In exchange for Joseph Cole Barleta's guilty plea on racketeering charges, prosecutors agreed to recommend he spend no more than eight years in prison.
The last remaining executive charged in the criminal probe of defunct Philadelphia business lender Par Funding pleaded guilty Wednesday, averting a trial that had threatened to lay bare just how the business fleeced investors and extorted clients over years to rake in millions.
As part of a deal struck with prosecutors, the company’s former CFO, Joseph Cole Barleta, admitted to one felony count of racketeering. In exchange, government lawyers agreed to drop dozens of remaining counts of conspiracy, fraud, perjury, and tax evasion filed against him and recommend he spend no more than eight years in prison when he is sentenced next year.
Barleta’s guilty plea — along with earlier deals struck with Par Funding founder Joseph LaForte and his brother James — resolves a sprawling set of allegations faced by the company’s principals just days before they’d been set to take their case before a jury.
Prosecutors maintain Par Funding — once a leader in the multibillion merchant cash-advance industry, which offers quick loans at high interest rates to businesses deemed too risky to borrow from traditional banks — operated as a criminal enterprise that defrauded backers out of more than a half-billion dollars, while using threats of intimidation and violence to collect from its customers.
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