Article content continued

“It’s going to take me a few weeks to come up with it,” said Webster, also a former federal district and appeals court judge. “I’m as anxious as you are to get the money, but it’s going to take me a while to do it.”

“You can pay a part in the meantime,” parried the caller, later identified as Keniel Thomas.

“How much is a part?” asked Webster.

“You can come with about $20,000 in the meantime,” Thomas said in the recorded call that is part of the court record.

The conversation was one of many calls that Thomas made to Webster or his wife, Lynda, in 2014, including one in which he promised a bullet “straight to the head” of Lynda. Thomas was then charged in 2014 with attempted extortion. But Thomas wasn’t arrested until late 2017, after he landed in New York on a flight from Jamaica. He pleaded guilty in October and faced a prison term of 33 to 41 months under federal sentencing guidelines. But with Webster and his wife in the courtroom, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell on Friday added another two and a half years to Thomas’ sentence, giving him nearly six years to serve. Howell said that the scam qualified as “organized criminal activity” and that Thomas posed “a threat to a family member of the victim.”

“The threat of death to another person is a most serious crime,” Webster told the judge, “for which Mr. Thomas is about to pay. . . . We truly hope that word has spread into the criminal community of scammers that our Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies are clamping down on such predatory behaviors.”