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The Indian tribe that runs Gold Country Casino Resort near Oroville filed a fraud and money laundering racketeering lawsuit in Sacramento federal court Thursday, alleging that two of its former top employees skimmed off more than $1 million for personal trips and expenses.

The suit, which seeks more than $38 million in damages, describes a scheme that allegedly ran from 2011 through 2016 and involved a “secret credit card” as well as money laundering from the tribal smoke shop to pay for limousines, concert and fight tickets and trips to Disneyland, Las Vegas and Palm Springs.

“This complaint could devote countless paragraphs to detailing all of the other fraudulent charges,” the lawsuit by the Berry Creek Rancheria of Maidu Indians says, then goes on to list numerous expenses it says were improper, including:

▪ $4,818.50 spent on WWE WrestleMania tickets in November 2014 and $4,174.30 spent on UFC tickets the month before.

▪ $6,775.32 spent at Pottery Barn Teen in July 2014.

▪ $16,339.81 spent at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in June 2014 and $1,078.70 spent on Elton John tickets the same month.

▪ and $1,730 spent on Sacramento Kings tickets in December 2013.

The complaint names Deborah Howard, its former chief financial officer, and Jesse Brown, who served as tribal administrator, and alleges they “entered into a discreet personal relationship and used their resultant joint power to supervise both the finances and business affairs of the Tribe to carry out a scheme centered around misappropriating tribal assets on a grand scale.”

The couple has since married, and Deborah Brown flatly denied the allegations Thursday in a telephone interview with The Sacramento Bee.

“That is absolutely ridiculous,” she said. “We don’t know anything about it.”

She said she and her husband “absolutely not, did not steal even one dime.”

“And it wasn’t a secret credit card at all,” Brown added. “In his position the tribal administrator always had a credit card and all the expenses that were charged on the credit card were always approved by the council.”

The lawsuit alleges the couple defrauded the tribe “in four unique ways,” starting with the “secret” credit card to rack up $1.3 million.

The couple also allegedly misappropriated more than $200,000 “in cash withdrawals over the course of five holiday seasons that were meant to provide Christmas gifts to tribal youth,” the lawsuit says, and were “skimming more than $1.1 million of cash receipts from the Smoke Shop operated by Berry Creek before depositing the remainder of the funds into the tribe’s bank account.”

The two also allegedly manipulated payroll records to provide themselves $250,000 in “unauthorized payroll distributions,” the lawsuit says.

“This course of conduct went on for years, involved thousands of individual (transactions) and was only discovered long after Ms. Howard and Mr. Brown’s departures from the tribe in 2017 when the bank finally disclosed the existence of the aforesaid credit card (after first informing the Berry Creek Tribal Council that its members could not access the account because Ms. Howard and Mr. Brown were the only authorized individuals),” the lawsuit says.

“All of this fraud only came to light because of chance,” the lawsuit says, and came after both employees had left their jobs. “The 2016 annual audit of Berry Creek that had to be completed by September 30th of the following year indicated unreconciled credit card expenses on the credit cards known to be in the Tribe’s name.”

The tribe “encountered significant difficulties” in getting bank records “because Ms. Howard and Mr. Brown had designated themselves as the only individuals authorized to access the accounts,” the suit says.

“Changing the account designees was an involved process that took a substantial amount of time, but the Tribal Council finally succeeded in doing so and obtaining the desired credit card statements, discovering in the process that Mr. Brown had the secret credit card discussed throughout this complaint with the $1.3 million in expenditures that were not included in the 2016 annual audit,” the suit says.

In addition to personal expenses, the lawsuit says funds were used by the couple to fund personal businesses.

“Following their departures from Berry Creek, Ms. Howard and Mr. Brown — who have since married — have used the tribal funds with which they absconded to start at least two different businesses: a women’s clothing boutique in downtown Gridley named the Makeup Room & Co., and a self-described ‘upscale full-service bar’ in historic Oroville known as The Exchange,” the lawsuit says.

The tribe says in the lawsuit that its actual losses are more than $2.9 million and that it is seeking damages in that amount, plus more than $26 million in punitive damages (nine times the amount of the actual alleged losses) and more than $8.8 million in Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization damages.

The allegations in the lawsuit are reminiscent of other cases involving Northern California Indian casinos, including a lawsuit and subsequent 2017 indictment of three tribal officials of the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians.

That indictment alleged the three engaged in a “12-year looting spree” to embezzle $6 million from the Rolling Hills Casino near Corning and used it for World Series tickets, home improvements, travel and automobiles.

All three pleaded guilty in 2019.

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Nation Tribe: Tyme Maidu Tribe of the Berry Creek Rancheria

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(530) 538-4560

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