Date: December 14, 2023 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov Albany, NY — Dennis Radcliffe and Kenneth Radcliffe, each of Elka Park, New York, were each sentenced today to 6 months in jail, and to pay a $40,000 fine, for conspiring to evade taxes on income earned from stock sales. United States Attorney Carla B. Freedman and Thomas Fattorusso, Special Agent in Charge, New York Field Office, Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (CI), made the announcement. Dennis Radcliffe and Kenneth Radcliffe, who are cousins, each previously pled guilty to two conspiracies. In the first conspiracy, they conspired with each other to avoid taxes on their personal income, by failing to report several million dollars of income earned principally from sales of penny stocks, from 2014 through 2017. The stock sales occurred in brokerage accounts that Dennis Radcliffe and Kenneth Radcliffe controlled, and which stood in the names of their companies Crackerjack Classics LLC ("Crackerjack") and Universal Consulting LLC ("Universal"). In the second conspiracy, Dennis Radcliffe and Kenneth Radcliffe conspired with each other and with Joseph Radcliffe, Dennis's father, to avoid taxes on approximately $500,000 in compensation that Crackerjack and Universal paid to Joseph, from 2013 through 2019. Joseph Radcliffe was a former Wall Street stockbroker and at the time he was evading the payment of taxes, he owed more than $1 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), after settling fraud allegations with the SEC in 2011. Joseph Radcliffe has also failed to repay the SEC. United States District Judge Glenn T. Suddaby also ordered Dennis Radcliffe to pay $77,552 in restitution to the IRS and ordered Kenneth Radcliffe to pay an additional $152,274 in restitution. In imposing sentence, Judge Suddaby noted that the defendants "come from good people" and that there was no excuse for their willful conduct. "This is just all about greed – pure, unadulterated greed," said Judge Suddaby. Joseph Radcliffe of Elka Park, was sentenced in August 2022 to 3 years of probation, to include 4 weekends in jail, and to pay $109,106 in restitution to the IRS, following his guilty plea to tax evasion conspiracy. CI investigated this case and Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Barnett prosecuted this case. CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a more than a 90 percent federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 12 attaché posts abroad.
