Simon Tusha, a former Google executive who testified in Pittsburgh against a Dutch real estate tycoon who paid him millions in bribes, was rewarded for his help Thursday with a 21-month prison term, far less than the 51 months he could have received.
U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose imposed the sentence after the U.S. attorney's office this week asked for leniency based on substantial assistance.
She also ordered him to pay restitution to the IRS of $962,000, the taxes he owes on the bribes he accepted.
Tusha, 44, of Forest Hill, Md., had testified in Pittsburgh about $1.8 million in payoffs he accepted from Rudy Stroink, one of the richest men in the Netherlands and something of a media superstar who had once been compared to Donald Trump.
In exchange, federal prosecutors cut him a break in his own case of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., an investigation pieced together by Pittsburgh IRS agents along with Dutch authorities and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Tusha had been in charge of setting up data centers for Google around the world. Stroink paid him bribes from 2008 to 2010 to put one in the Dutch city of Eindhoven.
Tusha's guilty plea in May 2016 involved those bribes from Stroink's conglomerate, TCN Group, and other money he accepted from another company in the United Kingdom that had also been negotiating a contract for a Google data center.
Stroink and his wife, Saskia, were convicted last year in the Netherlands of fraud and money laundering, although they were acquitted of participating in a criminal organization.
Tusha helped agents on both sides of the Atlantic to build the case.
But instead of appearing in court in the Netherlands, he testified over two days in Pittsburgh before a Dutch judge and prosecutor, along with his own lawyer, Stanley Greenfield. Transcripts were sent to the Netherlands, where a court decided Stroink's fate.
Tusha hid his bribe money in a series of Caribbean shell corporations and then had it transferred to his PNC bank account in Pittsburgh. His accomplice in handling those tasks was Howard Weinberg, the owner of a lighting company in Baltimore who also received a motion for leniency from the U.S. attorney.
In court Thursday, Mr. Greenfield had asked that Tusha be allowed to serve his term on house arrest instead of prison in part because Tusha has been suffering from two different cancers. He had his prostate removed and now faces another surgery for melanoma.
In addition, Mr. Greenfield said, Mr. Tusha is needed to help care for his five children, with whom he shares joint custody with their mothers.
Tusha faces a host of other problems as well. He has a prior federal fraud conviction in Delaware and also spent time in jail for beating his ex-wife.
In addition, he faces numerous lawsuits in Maryland from prospective brides who had booked weddings at his winery there and then were left without a venue when it shut down after his guilty plea.
"I take full responsibility for what I did," Tusha told Judge Ambrose. "Whatever [sentence] you think is appropriate, I put myself in this position."
The Google bribery scheme probably would never have been discovered had it not been for a Pittsburgh-area drug ring.
That case exposed a cocaine pipeline from California to Pittsburgh run by Russell Spence, of Coraopolis, who is now in prison. Spence shipped two tons of coke into the region.
Among his co-conspirators was Weinberg, a leader in the Jewish community in Baltimore who had laundered money for Spence's cocaine source, Damon Collins of Baltimore.
Weinberg also used his money-laundering skills to help Tusha.
The two had met in 2006 in a Baltimore steakhouse where Weinberg knew the waitress, Danielle Pastin, who at the time was Tusha's girlfriend and is now a Pittsburgh opera star.
In exchange for a split of the bribe money, Weinberg set up a shell corporation for Tusha in the Caribbean for him to hide the income and then transferred it to Tusha's PNC Bank account in Pittsburgh.
Tusha used some of that money to buy a big house in Maryland, but he and Weinberg later had a falling out over the bribe split.
Weinberg was sentenced in Pittsburgh in May to a day in jail and a year of home confinement for his role in the Spence drug conspiracy.
Mr. Greenfield argued Thursday that Tusha should get a similar sentence of home detention, but Judge Ambrose said the two cases are separate and refused.
She did, however, allow Tusha to delay reporting to prison until April to give him time to recover from his melanoma surgery.
Torsten Ove: tove@post-gazette.com.
First Published: January 10, 2019, 6:39 p.m.
