DETROIT–A former Washtenaw County township official will spend 22 months in prison for trying to intimidate her parents-in-law into evicting the occupants of her former rental home.
A federal judge in Detroit also ordered Marcia Ottoman, 44, of Dexter Township to pay a $3,000 fine, undergo a period of supervised release after her incarceration and receive mental-health counselling.
Ottoman pleaded guilty April 29 to impersonating a federal official and wire fraud. She was automatically removed as a Dexter Township trustee after her plea.
Ottoman will report to federal prison on Jan. 19.
Prosecutors say Ottoman pretended to be an assistant U.S. attorney in late 2006 when she e-mailed a local attorney and sent a letter to her parents-in-law claiming that one of the residents of a farmhouse they rented out was a drug-trafficking illegal alien with ties to terrorists.
Ottoman and her husband had occupied the rental home in the 1990s and, prosecutors say, she wanted to move back.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider said impersonating a federal official was only the tip of the iceberg.
In a court filing, federal prosecutors described Ottoman's campaign in 2005 and 2006 to reclaim her former house, including falsely reporting crimes to local police and attempting to hire mercenaries to evict the occupants.
"I also need people willing and able to get done what our good American government officials cannot or are not willing to do," she wrote in a July 2006 e-mail to militia groups in Michigan and Ohio, according to the government filing.
Schneider said Ottoman's actions and refusal to accept responsibility – including denying she pleaded guilty while testifying under oath in a separate hearing in a state court less than three weeks after she entered the pleas – deserved a stronger sentence than the recommended guideline of 10-16 months.
"Fortunately, it didn't escalate to violence, but that was a possibility," he said.
Defence attorney Joseph Niskar said U.S. District Judge Julian Abele Cook's sentence was "appropriate."
Ottoman had sought to avoid prison in a court filing asking for home detention so she could seek treatment for a "long-burning personality disorder" that fueled her "aberrant behaviour."
Niskar said Ottoman is upset that others involved in the case, such as the lawyer who delivered the fake letter to her parents-in-law, were not charged.
