The former owner of a shuttered Waimanalo puppy mill pleaded not guilty Monday in state court to failing to get a general excise tax license and failing to pay general excise taxes from 2007 to 2012.
Vernon Luke remains free after he posted $5,000 bail Friday. His trial is scheduled for June.
An Oahu grand jury returned an indictment March 19 charging Luke with six counts of evading state general excise taxes and six counts of failing to get a GET license. The first six charges are Class C felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison and a $100,000 fine. The other six charges are misdemeanors, each carrying a maximum one-year jail term and $25,000 fine.
"Apparently they say he has income for the six years in question and he didn’t pay GET. But what that income is, they haven’t told us other than, as far as I know, it has nothing to do with the puppy farm," said Earle Partington, Luke’s lawyer.
Luke dodged paying nearly $700,000 in fines, restitution and state court fees when he dissolved Bradley International Inc., his company that owned the puppy mill.
Bradley had pleaded no contest to 153 counts of misdemeanor animal cruelty in 2011, one count for each dog the Hawaiian Humane Society removed from squalid conditions at the Waimanalo dog-breeding facility.
A state judge fined Bradley International the maximum $2,000 for each charge and ordered the company to repay the Humane Society the $370,701 it spent to recover and care for the dogs plus $8,415 in court fees. The fine, restitution and fees have not been paid because Bradley International had no assets when the company was dissolved.
Bradley International’s former manager, David Lee Becker, also pleaded no contest to 153 counts of animal cruelty and was sentenced to six months in prison.
