Rocky Boy pharmacist sentenced on tax charges

A federal judge kept the sentence suggested in a plea agreement for Darin Lee Miller of Havre in a case involving corruption and embezzlement at Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation.

Federal District Judge Brian Morris sentenced Miller to nine months in prison for each of three counts of filing false income tax returns, each to run at the same time.

He also ordered Miller to pay a $90,000 fine and $73,125.50 in restitution.

Morris also granted the request of Miller, who spent 100 days in the Cascade County jail and in the Shelby Crossroads Correctional Facility following his October guilty pleas, to be released pending placement by the federal Bureau of Prisons.

According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Miller failed to report interest he earned on extensive tribal loans as a partner in James Howard Eastlick Jr.’s loan company, JE Loan Program. Eastlick operated that company with the Chippewa Cree Tribe of the reservation, loaning money to both the tribe and individual tribal employees.

Eastlick, a Havre resident, was the psychologist at the tribal clinic at the time and a former CEO of the tribe’s health board. Miller was a pharmacist at the clinic.

Eastlick is serving a sentence of six years in prison followed by three years probation in a complex plea agreement involving multiple cases and numerous tribal officials and people off the reservation.

The press release says he brought Miller in as a partner in the loan company with the intent of turning the business over to him.

The loan program to the tribe and its employees generated a 70 percent to 80 percent return and up to 100 percent return with some entities such as the health clinic and school district, the release says.

Miller claimed $10,000 interest income on his 2010 tax return, but did not claim any on subsequent returns, the release says.

Once the U.S. Attorney’s Office program the Guardians Project, established to investigate fraud and corruption on Montana’s Indian reservations, began investigating, Miller hired an accountant to amend his returns, the release says.

Miller had failed to report large amounts of interest income, the release says, misreporting $17,148.68, $76,373.37, and $23,378.17 in interest income from tribal loans in 2009, 2010, and 2011 respectively, including on later amended returns.

From 2009, when Miller first became involved with Eastlick’s loan program, to 2011, Miller deposited $635,818.48 in tribal loan checks into his Wells Fargo Bank account, the release says. This figure does not include any checks Miller transacted into cash at Wells Fargo.

In addition to the bank account with Wells Fargo, during the same time period, Miller cashed $71,109.53 in checks at Leon’s Buy & Sell and another $142,042.87 at Leon’s Finance, businesses operated by Havre businessman Shad Huston, a former chair of the Havre Public Schools Board of Trustees.

Huston has pleaded guilty to not reporting transactions at his businesses in a case filed in 2014 and to offering bribes and conspiring to file false claims in 2015 cases. He is scheduled for sentencing Feb. 17 at the federal courthouse in Great Falls.