Alleged harassers charged with fraud

ANCHORAGE — Two people whose alleged stalking of a state employee sparked a lawsuit against the state are in federal prison on fraud charges.

Floyd Leroy Lee Jr. and Mary Elizabeth Transki were indicted April 19 on securities fraud. Lee also faces a charge of mail fraud.

The feds say that Lee, as CEO of a phony corporation “Platinum Investments” and Transki as its treasurer and secretary, took money from investors but didn’t invest it.

“Instead, Lee and Transki used most of the victims’ money to pay their own expenses,” according to the seven-page indictment.

The company was active from October 2010 until May 2012 and was based out of Anchorage.

Investors were promised a high yield in a short amount of time and given fake documents to show how their money was doing.

“It was part of the scheme that Lee created a website located at platinuminvestments.biz in an effort to try to legitimize Platinum and falsely claimed to have offices located in Dubai, Manila, New York City and Moscow. That website appears to be no longer active,” the indictment says.

The indictment lists 11 people alleged to have been victims of the fraud scheme, including one who gave Lee “$3,050 for the purchase of 8,000 cellphone memory cards, which Lee never purchased.”

Lee and Transki were both mentioned in a lawsuit Lisa Carpenter filed against the state of Alaska alleging that when she worked for the Office of Children’s Services in Wasilla, the state failed to protect her from Lee’s nonstop harassment.

She claims the harassment included calls to her supervisors, false reporting that she’d assaulted Lee and Transki and their children, as well as allegations to numerous state officials that Carpenter was an embezzler, an animal abuser, a liar, an impersonator of an OCS employee, a tax cheat and a child abuser.

The harassment led to Carpenter’s resignation, but didn’t stop after she’d left the state’s employ. Soon after, her home address, work phone number and name were posted to Craigslist ads offering, among other things, cheap vehicles, sexual services and children’s toys and clothes.

Carpenter, according to the lawsuit, “was forced to change her telephone number and to stand on the deck of her home with a gun to protect her family.”

She eventually left the state.

Her attorney, Tim Twomey, wrote in an email last week that it was a shame the state didn’t listen to Carpenter.

“Seems that the state could have prevented more problems with these folks if they would have taken some action to revoke parole way back when my client was complaining to the state,” he wrote.

The crimes were charged federally because they were alleged to have been committed across state lines. If found guilty, both Lee and Transki would be liable to serve time in federal prisons. Until they reach trial, both are being held in state facilities.

As of Saturday afternoon. Lee listed as an inmate in the Anchorage Jail and Transki has being housed at the Hiland Mountain Correctional Center.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.