Huntington Beach man pleads guilty to scamming L.A.’s Fifth Church of Christ out of $11.5 million

The former chairman and facilities manager of a historic Los Angeles church pleaded guilty Monday to stealing millions of dollars from church members over a decade, using the money to finance buying an expensive mansion and exclusive club memberships for himself.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Charles Thomas Sebesta, a 54-year-old Huntington Beach resident, agreed to plead guilty to one count each of wire fraud and bank fraud for orchestrating the scheme to steal at least $11.5 million from the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist, a longtime Hollywood-based branch of the Church of Christian Science.

In court Monday, U.S. Central District Judge Stephen V. Wilson described Sebesta’s scheme as “looting” the church of everything it owned.

“This wasn’t piecemeal,” Wilson said from the bench. “In the end the church was robbed wholesale.”

Sebesta — who appeared in the courtroom with short gray hair, in a white jail jumper covering a gray sweater, constricted by chains around his waist and ankles — was first indicted in August. He initially faced 250 years in federal prison for 13 counts of bank fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

With the two-count plea agreement, signed in January, Sebesta could be sentenced to a total of 60 years in prison. He also faces five years of probation, and must give back all the money he stole.

In the plea agreement, prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Sebesta “began to gain the trust of the Church and its members” after he was hired in 2001 as a facilities manager.

For years, Sebesta worked his way up through the leadership of the dwindling congregation. By 2016, he was in control of nearly every aspect of the church’s finances.

To hide his thefts, Sebesta wrote the church’s checks “payable to fictitious entities that appeared legitimate because their names were similar to real businesses.”

Sebesta owned the bank accounts for the fake businesses. He named them after the church’s vendors — Grainger, an industrial supply company, and Zurich International, an insurance company — to fool its members into thinking they were legitimate.

All of that money, millions of dollars worth, then was directed to “the defendant’s wrongful personal benefit,” prosecutors said.

The purchases included a $2 million mansion, a membership to Club 33 — a VIP club at Disneyland in Anaheim — and gifts for his wife, son and a female companion.

At Club 33, Sebesta would host fancy gatherings with “high-profile entertainment companies, including professional sports teams, and their employees.” The sports teams or other companies were not named in the indictment.

Some of the thefts were disguised as donations, such as when Sebesta took $4 million off the top of the church’s $12.7 million sale of its longtime Hollywood Boulevard home.

Now effectively defunct, the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist for almost 40 years was housed in the sleek, modern mid-century building at 7107 Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The church address now directs to a strip mall in the Fairfax District; other Church of Science congregations in the area were not aware of the Los Angeles chapter, and some said it no longer exists.

With few members left, the church decided to sell the Hollywood Boulevard property in 2008. Sebesta shepherded that sale. The property is now owned by the hip, millennial-focused Mosaic Church.

In an email to the church’s remaining members, Sebesta posed as the developer buying the property, prosecutors said. He told them $4 million from the sale would be distributed to the Church of Science’s founding organization, referred to as the Mother Church, as a donation.

The Boston-based Mother Church never received that money, prosecutors said in the indictment. And instead of directing the rest of the purchase price of the building to the Los Angeles chapter’s coffers, Sebesta pocketed a “a significant majority” of the money, according to court documents.

The transaction was a misstep that helped Secret Service investigators uncover the lengthy scheme, which began to crumble when the Mother Church noticed the missing $4 million donation promised to them.

When officials there began investigating where their money went, Sebesta sent them letters posing as another Fifth Church member asking them to allow the local branch to look into the discrepancy on their own, “without distraction or interference,” according to the indictment.

It still took until 2016 for church members to reach out to federal investigators about the scheme. Secret Service agents in Southern California then looked in to the case.

Prosecutors have not said where the mansion was that Sebesta bought with the church’s funds.

His female companion, unnamed in the August indictment, who received gifts as part of the First Church of Christ thefts was nevertheless mentioned as a co-defendant with Sebesta in another scheme, according to Valerie Makarewicz, an assistant U.S. attorney who spoke in Monday’s court hearing.

In 2014, Sebesta and Christine Lynn Rowe, a 50-year-old from Huntington Beach who Los Angeles County prosecutors named as Sebesta’s assistant, were charged with stealing about $180,000 from Lay Mission-Helpers and Mission Doctors Association, a Catholic charity.

Two years later, both pleaded no contest to the charges after initially pleading not guilty.

Representatives of the Church of Christian Science in Southern California have not yet returned a request for comment on Sebesta’s guilty plea.