Crime stories with geek ties seem to be proliferating, with several just in the last few days running the gamut from a costumed character accused of sexting to an underage girl, to a lawyer who embezzled money and used it to buy high end Golden Age comics sentenced (and the evidence stolen), and in one on the positive side, to a settlement in an illegal search of fans on their way back from a Star Trek event.    
 
In Florida, Universal Studios employee James Weldon Alton, who worked in costume as Captain America, was arrested on April 30 on a felony charge of transmitting harmful material to a minor, according to The Smoking Gun.  He is accused of sending sexually explicit photos and text messages to a minor,  a 16–year-old girl, with whom he began an online friendship after she posted a photo online of her posing at Universal Studios with Alton in his Captain America outfit.  Alton, 29, knew the girl was underage but “chose to disregard this because at times he thought it was a joke or that it was all just merely an online flirtatious relationship.”
 
In Texas, Anthony Chiofalo, 52,  a disbarred lawyer who was charged with stealing $9 million from his employer from 2010 to 2012, pled guilty to theft of more than $200,000 (which is (still) a first-degree felony) and was sentenced to 40 years in prison, according to The Houston Chronicle.  The prosecutors believe that Chiofalo bought valuable comic books, sports memorabilia, and other collectibles with the embezzled funds.  Police seized hundreds of valuable items, including a Batman #1 worth $850,000 and an original Green Lantern worth $300,000, when Chiofalo was arrested. 
 
The plot thickens because in February, Lonnie Blevins, an investigator for the Harris County district attorney’s office involved in the case, was arrested and accused of stealing the comic books from a storage unit containing the evidence, and  selling them to dealers at a convention in Chicago for $70,000.
 
And in a win for the geek team, a pair of Ohio Star Trek fans got a $100,000 settlement from the police department in Collinsville, Illinois (familiar to old-timers as the one-time home of Russ Ernst’s Glenwood Distributors), according to The Washington Post.  Terrance Huff and John Seaton were returning from a trip to St. Louis to view a Star Trek exhibit at the St. Louis Science Center and were pulled over on their return by a Collinsville police officer and searched on a pretext.  Huff sued in federal court and won at the District and Appeals Court levels, which led to the settlement.  He also made a video documenting his traffic stop, using video from the police officer’s dash cam, which remains online. 
 
S0 we’ve got cosplay (of a commercial sort), collectible comics, and Star Trek in a hat trick of geek crime stories in the first week of May 2014, a record to be sure.