DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO
A San Diego federal judge on Friday sentenced a Fallbrook woman to nearly two years in prison and ordered her to pay $9.9 million in restitution for a fraud scheme centered around her family’s Porsche restoration and resale business.
Read more Trump orders new signs outside Smithsonian saying some exhibits are inaccurate
Both the judge and a prosecutor acknowledged that Andrea Nicole Doherty, 38, was placed in a difficult position by her father’s questionable business practices that he engaged in while running a company that was registered under her name. But they said that when he died in 2021 and left her with a financial mess, she should have closed the business and filed for bankruptcy.
Instead, Doherty continued her father’s “puffery” and false promises to customers and ended up operating a Ponzi-style scheme that finally came crashing down in 2024, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Hill told the judge Friday.
“I tried to save something that wasn’t savable,” Doherty told U.S. District Judge Andrew Schopler through tears. She apologized to the victims of her crime and said she would spend the rest of her life trying to make up for what she did, though she acknowledged that with such a steep restitution order against her, “it will never be enough.”
Doherty pleaded guilty in December to three counts of wire fraud, admitting that she stole more than $827,000 from five customers during the years after she took over CPR Classic following her father’s death. As part of her plea agreement, she also agreed to pay restitution to more than 60 additional individuals, including many who had filed civil lawsuits against her and CPR Classic claiming they were owed money, vehicles or both.
Defense attorney Megan Foster argued that Doherty hadn’t used the scheme to enrich herself. Instead, Doherty used the fraud proceeds to try to keep afloat a company that she believed was her father’s legacy, that she had worked for her entire adult life and that also employed her husband and brother.
“She was robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Foster told the judge.
Schopler agreed, saying that unlike many other fraud cases he’s seen, Doherty was not funding a lavish lifestyle. But he said that in crafting a proper sentence, he had to “take into account the enormity of the crime” and the “massive loss to dozens and dozens of people.”
In addition to a prison term of one year and nine months, the judge ordered Doherty to pay $500 per month in restitution once released from custody.
Though prosecutors alleged that CPR Classic was engaged in widespread fraud, Doherty pleaded guilty to charges involving three specific cars.
Read more Biden drops lawsuit seeking to block release of recordings of his interviews with a ghostwriter
She admitted that in 2022 and 2023, she sold a 1973 Porsche 911E Targa to two different buyers, accepting $216,050 from one buyer and $200,000 from the second buyer. She delivered the car to the second buyer while making excuses to the first about delivery delays. She also waited months to inform the car’s owner that it had sold, and when she did finally send him a check, it bounced.
Later in 2023, she made a similar series of transactions, agreeing with the owner of a 1972 Porsche 911S that she would sell his car. The next day, a buyer agreed to purchase it and wired her $280,000. Doherty delivered the vehicle to that buyer, but did not transfer its legal title nor inform the car’s original owner that it had been sold. Months later, she sold the same car to a different buyer for $275,000. The original owner transferred the title to the second buyer, unaware that someone had already paid for the same car months earlier.
Her third guilty plea related to a 1983 Porsche 930T Slantnose that she sold for $130,000 after agreeing with the car’s owner to sell it for at least $150,000. In order to complete the sale at the lower price, she forged the owner’s signature on the vehicle’s legal title — but she placed the forged signature on the wrong line. She later delivered the car to the buyer without providing the legal title and failed to inform the car’s owner that it had sold.
“I don’t recognize the person I became during those years,” Doherty told the judge.
Hill, the prosecutor, acknowledged that many of the victims were financially well off, given how much money they were spending on the vehicles. But he said at least one victim viewed the car in question as a significant part of his retirement portfolio.
Court records show Doherty’s father had millions of dollars of civil judgments against him stemming from previous business ventures. Foster, the defense attorney, said he started CPR Classic under Doherty’s name to shield the company from those civil judgments.
“Everybody agrees the defendant was left in an awkward position” by her father, the prosecutor acknowledged Friday in court. But he said Doherty would have never faced criminal charges if she had shuttered the business once he died.
