Former Gary Mayor Jerome Prince pleads guilty to wire fraud

Former Gary Mayor Jerome Prince admitted that he used campaign funds to purchase a house in 2019 as part of a pre-indictment plea filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Hammond.

As part of the deal, Prince agreed to enter a guilty plea on one count of wire fraud in exchange for the U.S. Attorney’s Office not pursuing further charges against him or other individuals over the misuse of campaign funds involving the Committee to Elect Jerome Prince for Mayor.

If the plea is accepted by Judge Philip Simon, Prince is requesting that he be sentenced to one year of probation without any conditions of confinement or home detention and he would be required to pay a fine of $26,750, which reflects the amount Prince used for personal reasons from the committee.

Prince is represented by attorney Kevin Milner, according to court filings. Prince had a lengthy statement admitting his guilt included in the filing.

“I misled donors by falsely representing and causing to be falsely represented, directly and by omission, that donations made to the Committee to Elect Jerome Prince for Mayor campaign committee were being used for campaign purposes, when, in fact, I used a portion of the money provided by donors to the Committee to Elect Jerome Prince for Mayor campaign committee for my own personal purposes, including using committee funds as part of the real estate transaction to finance the purchase of my personal residence,” the statement read.

The charge stems from what federal prosecutors described in court documents as a scheme to mislead and defraud donors so he could use their donations to his Gary mayoral campaign in 2019 to finance a house in the city.

Prince won the Democratic Party primary in May 2019, defeating incumbent Mayor Karen Freeman Wilson, and was coasting to a general election victory in the heavily Democratic city. He was familiar with Indiana campaign finance law and its prohibition against using campaign funds for personal use, according to the court filing, having previously established a campaign committee for his campaign for Lake County Assessor in 2015, court records state.

On Oct. 10, 2019, Prince admits he wrote a check to cash from the Committee to Elect Jerome Prince for Mayor in the amount of $7,000. The next day he used $5,000 of that amount to make out a cashier’s check to a real estate brokerage as the initial payment for the personal residence, records state. The $7,000 withdrawal was not reported on the required report of his campaign committee’s expenses. Prince was the only signatory authority on the account in 2019.

On Oct. 14, 2019, he wrote another check from the committee to an unnamed company in the amount of $19,750, which he also failed to list on the committee’s expenses, according to the case information. The funds were transferred from the company to an unnamed individual, and on Nov. 21, 2019, he caused a wire transfer of $31,100 from the personal bank account of that individual to Chicago Title Company.

Prince was defeated in the 2023 Democratic mayoral primary by current Gary Mayor Eddie Melton.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Philip Benson and Kevin Wolff are prosecuting the case.