Crisp & Cole defendant wants his belt back
BY JOHN COX, Californian staff writer jcox@bakersfield.com
There are belts and then there are belts. The black leather one that a Kern County Sheriff's deputy removed from the waist of Bakersfield mortgage fraud defendant Jayson Costa was the kind you don't easily forget.
Now that it's missing, he wants the county to pay him $338.67 to replace it.
As Costa recounted in a claim filed with the county March 1, a deputy removed the belt Jan. 25 and handed it to another deputy who then placed it in a brown grocery bag marked "Costa."
That was right before Costa was transferred from Lerdo Jail to the federal courthouse in Fresno for a court proceeding in the mortgage fraud case against him and 14 other associates and executives of Crisp & Cole Real Estate, the disgraced Bakersfield real estate agency. Costa has pleaded not guilty.
Costa's claim states that the deputies told him the belt would be mailed to his mother's house in Lompoc. But the belt never arrived.
When Costa called Lerdo to ask what happened, he wrote, he was told authorities there didn't have the belt.
His claim states that the 1.6-inch-wide belt has a silver buckle featuring two interlocking Gs (for Gucci). A printout of a page from Gucci's Internet shopping site values the item at $310.
Costa and his lawyer could not be reached for comment Friday.
The county Board of Supervisors is scheduled to consider Costa's claim at its meeting Tuesday.
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