Defendants in organized crime case say wealthy businessman pursuing them had a secret weapon: The DA

Blue Ocean Enterprises, an investment firm founded by the wealthy manufacturer of the popular OtterBox smartphone protective cases, was able to rely on an ally to criminally prosecute the firm’s former business partners and their associates over a failed business deal.

In an arrangement one legal expert later called the type that “breeds cynicism in the criminal justice system,” the lawyer Blue Ocean Enterprises paid to lobby for criminal charges jumped from his private practice to join the government’s prosecution team.

Two defendants have sued, claiming they were wrongly accused of running an organized criminal enterprise. Their lawsuit contends one of the lawyers who prosecuted them was dishonest and blinded by his own conflict of interests.

That lawyer offered up his services as a “special deputy” prosecutor, for free to the government, in this case the Larimer County District Attorney’s Office. He then presented the case to a grand jury in November 2017 and shepherded the case to its conclusion over the next five years, according to documents reviewed by The Gazette.

The highly unusual arrangement resulted in a secret, unpublished discipline settlement in July 2023 against Phillip Parrott, the lawyer who volunteered to criminally prosecute six individuals on allegations of defrauding Blue Ocean. The investment firm was founded by Curt Richardson, a wealthy Fort Collins businessman who was inducted into the Colorado Business Hall of Fame in 2022. He has donated more than $1.3 million to Republican candidates and political causes in the past 15 years.

While prosecuting the case, Parrott, a former chief deputy in charge of the economic crimes unit at the Denver District Attorney’s Office for 10 years, denied in court filings and court statements made on his behalf any prior relationship with Blue Ocean. He still does.

“Phil Parrott was never (and is not now) employed by, contracted with, or otherwise retained by Blue Ocean or any individual associated with Blue Ocean,” the prosecution pledged in one court filing that helped convince a judge to reject defense efforts to kick Parrott off the case.

Parrott also remained silent when he attended one hearing during civil litigation during which a lawyer with his law firm told a judge that Parrott had never even met Blue Ocean officials while in private practice, let alone been retained as a lawyer by Blue Ocean.

“There were no conversations,” between Mr. Parrott and Blue Ocean officials, the lawyer represented during that hearing. “I know Mr. Parrott would be willing to take an oath to swear to that effect.”

But evidence obtained during civil litigation later showed Blue Ocean’s managers actually authorized their privately retained investigator to pay Parrott prior to Parrott becoming a prosecutor on the case. In that role, Parrott was paid to review allegations of wrongdoing, suggest criminal charges and help prosecutors build a case while he also negotiated to join the prosecution team, according to deposition testimony and invoices.

The $2,691 the investigator paid Parrott for Parrott’s advocacy on Blue Ocean’s behalf came from money Blue Ocean paid the investigator, records show. The bills from Parrott included payment for his attendance at a conference call with Blue Ocean officials. He also was paid to attend a meeting between Blue Ocean officials and Clifford Riedel, who at that time was the Larimer County District Attorney, to discuss a potential criminal case.

Parrott even submitted a bill to review correspondence from Riedel discussing bringing Parrott on board the prosecution team.

In that email, Riedel wrote to Parrott: “Our office has some very talented trial prosecutors, but we have never had the luxury of having a dedicated white-collar unit. As a result, we have used our statutory grand jury sparingly. If you were serious about the possibility of being appointed a special deputy district attorney on this case, I would love to chat with you about that possibility.”

Blue Ocean’s managers rejoiced when they learned Parrott, a lawyer in private practice who also co-founded a private equity investment firm, was joining the prosecution to help secure grand jury indictments against Blue Ocean’s prior business partners Ben Davenport and Kirk Smith, at no charge to the government, an email shows. Parrott became instrumental in convincing a grand jury to indict them and eventually five of their associates, too.

“Blue Ocean is delighted that you will be working on the Davenport/Smith prosecution,” Blue Ocean’s private investigator, Gary Johnson, a former FBI agent, wrote in one May 14, 2017 email to Parrott. “You have their approval.”

“You in? You started?” Johnson, the investigator, emailed Parrott in June of 2017. Parrott emailed back that the district attorney “is working on it.” Nearly four months later, Parrott was presenting the case to the grand jury, seeking and eventually securing indictments as an unpaid volunteer for the Larimer County District Attorney.

Parrott in a recent interview said his pay, prior to joining the prosecution, was for assisting Johnson, Blue Ocean’s private investigator, not Blue Ocean. Asked if he knew back then if Blue Ocean was the ultimate source of his pay, he said: “I’m not stupid. I understand how life works.”

Alexander Rothrock, chair of the Colorado Supreme Court’s judicial ethics advisory board and the past chair of Colorado Bar Association’s Ethics Committee, wrote an analysis for the defense criticizing Parrott’s role in the criminal prosecution — which spanned five years and which the six initial defendants allege amounted to an extreme abuse of prosecution resources and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act.

In the end, much of the 100-count criminal indictment against the defendants went by the wayside.

The two principal targets of the indictments each plea bargained their portion of the case down to two uncharged felony counts of filing a misleading statement with the Colorado Securities Division, with all the original charges dismissed. Those two defendants — Ben Davenport, now 49, and Kirk Smith, now 45, — entered an Alford plea, which means they agreed to accept imposition of a sentence while maintaining their innocence.

Larimer County District Court Judge Juan Villaseñor ordered them each to spend 100 days in jail and 10 years on probation. They were released from jail after 40 days. During the sentencing hearing, the judge grilled the prosecution over why the guilty pleas didn’t involve a single original charged count and appeared to be “random — for lack of a better term.”

“You know, why choose something out of thin air, it appears?” the judge asked during the hearing.

Under the original indictment, Davenport and Smith faced what one prosecutor told the judge during the hearing could be “the functional equivalent of a life sentence,” though the prosecutor said he likely would have sought a sentence between 10 to 20 years in prison in the absence of the plea agreement.

“Mr. Smith and myself have zero criminal history, and we only went along with this plea agreement because he has six children and I have seven,” wrote Davenport, in a complaint against Parrott he filed with the Attorney Regulation Counsel, which oversees lawyer conduct and discipline in Colorado. “These kids need us to be here for them, and the enormous financial burden associated with the proposed six-week trial was far too great. We simply did not have half a million dollars to pay multiple attorneys to represent us for six weeks straight.”

“The reality is that they didn’t have a case at all, and they never did,” Davenport continued. “I truly believe this entire debacle would never have happened without the continuous biased efforts of attorney Phillip A. Parrott.”

Rothrock, in an opinion letter, wrote that he believed Parrott had a major conflict of interest that should have barred him from helping prosecute the case for the government because Parrott previously had been paid by Blue Ocean, the alleged victim, to lobby the Larimer County District Attorney to pursue criminal charges.

“The spectacle of a lawyer advising a business enterprise in a civil dispute one day and prosecuting criminal charges against the enterprise’s adversary the next day breeds public cynicism in the criminal justice system and potentially taints the criminal process itself,” Rothrock wrote after reviewing Parrott’s prosecution for the defendants.

The Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct states prosecutors shall not “participate in a matter in which the lawyer participated personally and substantially while in private practice or nongovernmental employment, unless the appropriate government agency gives its informed consent, confirmed in writing.”

No such consent was provided in writing, Rothrock noted, adding that Colorado’s Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers are “designed to prevent a ‘lawyer who has pursued a claim on behalf of a private client from pursuing the claim on behalf of the government.’”

After a two-year investigation into Parrott’s handling of the prosecution, the Attorney Regulation Counsel issued “a confidential agreement” in July 2023 with Parrott requiring him to “comply with certain conditions, including the requirement that he attend a specific ethics-related program.”

Parrott told The Denver Gazette he informed Riedel of all his previous work, as a private lawyer, on the Blue Ocean matter, prior to agreeing to work as a prosecutor on the case. Parrott said the Attorney Regulation Counsel took exception to a technicality: the lack of him providing Riedel a written memorialization of his prior paid work.

“There’s a failure to write something down,” Parrott said. “For example, a memo, a little more than a paragraph, which I should have done.”

Riedel told the defense lawyers during the criminal case in a letter that the only reason Parrott had agreed to help prosecute the case, on a pro bono basis, with no salary, nor any benefits, was “out of a sense of duty and a desire to seek justice.” Riedel did not return messages seeking comment.

The current Larimer County District Attorney Gordon McLaughlin, who succeeded Riedel, and authorized the plea agreement that resolved the case, also defended Parrott, saying he found Parrott to be a “highly professional and unbiased attorney.”

Parrott defended his prosecutorial role, categorically denying that he received any more pay or anything else of value from Blue Ocean while prosecuting the case. He noted that he obtained guilty convictions, through a plea agreement.

“They waived their right to a trial,” Parrott said. “That’s between them and their lawyer and their conscience.”

Davenport, one of those indicted, still questions the motives of Parrott, who still had an ongoing income by maintaining a private legal practice during the prosecution. He said Parrott was obsessed with turning what Davenport termed legal business transactions and deals into crimes.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch, let alone five years’ worth of free lunches,” Davenport said. “The guy has got the capability of earning $500 an hour. And he worked for free for five years? Nobody works for free for five years, and nobody outlasts the original judge, the district attorney, and every other paid prosecutor on the case, and is still there five years later for free. But that’s what he wants people to believe.”

Davenport claimed Parrott and prosecutors turned necessary business expenses, including the purchase of a nail gun for the business deals’ manufacturing needs, into accusations of theft. He said his associates had their bank accounts and tax records combed over.

In one instance Davenport’s sister-in-law, who worked as a part-time accountant on the business venture, was accused of felony tax fraud for splitting her rent with her roommate, Davenport said.

The sister-in-law confirmed she had been targeted for tax fraud at one critical juncture because she had received checks from her roommate for her share of the rent, which they split. She said prosecutors inaccurately believed that showed she had a secret rental business. Prosecutors in the end dismissed all the 29 criminal charges pending against her, including theft charges.

Another defendant, Jason Lewis, another business associate of Davenport in charge of acquiring raw material for the business venture, also was targeted. He pleaded guilty to a felony charge of tax evasion and was sentenced to 50 hours of community service and two years of probation, upon completion of which the charges were dismissed and the case was sealed.

Lewis said he had forgotten to file his state income tax returns two years in a row because he was struggling after he was hit in the face with a softball while pitching during a game, an injury he said required him to undergo three reconstructive surgeries to save his eyesight and to fix multiple broken bones in his face.

He said the amount of taxes he owed was minor, just about $600 in state taxes, but that didn’t matter to Parrott. Lewis said that during one meeting with Lewis’ lawyer, Parrott opened by saying: “Let’s hear Jason Lewis beg for a plea deal today.”

“I don’t believe it, never did and still don’t that Ben and Kirk did anything wrong at all, or myself, or anybody, for that matter,” Lewis said.

The controversy over Parrott’s prosecution now is headed to the Colorado Supreme Court, which will be asked to reverse the dismissal of a lawsuit alleging Parrott of “abuse of process” for “impaneling a grand jury” and becoming the “de facto lead prosecutor” when he previously had been paid as a private lawyer to advocate on Blue Ocean’s behalf.

The Colorado Court of Appeals this month upheld the dismissal of the lawsuit this month after ruling the two-year statute of limitations had passed. The lawyer who filed the lawsuit, Daniel Alexander, questioned Parrott’s motives in one brief he submitted to the appellate court, stating: “To put it a bit more crassly: ‘It never hurts to do a favor for the mega-wealthy.’”

Alexander claims a lack of candor from Parrott meant he didn’t have all the necessary facts to file the lawsuit in a timely fashion.

During one Court of Appeals hearing in June over the lawsuit, Parrott’s lawyer, Bruce Rohde, countered that Parrott was a man of integrity battling what he termed specious accusations in the lawsuit.

“I’ve known him for 40 years,” the lawyer told the three-judge panel of the court of appeals. “I’ve known what this has done to him, and what this has done to his family. Maybe none of that matters. But maybe it does.”

The July 25, 2018 indictments against Davenport and Smith and their associates stemmed from an initiative that began in 2012 to turn a defunct wood pellet manufacturing plant in Denmark, just outside Copenhagen, into a successful business venture.

The oldest of five children raised in Lafayette, La., Davenport became an entrepreneur at an early age after dropping out of school in eighth grade to help his parents support the family. Years later, in 2012, Davenport was living in Fort Collins when he and his longtime friend, Kirk Smith, came upon what they thought would be a solid money maker.

They had found a shuttered wood pellet manufacturing plant, more than a mile long, in Denmark and believed that if they found an investor, they could strip and refurbish the plant’s equipment for potential resale for use in another wood pellet manufacturing plant.

At that time, gas prices were soaring globally, making alternative fuels an attractive investment. Increasingly, wood pellets, which could be burned as residential fuel in little wood pellet stoves, were becoming popular in Europe and replacing oil as a heating source there.

Davenport had inked a deal with an individual who had an option to buy the plant in Denmark that ensured Davenport and Smith would receive a commission that eventually was worth $1.42 million if they found a buyer for the plant’s equipment.

A physician who didn’t have the deep pockets to turn the deal into a reality introduced them to Curt Richardson, a successful Fort Collins entrepreneur who also never graduated from high school. Richardson had created an investment firm Blue Ocean Enterprises, which bit on Davenport’s pitch to buy the plant equipment in Denmark.

Richardson later told one of his friends that the headstrong, long-winded, fast-talking Davenport was “a genius and nobody can understand him,” according to one deposition.

Richardson had become wealthy through his firm, OtterBox, which makes wildly popular protective cases for smartphones. By 2013, OtterBox had become a financial juggernaut, generating nearly $1 billion in sales annually.

Blue Ocean paid $3.14 million to buy the plant’s equipment, triggering the $1.42 million in commissions for Davenport and Smith. Later that same year, Blue Ocean shifted course and decided instead to become partners to make the plant operational, agreeing to pay Davenport and Smith $20,000 a month to get the plant up and running.

But roadblocks occurred when a nearby plant that was the expected source of steam needed to dry out the wood pellets signed contracts elsewhere, and the wood fuel pellet market nosedived due to a glut of oil released by Saudi Arabia.

With losses mounting, Davenport offered up a new pitch to Blue Ocean in 2015. He said the partners could overhaul the plant so that it could manufacture plasticized pallet blocks — a variation on the wood pallets seen in places like Costco and Sam’s Club that are used to store and move merchandise.

“I tried to tell them, ‘Hey, we need to pivot. We need to do something different,’” Davenport recalled.

Blue Ocean’s CEO at the time, Kurt Hoeven, a Harvard graduate, liked the plan and agreed “in principle” to give Davenport and Smith, whose initial ownership interest had dwindled to virtually nothing, a path back to equity, authorizing the purchase of the equipment needed to make the plasticized blocks.

But Brent Keele, Blue Ocean’s general counsel, never finalized a promised “restructuring” agreement, telling law enforcement authorities later that he “slow played” doing so because he did not believe Davenport and Smith should receive “more ownership,” a police report shows.

“We suspected foul play,” Davenport said. “It turned out we were right.”

Because no formal agreement was ever sent their way, Davenport and Smith say they decided to secretly create a company to manufacture the necessary equipment for making plasticized pallets to protect their sweat equity and come up with a way to protect their interests through future licensing fee payments.

Through that new company, they billed Blue Ocean $1 million for the necessary equipment without telling Blue Ocean they would receive proceeds from the sale.

Upset with the lack of progress on wood pellet manufacturing, Blue Ocean officials forced Davenport and Smith to resign in December 2015, with the company promising them a release from all claims of liability — a release Blue Ocean never provided, court records show.

Blue Ocean plowed forward with the original plan to manufacture wood pellets as a fuel source despite Davenport’s warning that doing so would turn into massive financial losses.

From 2016 through 2019, after Smith and Davenport’s forced resignation, the wood pellet manufacturing plant in Denmark turned in losses of at least $43.9 million, proving Davenport’s predictions of massive losses in the wood pellet fuel market accurate.

“It was actually worse,” than Davenport had predicted, according to a deposition from John Allen, a self-taught engineer who took over managing the plant at the behest of his close friend Richardson, whom Allen said he was indebted to for helping save him from severe alcoholism years earlier.

The criminal indictments against Davenport, Smith and four of their affiliates that worked on the Denmark plant hinged on the following:

• Davenport hiring and paying four additional employees $293,882.31 as salary over four years.

• Personal expense reimbursements of $59,054.39 along with $21,195.24 in cash withdrawals during that time.

• The non-disclosure of the $1.42 million commission for the initial purchase of the plant’s wood pellet manufacturing equipment.

• The non-disclosure of Davenport’s and Smith’s silent ownership in the company that sold equipment for manufacturing plasticized pallet blocks.

Defense lawyers and the defendants all claim none of those issues amounted to criminal violations. They contend Parrott and the other prosecutors improperly used the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act — a provision of state law often used to topple drug kingpins and gangs — to criminalize business transactions they contend actually were contractually allowed.

The employee wage payments were allowed under a memorandum of action, drawn up by Blue Ocean, according to the defense. Specifically, the memorandum gave Davenport, as president of Blue Point Pellet, the sole authority to hire and authorize payments for employees.

Still, the four employees Davenport hired got swept up in the prosecution, with their salaries used as justification to charge them with theft. Prosecutors dropped those charges after nearly three years of legal wrangling, conceding they would have difficulty proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Jeremy Pond, Davenport’s executive assistant at the Denmark plant, during one hearing told the judge that he, his wife and their four young children became “collateral damage” to Parrott and the prosecution, which he described as driven to win at all costs, even at the expense of the truth. Pond claimed he was only charged criminally to try to pressure him into caving and falsely implicating his bosses in exchange for leniency.

“My family’s welfare didn’t matter, and the ends justified the means as they tried to coerce me to endorse their accusations against these men,” he told the judge. He added that he never provided any evidence because he had seen no wrongdoing.

The defense further contends there was no legal obligation to disclose the commission payments, which the defense points out were arranged well before Davenport ever approached Blue Ocean as a potential buyer and before the existence of a partnership.

Furthermore, there was no obligation by Davenport or Smith to disclose they were silent owners of the company that in 2015 sold the equipment for manufacturing the plasticized pallets, according to a provision in the Blue Point Pellet operating agreement, also executed on July 19, 2012, the defense contends.

That operating agreement states the board of managers — consisting of two Blue Ocean officials and Davenport — “are free to engage or invest in an unlimited number of activities or businesses, any one or more of which may be related to or in competition with the activities or businesses of the company.” That operating agreement further stated that the board of managers “acknowledge that certain conflicts of interests may arise” among members of the board.

Davenport said he informally asked a lawyer if he could silently collect revenue from the sale of the plasticized block manufacturing equipment, and he claims the lawyer told him the “conflict of interests” clause in the operating agreement allowed him to do so.

The defense also points to deposition testimony from John Allen, the Blue Ocean engineer who took over the plant as supporting evidence that Davenport and Smith didn’t take advantage of the transaction. Allen testified the equipment for the plasticized pallet operation cost significantly less than alternatives, and worked well when he made inexpensive modifications.

“They are telling the district attorney that they were robbed, that we took money, and they got nothing,” Davenport said. “In fact, they got the exact equipment they paid for. They admitted it worked better than any other equipment for that purpose. They admitted it was half the price of the other equipment on the market, and they admitted that it still had value.”

The equipment for the plasticized pallets eventually was prepared for sale from the Denmark plant to Richardson’s firm, OtterBox, for an undisclosed future use, Allen, now deceased, said during a deposition in 2019. Davenport said he and Smith have never received any of the licensing fee revenue for the use of the equipment. He maintains that Blue Ocean accused him of fraud to avoid having to pay those fees.

Davenport contends the expenses and ATM withdrawals in the indictment had innocent explanations and were incurred over the four years it took to get the plant operational and were allowed under the operating agreement drafted by Blue Ocean lawyers. Testimony later revealed every single expense was documented and sent by email, each month, to Blue Ocean’s management and accountant.

“This is not what you do if you’re defrauding somebody in expenses,” Eric Fischer, Davenport’s lawyer, told the sentencing judge. “You don’t document it all and hand it to them in a QuickBooks file.”

In one instance, the prosecution accused an employee of improperly buying a watch on the company’s dime, Davenport recalled. According to Davenport, the purchase actually was for a GPS navigation device that would help the employee steer rental cars through the streets of Denmark when he was locating and buying material for the Denmark plant.

Davenport also contends the prosecution in another instance criminalized the purchase of a nail gun, a purchase he said was necessary for testing how well the plasticized pallet blocks took nails.

“It’s just thing, after thing, after thing, after thing, like that, where they just went through and anything that didn’t make sense, they just red flagged it, and then stacked it all together and said, ‘These are personal items that they just bought for themselves,’” Davenport said. “No proof that was the case, but that’s what they told the grand jury.”

Just as Davenport and Smith began to sense their prosecution was faltering, suddenly new indictments were filed against them, an additional nine criminal counts against each defendant, after Parrott, the prosecutor, took new alleged fraud allegations to a new grand jury.

After their forced resignation from the Denmark plant’s operations, Davenport and Smith went on to form another company, which has gone on to manufacture virtual reality game cabinets that now are in use in Dave & Buster’s arcades throughout the country as well as other entertainment venues, including Main Event centers.

After the indictment, they entered into negotiations in 2017 with J. J. Rendón, a political consultant and activist from Venezuela, who had been granted political asylum in the United States and had plans to build a Disneyland-style virtual reality complex in Florida, where he lived, and distribute their products throughout Latin America.

Rendón falsely claimed to have ties to the actor Mark Wahlberg and also falsely claimed to have access to $3 million in cash to expand Davenport’s and Smith’s virtual reality cabinet business, the defense later asserted during one hearing.

“Guess what? He didn’t have it,” defense lawyer Michael Melito said during that hearing. “His own people have testified that he didn’t have it.”

Rendón would go on to become one of the architects of a failed 2020 coup aimed at overthrowing the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

Back in 2017, Rendón had agreed to loan Davenport and Smith’s new virtual reality cabinet company $1.1 million. Rendón said the loans would buy him some time to eventually free up the cash for a $3 million investment, which he then would use to pay off the loans and allow him to become a managing partner with them, the defense contends.

The $3 million investment never came, though, and Rendón cried foul when Davenport and Smith said they would need two years to pay off his loan after he demanded his money back. Rendón sued for repayment, at that time not alleging he had been defrauded. They countersued.

Parrott began reaching out to numerous customers of the new company Davenport and Smith had formed asking if they believed they had been defrauded. Parrott used the Rendón negotiations to convince a new grand jury to issue a new indictment against Davenport, Smith and one of their employees, alleging securities fraud for allegedly failing to disclose their previous Blue Ocean indictments to Rendón and for allegedly failing to disclose they were using some of his loans to pay their criminal lawyers.

Once again, the evidence tells a different story, the defense maintains, pointing to emails to Rendón during the negotiations for a partnership. Those emails included detailed budgets for how the loans would be spent, including that $675,000 was for executive salaries. The defense says there was no duty to disclose how the salaries were expended.

Davenport during one court hearing testified that all the transactions between Rendón and him and Smith were blessed by high-powered Los Angeles lawyers he paid $35,000 to go over the transactions, the same lawyers that handled Facebook’s $2 billion merger with Oculus VR, Inc. He said those lawyers, as well as his defense lawyers and their expert witness, still maintain he wasn’t engaged in securities transactions.

Davenport has since moved to Tennessee, where he has continued to successfully grow the business making cabinets for virtual reality games in entertainment complexes. His cabinets are now in 900 locations in 12 countries, generating multi-million dollars in sales.

After a new Larimer County District Attorney Gordon McLaughlin, a Democrat, was elected in 2020, prosecutors agreed to dismiss the theft charges against Davenport’s employees for the salaries they had been paid when working for the plant in Denmark.

The prosecution then negotiated the eventual plea agreement that ended up with Smith and Davenport each serving 40 days in jail. McLaughlin said the plea agreement followed dozens of conversations between his office and defense lawyers about the merits of the case.

“We want to be able to challenge our positions and make sure that we are getting justice and make sure that we are only pursuing the counts that are appropriate to pursue,” McLaughlin said. “We encourage defense attorneys in any case to present us with those alternative theories to challenge our position, and even when someone has committed crimes, to present us with mitigation about why the case should perhaps be different, and that occurred in this case.”

After the criminal charges were resolved, lawsuits filed by Blue Ocean and Rendón and counterclaims from Davenport and Smith were settled, with a requirement that the Blue Ocean settlement remain confidential.

At sentencing, District Court Judge Juan Villaseñor said he found the prosecution’s allegations of securities fraud related to the Rendón negotiations dubious.

“I don’t know what would have survived, to be honest, a motion for judgment of acquittal, and it seems to me more a matter of sour grapes,” the judge said during the sentencing hearing following the plea agreement.

Still, the judge during the July 14, 2021, hearing sentenced Davenport and Smith each to a 100-day jail sentence, 10 days of which stemmed from the Rendón indictment and 90 days from the Blue Ocean indictment. He also ordered 10 years of probation for both defendants.

The judge said he believed the defendants clearly had engaged in theft for failing to disclose to Blue Ocean they were silent owners in the company that manufactured and sold the equipment for the plasticized pallet operation for the Denmark plant.

He ordered the defendants to pay over $740,000 in restitution to Blue Ocean, $214,098 of which was related to Blue Ocean’s investigative costs and $529,525 for Blue Ocean’s purchase of manufacturing equipment for the plasticized pallets.

The Colorado Court of Appeals this month overturned the restitution award, ruling that there was “insufficient evidence” to justify the $529,525 in restitution for the manufacturing equipment since there was “uncontroverted evidence” that equipment had value for Blue Ocean.

“Giving Blue Ocean its money back in addition to the equipment it used that money to buy would leave Blue Ocean better off, not merely return it to its original position,” the appellate court ruled in its opinion ordering a new restitution hearing.

Back during the sentencing hearing, Judge Villaseñor quoted from the now deceased former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson before imposing the sentences, a person he called one of his favorite justices.

The quote he read into the record to the surprised courtroom began: “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America.”

Villaseñor went on for a while, before concluding the quote: “While the prosecutor, at his best, is one of the most beneficent forces in society, when he acts with malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”

Parrott dismissed Villasenor's comments over the prosecution, saying the judge wasn't aware of all of the evidence the prosecution had gathered implicating the defendants.