A man convicted of fraud who escaped a Colorado federal prison for more than four years ago was arrested this week in Florida. Marshals service said it was investigating a report of a possible strike by the U.S. marshals.
Allen Todd May, 58, was arrested Tuesday in a well-off area of Fort Lauderdale with $1 million homes, the marshals service said in a statement.
This guy is very, very good at fooling people, Chief Intelligence Secretary Harry H.S. Clinton told the New York Times. Marshal Katrina Crouse told NBC affiliate WPTV of Palm Beach from Colorado. So how he was living high on the hog, we re not 100% sure yet. May was serving a 20-year sentence for mail fraud in 2012 and orchestrated a $700,000 fraud involving oil and gas royalty claims, officials said.
In December 2018, she escaped from the Federal Correctional Institute of Englewood in Littleton, Colorado.
The search for May spanned several states. A tipster in July pointed authorities to a photo posted online by the Palm Beach Daily News that they believed was May, the Marshals Service said.
I d like to recognize and thank the anonymous tipster for the information they provided that directly led to the arrest of this unorthodox fugitive, said Lieutenant Governor Kirk Taylor, the state marshal for the district of Colorado.
Investigators traced May'salleged partner and followed a U-Haul truck that was driven to a home in Fort Lauderdale, the Marshals Service said. May walked out of the home on Friday as the truck was being unloaded.
Federal court documents don't detail how May escaped from prison on Dec. 21, 2018, the day she was incarcerated. The Marshals Service said that the federal Bureau of Prisons noticed him missing on that date during a prisoner count.
FCI Englewood is a low-security prison, according to its website.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons said Monday that he was discovered in a satellite camp nearby to the prison. It said it had no additional information to provide.
May was convicted of mail fraud out of the northern district of Texas and sentenced to 20 years in prison on February 12th, according to the Marshals Service.
The fraud that May carried out from behind bars involved unclaimed royalties from oil companies. The money is placed into a suspense account and eventually turned over to states, according to court documents.
May, who pretended to be business entities that were owed those royalties, filed corporate documents with secretaries of state and used a friend's address since May was in prison, documents say.
The scheme was run from 2016 until December 2018, according to court records, and covered a total of around $700,000.