A former Augusta County businessman failed to appear in federal court on Thursday morning, when he was scheduled to be sentenced on tax evasion charges. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Richard Moore, the former part owner and executive vice president of the company Nexus, had a sentencing hearing scheduled for 10 a.m. on Thursday at the federal courthouse in Harrisonburg. A court officer told WMRA that the hearing was canceled because the defendant was purportedly in the hospital. A post made on Moore's Instagram account earlier in the morning alludes to suicide, saying "today is my expiration date."
Moore pled guilty to two felony counts of federal tax evasion in January, on the day he was scheduled to go to trial. He had been charged with a total of 18 felonies for bilking the IRS out of nearly $3.2 million in taxes he took out of employees' paychecks and those Nexus owed as an employer. Nexus was a conglomerate of businesses formerly based in Verona that primarily made its millions by connecting people in immigration detention with bonds. The tax evasion trial, like several other court cases in which Nexus leaders are criminal or civil defendants, had been postponed multiple times.
In court documents, prosecutors advocate for Moore to receive a 10-year prison sentence, noting that he continued to not pay Nexus' taxes in 2022 and 2023 – after already being charged with those crimes. The U.S. attorneys allege that Moore spent more than $11 million of Nexus funds over a 10-year period on luxuries including Maseratis, Ferraris, a private Fall Out Boy concert, and a lavish wedding. This memo includes text messages from Moore to Nexus employees showing that he was directing the flow of money in and out of Subversivo, a separate business entity established "in part, to disguise his continued control over Nexus’s financial accounts."
In a response, Moore asked the court not to imprison him, but to sentence him to probation, restitution, and community service. He wrote that "he was way over his head" and that Nexus' financial problems "snowballed out of control." Moore added that he has been working as a cook at Waffle House since January to support his family.
The sentencing hearing has not yet been rescheduled. Moore and his husband, Michael Donovan, are scheduled to go on trial in Augusta County in September for the alleged financial exploitation of a young man who used to live with them.
