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That’s a lot of postage.
A Marblehead postal worker made off with more than $18,000 through a couple schemes that boiled down to pocketing money people paid for stamps and money orders.
On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Patti B. Saris sentenced Zeon Johnson, 28, of Saugus, to just time served — a day in jail — and two years of supervised release. It’s a sentence that finds a middle ground between the prosecution’s ask of 30 days in prison with three years of supervised release and the defense’s ask of time served with one year of supervised release, according to their respective sentencing memos.
He’ll also have to fork over the $18,206 he stole from the U.S. Postal Service.
While that sum is only a 74th of the $1,351,250 a single Inverted Jenny — often listed as the most valuable U.S. stamp in history — sold for at auction in 2016, it’s enough to have sent out 27,667 regular letters or 35,805 postcards to family and friends at current postage rates.
“For much of his employment,” federal prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo, “Johnson engaged in a premeditated, recurring scheme to convert money from the US Postal Service by taking money that customers paid for stamps and money orders, providing voided money orders to customers, and issuing fraudulent money orders to himself.”
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