San Francisco, sought to portray Williams as the person responsible for seeking specific dollar amounts from the illegal immigrants.

"She did not negotiate with any of these people," said Loveseth, who suggested that Pendergrass had received less than $10,000 and should therefore receive a lighter sentence.

But the judge said of Pendergrass, "It isn't as though she is in the dark about the fact she's going to get a piece of the money." All the evidence showed that she did receive at least $10,000, the judge said.

In a letter to the judge in January, Pendergrass said she was enrolled in cosmetology school and hoped to be a positive role model for her children.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Doug Sprague wrote in court papers that after Pendergrass pleaded guilty in May 2006, she fraudulently obtained $60,000 in cash advances and made purchases across the country, including at Sears, a game store, an electronics store, a sunglasses store and a rental-car company.

In June, she fled from an Illinois bank after again trying to obtain another cash advance under false pretenses, and there is an Illinois warrant for her arrest, Sprague wrote.

E-mail Henry K. Lee at hlee@sfchronicle.com.

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