Convicted felon Kylie Marie Larson asked a Dakota County judge in December for permission to travel to Mexico for a vacation, saying that she had “remained law abiding” since she was put on probation for check forgery and theft by swindle for defrauding a previous employer.

“I look in the mirror every morning and realize the wrong and evil I did. This was a lesson, and I have learned a lot and I have come out stronger,” Larson, of Roseville, wrote in her letter to Judge Arlene Perkkio.

Kylie Marie Larson (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

In reality, Larson had not been lawful, prosecutors say. At the time, Larson had already swindled more than $570,000 from her new employer, Portable Storage of MN, using her “position of trust” as an accounting specialist to employ an “elaborate and sophisticated scheme” over four years for her personal monetary gain, according to charges filed Friday in Ramsey County District Court against the 31-year-old.

In total, from late November 2020 to late March of this year, Larson allegedly stole $606,790.42 from Portable Storage of MN and its subsidiaries. The charges say Larson pulled off more than 1,500 fraudulent transactions at the expense of Portable Storage, a residential and commercial portable storage and moving company that is headquartered in New Brighton and operates as The Big Blue Box.

Larson, who was arrested Thursday and booked into the Ramsey County Jail, faces five counts of theft by swindle and seven counts of identity theft. She made a first appearance on the charges Friday and remained jailed in lieu of $75,000 bail. An attorney is not listed in her court file.

Casinos, Amazon purchases

To pull off her scheme, Larson allegedly created fraudulent ACH payments and fraudulent Square businesses, and fraudulently used company credit cards for personal purposes. To conceal the theft, Larson created phony email accounts and invoices, and forged and falsified business documents, “among other deceitful acts,” the charges say.

Through bank records, New Brighton police investigator Joe Pyka discovered Larson made nearly 230 transactions — a mix of ATM withdrawals and debit-card purchases — at Running Aces, Mystic Lake and Little Six casinos — totaling just shy of $294,000, between August 2020 and May of this year.

Larson allegedly created an Amazon account in December 2020 under the name of the owner of Portable Storage, using his personal information and credit-card numbers, except that the shipping address was to Larson’s home. She created an email address — portablestorageofmn@gmail.com — and linked it to the account, the charges say.

Larson allegedly went on to make nearly 1,200 Amazon purchases, spending more than $130,000 on groceries, alcohol, home improvement supplies, clothing, electronics, digital subscriptions, luggage and sex toys, among other items.

Furthermore, the charges say, Larson’s bank records show withdrawals made to Travelers Insurance for monthly restitution payments for her June 2021 Dakota County convictions.

Fired from previous job

According to the 17-page criminal complaint:

Larson was hired by Portable Storage as an account specialist on Sept. 21, 2020. She passed a background check, but the company did not speak with her former employer as part of the hiring process.

Less than a month earlier, on Aug. 12, Larson was fired from her accountant job with Southview Senior Communities in Lilydale after its chief financial officer became aware that she had created a vendor account in her grandmother’s name, issued checks and cashed them for herself.

Larson was charged in Dakota County with theft by swindle and six counts of check forgery the following January. A review of Southview’s finances showed Larson wrote out eight fraudulent checks between February 2020 — the same month she was hired — and July 17, 2020, totaling just over $24,000.

Once at Portable Storage, Larson had access to and regularly handled sensitive financial information through the company’s bookkeeping software, online bank accounts, financial statements, credit card and checks. “(A coworker) indicated that (Larson) was an enthusiastic and well‐liked employee during most of her tenure with Portable Storage,” this week’s complaint says.

But Larson had another secret, starting in February 2022 when she was charged in Ramsey County District Court with obtaining unemployment benefits through false representation. The criminal complaint says she received more than $16,300 in unemployment benefits while working at Portable Storage, spending at least $30,000 at Mystic Lake Casino and over $10,000 at Running Aces.

Larson’s coworker at Portable Storage eventually stumbled upon the alleged fraud at the New Brighton company this past October while working on company accounts. The worker noticed in QuickBooks software several discrepancies in payments to a vendor — Arrow Towing, out of Nebraska. Larson had no explanation for discrepancies, despite being given until early February to come up with one.

Larson quit her job on Feb. 8, although two coworkers convinced her to withdraw the resignation. “For unrelated reasons, (her coworker) did not revisit the issue again until early April,” the charges say.

Her coworkers and the company’s vice president confronted Larson in an April 11 meeting. Larson said she had copies of all invoices from Arrow Towing in her office and in storage. After leaving to “eat lunch,” she never returned to the office. She texted her coworker denying their accusations and told Portable Storage she was quitting her job and hiring an employment law attorney.

After her arrest on Thursday, Larson declined to comment on most of the allegations, but admitted to using stolen funds to pay restitution for her previous cases, the complaint says. She replied “Yes, yes, cuz I wasn’t trying to go to jail.”

Larson said she had a gambling addiction and had been trying to get help for a long time. She cited difficulty with being a single mother and seeing her daughter’s friends go on trips when she could not buy groceries. At the end of the interview, Larson said: “I knew this day was going to come, but I didn’t know when.”

On probation

Larson was sentenced on the two Dakota charges in June 2021. She was given probation for four years and eight days of work release. The sentence included a stay of imposition, meaning the felony convictions will be deemed misdemeanors if she successfully follows terms of her probation. She was ordered to pay Southview Senior Communities $20,000 in restitution, which was what she still owed them.

In the felony unemployment benefits case, Larson pleaded guilty in August 2022 and was sentenced to three days in jail, which was time she had already served after her arrest, and three years of unsupervised probation. She again was given a stay of imposition, and ordered to pay back more than $7,200 to the state.

As far as her December request to take a trip to Mexico, Judge Perkkio denied it, pointing out that she hadn’t paid all the restitution she owed to her former employer.

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — The U.S. ambassador to Mexico confirmed on Friday that drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada was brought to United States against his will when he arrived in Texas in July on a plane along with fellow drug lord Joaquín Guzmán López.

Zambada’s attorney had earlier claimed the long-time chief of the Sinaloa cartel had been kidnapped. But officials had not confirmed that and Zambada’s age and apparent ill-health had led some to speculate he turned himself in.

U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar on Friday said “the evidence we saw … is that they had brought El Mayo Zambada against his will.”

“This was an operation between cartels, where one turned the other one in,” Salazar said. Zambada’s faction of the Sinaloa cartel has been engaged in fierce fighting with another faction, lead by the sons of imprisoned drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Guzmán López is the half-brother of those factional leaders.

Salazar said no U.S. personnel, resources or aircraft were involved in the flight on which Guzmán López turned himself in, and that U.S. officials were “surprised” when the two showed up at an airport outside El Paso, Texas on July 25.

Frank Pérez, Zambada’s attorney, said in a statement in July that “my client neither surrendered nor negotiated any terms with the U.S. government.”

“Joaquín Guzmán López forcibly kidnapped my client,” Perez wrote. “He was ambushed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed by six men in military uniforms and Joaquin. His legs were tied, and a black bag was placed over his head.”

Perez went on to say that Zambada, 76, was thrown in the back of a pickup truck, forced onto a plane and tied to the seat by Guzmán López.

In early August, Zambada made his second appearance in federal court in Texas after being taken into U.S. custody the week before.

Guzmán López had apparently long been in negotiations with U.S. authorities about possibly turning himself in. Guzmán López, 38, has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges in federal court in Chicago.

But U.S. officials said they had almost no warning when Guzmán López’s plane landed at an airport near El Paso. Both men were arrested and remain jailed. They are charged in the U.S. with various drug crimes.

Salazar said the plane had taken off from Sinaloa — the Pacific coast state where the cartel is headquartered — and had filed no flight plan. He stressed the pilot wasn’t American, nor was the plane.

The implication is that Guzmán López intended to turn himself in, and brought Zambada with him to procure more favorable treatment, but his motives remain unclear.

Zambada was thought to be more involved in day-to-day operations of the cartel than his better-known and flashier boss, “El Chapo,” who was sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. in 2019.

Zambada is charged in a number of U.S. cases, including in New York and California. Prosecutors brought a new indictment against him in New York in February, describing him as the “principal leader of the criminal enterprise responsible for importing enormous quantities of narcotics into the United States.”

The capture of Zambada and Guzmán López — and the idea that one cartel faction had turned in the leader of the other — raised fears that the already divided cartel could descend into a spiral of violent infighting.

That prompted Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to take the unusual step of issuing a public appeal to drug cartels not to fight each other.

Charlotte Johnson, one of three trustees at the helm of the Otto Bremer Trust, has stepped down after roughly 30 years co-leading one of the region’s oldest philanthropies.

She selected her daughter, Caroline S. Johnson, a Bremer Bank branch manager, to replace her as trustee.

The St. Paul-based philanthropy announced Charlotte Johnson’s retirement and Caroline Johnson’s appointment as co-trustee on Friday. Caroline Johnson will lead the charity alongside longstanding trustee Daniel Reardon and former Cretin-Derham Hall president Francis Miley, who was appointed an Otto Bremer trustee in early 2023.

Caroline Johnson steps into her new role at a tumultuous time for the philanthropy, with a series of lawsuits between the bank, the charity and a cadre of East Coast hedge funds only recently having been settled after five years. Terms of the settlement have not been publicly disclosed, and it’s unclear if the charity — which owns Bremer Bank, one of the state’s oldest farm lenders — will sell controlling stakes in the financial institution to outside interests intent on selling the bank to new owners, as long planned.

“OBT is not at liberty to discuss those issues at this time, due to the confidentiality terms of the settlement agreement,” said a spokesperson for the trust, in a recent email.

The philanthropy, which was founded by German-American immigrant and banking impresario Otto Bremer in 1944, has granted more than $1 billion in charitable funding across the Midwest since its inception. Bremer hand-picked his top advisers to lead the charity and oversee Bremer Bank, writing into the trust’s founding documents that they, in turn, would each choose their own successors, and so forth.

Caroline Johnson has spent the last eight years working for Bremer Bank “in various roles in community banking,” including managing a Bremer Bank branch in New Richmond, Wis., according to a written announcement from the philanthropy.

“Caroline has nearly 20 years of leadership and financial management experience in banking and other industries,” reads the written statement, which did not list specific past employers or job titles. “She brings with her a wealth of knowledge about Otto Bremer and his legacy and has demonstrated her ability to work collaboratively and respectfully with peers and the public OBT serves.”

In 2023, the Otto Bremer Trust awarded upwards of $105 million in charitable funds through more than 1,100 grants and loans to 1,035 organizations in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and Wisconsin. More than $61 million of that total was spent in Minnesota.

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