Godfather Got Off Light: 6.5 Years for Deputies-on-Retainer and a $37M Meta Caper 🎬

Adam Iza, the 26-year-old Los Angeles crypto entrepreneur who styled himself "The Godfather," has been sentenced to 78 months in federal prison for hiring off-duty Los Angeles sheriff's deputies to harass his adversaries, stealing more than $37 million from Meta, and using cryptocurrency custodians to conceal the proceeds from the IRS. U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson also ordered Iza to pay $23,402,766 in restitution, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California said on October 5. Iza pleaded guilty in January 2025 to conspiracy against rights, wire fraud and tax evasion, and has been in custody since September 2024.

The new sentence runs concurrent to a 15-year Connecticut term imposed last month over a 2018 armed robbery attempt targeting a laptop containing cryptocurrency from a person identified as "Victim T.W." Because the California term runs alongside it, the federal sentence adds no additional time behind bars. In a sentencing memorandum, prosecutors wrote that people with money cannot buy "warrants, arrests, badges, or firearms for use in private disputes."

Between August 2021 and April 2022, Iza retained off-duty deputies as personal security. He admitted in his plea agreement to conspiring with them to pull confidential law enforcement records and personal data on people he had financial and other disputes with, to obtain court-authorized search warrants to track those people down, and to have the deputies intimidate and threaten them. Five former deputies have now been convicted over work they did for him, including Eric Chase Saavedra, 42, a former federal task force officer who set up the security company that supplied them and who received 21 months on September 28; Michael David Coberg, 45, serving 63 months for helping extort a rival and arranging a sham drug arrest; Scott Allen Simpkins, 34, who got 18 months for obstructing an investigation into a $25,000 extortion at Iza's Bel Air mansion; and David Anthony Rodriguez, 45, sentenced to a year for filing a false search warrant application.

The fraud component was separate. From December 2020, Iza gained access to Meta business manager accounts and the lines of credit attached to them, then sold that access on to advertising companies. Meta clients were billed for advertising they never bought; when the billing was discovered, Meta refunded them and absorbed the losses, with Iza pocketing the proceeds and routing them through crypto custodians to evade taxation.