A former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy who led a $2 million armed robbery and staged it as a raid was sentenced to seven years in prison on Monday, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Marc Antrim, 43, was assigned to the Temple City sheriff’s station when he orchestrated a fake raid for half a ton of marijuana and $600,000 in cash from a downtown LA warehouse in October 2018. He pleaded guilty in March 2019 to a string of crimes, including brandishing a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime.
United States District Judge Virginia A. Phillips said the “the seriousness of the crime could not be overstated” and that it was “tragic,” “sounded like a movie script” and eroded “the public’s trust (in law enforcement).”
Antrim used a bogus search warrant and flashed his badge to get into the legal marijuana distribution business, where the off-duty deputy and two other men dressed as deputies—Kevin McBride, 45, and Matthew James Perez, 44—detained three warehouse security guards in an LASD Ford Explorer. Accomplice Daniel Aguilera then showed up in a rental truck for the men to load with marijuana.
Los Angeles police then showed up, and Antrim put them on the phone with a fake supervisor for them to leave. An attorney for the business then called the Sheriff’s Department and provided security footage. Authorities then found two pounds of marijuana at McBride’s home, along with a loaded Beretta handgun registered to Antrim, law enforcement ammunition, and a flashlight with Antrim’s name on it, according to court records reported by the LA Times.
McBride is serving a six-year federal prison sentence, as several others were convicted in relation to the scheme.
