Federal Court recently gave two reminders that no longer does the postman always ring twice.
Sometimes, he or she steals your mail. Sometimes, he or she throws it away.
The former came up in the sentencing of Miami’s David Tucker in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida. The latter got Hollywood’s John Caddle convicted Tuesday in the same court.
Caddle’s a mailman who treated all his mail like junk mail. Instead of delivering the mail in the 33020 ZIP Code to fellow Hollywood residents last Aug. 18 and 19, the 58-year-old Caddle dumped bags of mail in a dumpster near his home.
A witness spotted Caddle. After Caddle left, the witness examined the mail. Upon seeing the mail should’ve been in mailboxes instead of a dumpster, he called authorities. Caddle got caught doing it the next day.
A jury returned a guilty verdict on three of the four counts of delaying and detaining mail. The maximum sentence on each count is five years, although it’s likely his sentences will run concurrently.
Tucker, 30, was sentenced to two years in prison and four years of probation on one count of conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States and one count of aggravated identity theft. But he wasn’t the mail carrier.
His mother, 47-year-old Tara Tucker, made Tucker’s crimes possible by stealing four to five income tax refund checks totaling $12,139 from people on her Liberty City-West Little River route. She then gave her son the checks. David Tucker got busted with one of the checks on him during a traffic stop in Texas.
Tara Tucker served five years in prison for forgery, grand theft and cocaine trafficking between 400 grams and 150 kilos from 2000-2005. In 2011, shewas in prison again for nearly six months after being busted on two counts of unauthorized possession or use of a driver’s license, fraudulent use of a personal identification and grand theft between $5,000 and $10,000.
She got sentenced in November to four years in prison and four years of probation.
David J. Neal: 305-376-3559, @DavidJNeal
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