OKLAHOMA CITY – A former general manager of a Lawton hotel and a former Fort Sill official who both admitted participating in a scheme to defraud the U.S. Army have been ordered to report to federal prisons by March 25.
Candy Hanza, 51, of Medicine Park, and Alfred Ray Palma, 65, of Duncan, were indicted May 3, 2023, by a federal grand jury here on a dozen felony charges.
Hanza was the general manager of a franchise hotel in Lawton from December 2008 through May 2021. Palma was the manager of the Institutional Training Directed Lodging and Meals program at Fort Sill via which he booked hotel rooms for soldiers who attended on-post training.
The indictment alleged that from October 2019 through October 2020 Hanza paid Palma to direct soldiers to her hotel, and that she personally profited through her own scheme to defraud the hotel owners and launder the resulting proceeds. She was charged with money laundering, wire fraud, and paying a bribe to a federal official.
Palma pleaded guilty June 26, 2023, to a single count of being the public official who accepted the bribe.
His plea agreement mandates that he forfeit to the government the money he received from Hanza as an inducement to “favor the hotel at which she was a general manager when Palma booked soldiers for offpost training.” Palma admitted that he used the cash to buy money orders from Walmart in $1,000 increments, which he then deposited, along with the checks that Hanza gave him, into his personal checking account.
Hanza pleaded guilty July 28, 2023, to a single count of paying a bribe to a public official. Her plea agreement decrees that “the Court must order the payment of restitution to any victim(s) of the offense.”
Palma was sentenced Jan. 25, 2024, to 29 days confinement in the Grady County Detention Center in Chickasha. He also must forfeit $103,200 to provide restitution to the victimized Lawton hotel. “The Court shall retain jurisdiction to enforce … this final order of forfeiture,” U.S. District Judge Patrick Wyrick wrote on Jan. 30, 2024.
Hanza was sentenced Jan. 19, 2024, to 18 months in federal prison at Bryan, Texas. In addition, Wyrick wrote that the court is still “in the process of determining” the total amount of restitution that Hanza owes to the hotel, but it definitely will be more than the amount Palma was ordered to pay.
Hanza maintained a business checking account under the name Endeavor Travel LLC. The federal indictment alleged that from about January 2018 to June 2021, that bank account received approximately $3.1 million in payments from a Government Purchase Card that was used to pay for the hotel rooms reserved for the Army soldiers.