Prosecutors have charged ex-sports radio host Marty Tirrell of four additional crimes in a superseding indictment filed last week in federal court.
Tirrell, 59, was indicted in late January by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Iowa on six charges: Two counts bank fraud, two counts of wire fraud, one count of mail fraud and one count of access device fraud.
According to a superseding indictment filed on May 15, Tirrell has been indicted on four additional counts: One count of mail fraud and three counts of wire fraud.
In April 2017, Tirrell allegedly solicited a $7,500 check from an investor in Massachusetts via FedEx “by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses”, with prosecutors saying Tirrell offered to buy sporting event tickets for his investors with the intent to defraud, a violation of federal law.
Tirrell, know as “The Mouth of the Midwest”, hosted sports talk radio shows on 1460 KXNO and 1700 The Champ.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office also details three additional instances in which they say Tirrell knowingly executed payments from investors “by means of wire in interstate commerce” via wire fraud:
• November 8, 2017: Two checks are provided to Tirrell totaling $12,265.76 drawn from an investor’s bank account in West Des Moines. Both checks are deposited to Tirrell’s bank account. In processing the deposit, Tirrell’s bank electronically transmits the checks to a processing center in Minnesota.
• January 24, 2018: Tirrell texts an investor, “Everything is in order – I’m sorry I lost the check – call you this morning.”
• January 28, 2018: Tirrell texts an investor, “Check your email about noon and you’ll be very happy. Waiting on my Credentials before I come back They did distribution in groupings and were in the S group. I don’t set rules and they are swamped…I convey exactly what they tell me – grateful getting tickets a week out. Never been able to do that.”
Such actions, per U.S. Code, are the result of the defendant who “devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money.”
Prosecutors believe Tirrell told investors they could make money by financing Tirrell’s brokering of sporting event tickets, claiming he could make profits by buying and re-selling the tickets.
However, Tirrell allegedly used money paid to him by investors for personal use despite claiming he “needed more time” to pay back investors, including mailing insufficient funds checks and transmitting false money wire information “to place the Investors temporarily at ease”.
In the indictment, Tirrell is accused of depositing a check for over $13,000 at two different financial institutions and also attempting to file false fraud claims, plus sending four insufficient funds checks totaling $335,522 via FedEx to an investor in Burlington, Iowa.
Tirrell submitted seven false fraud claims relating to his debit card, “that reported 144 unauthorized debit card transactions were conducted on his account … totaling $82,733.74, when, in fact, the debit card transactions were not fraudulent and Tirrell had made those debit card transactions,” the indictment reads.
Tirrell, who filed a written plea of not guilty to all 10 charges on Thursday, is scheduled to go to trial September 9.
