Northern Iowa “con artist” returned to federal prison

SIOUX CITY – An Arnolds Park man who defrauded a Florida innkeeper while on supervised release on bank fraud and wire charges was sentenced on February 1, 2022, to three years in federal prison. Ronald Goldberg, age 63, from Arnold’s Park, Iowa, received the prison term after a three-day hearing in federal court in Sioux City.

Evidence at the supervised release revocation and detention hearings showed that, in January 2019, Goldberg checked into an ocean-front hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, with a credit card from a luxury automobile dealership in Dallas, Texas. When the automobile dealership called the hotel to question a charge on its credit card bill, the hotel confronted Goldberg. Goldberg then left the hotel in the middle of the night without paying his hotel bill in full.

At the time of the incident at the Palm Beach hotel, Goldberg was on supervised release for a 2016 conviction in the United States District Court for the District of South Dakota for two counts of bank fraud and one count of wire fraud. Goldberg has a lengthy criminal history, including prior federal convictions for wire fraud and interstate transportation of money obtained by fraud in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, interstate transportation of stolen securities, possession of stolen securities, bank fraud, and attempted escape in the Southern District of Florida, forging a signature of a United States Magistrate Judge in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and Wire Fraud in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. After the Iowa federal court issued a warrant for Goldberg’s arrest in 2021 to answer for the 2019 incident, Goldberg did not surrender himself and ultimately was arrested in a hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Goldberg was sentenced in Sioux City by United States District Court Chief Judge Leonard T. Strand. At the hearing, Chief Judge Strand found Goldberg committed the Florida crime of defrauding an innkeeper, a felony, but not a separate charge of unauthorized use of a credit card. In imposing sentence, Chief Judge Strand referred to Goldberg as a “con artist” with a lengthy history of defrauding victims. Goldberg, who holds himself out as a fine Italian wine importer, was sentenced to 36 months’ imprisonment. He must also serve a two-year term of supervised release after the prison term. There is no parole in the federal system.