Politicians, kin and pals of tax cheat push judge for lenience

Friends, family members, employees, well-known political figures and business executives have submitted letters totaling 200 pages to U.S. District Judge Susan Oki Mollway urging her to go easy on Honolulu telecommunications executive Al Hee as he faces several years in prison for tax fraud.

Included in the outpouring of support for Hee are letters from former Public Utilities Commission Chairwoman Mina Morita, former Hawaii Supreme Court Associate Justice James Duffy, state Sen. Brickwood Galuteria, former state Rep. Heather Giugni, communications strategist Barbara Tanabe and Bill Kaneko, an attorney and campaign manager for former Gov. Neil Abercrombie.

Attorneys for Hee had sought to keep the letters private, filing them as part of a confidential sentencing report. But during a Monday hearing, Mollway ordered attorney Michael Purpura to publicly release them.

“You and I have enough to do without having satellite litigation with respect to those letters,” Mollway told Purpura in court, noting that the media had been asking for them.

Hee, founder of Waimana Enterprises and Sandwich Isles Communications, which provides phone and Internet service to more than 3,500 residents of Hawaiian homelands, was convicted in July on multiple counts of tax fraud. Prosecutors said he skimmed some $4 million from Waimana, the holding company for Sandwich Isles, to cover personal expenses.

Prosecutors are pushing for a sentence of between 41 and 51 months as well as restitution for the tax loss, which could total hundreds of thousands of dollars. He’s expected to be sentenced on Dec. 15.

The letters give a sense of the depth of Hee’s close relationships with local political and business leaders. They also paint a picture of a man who is beloved by his family, generous in helping friends and committed to helping other Native Hawaiians, even as critics say his financial schemes have hurt the Native Hawaiian community.

His supporters talked about the toll that Hee’s trial and conviction has had on his family. A daughter said she went into preterm labor due to the stress of the trial and went on to have the baby early. They also said they worry that incarceration could exacerbate Hee’s prolonged health conditions, the specifics of which are redacted.

Hee’s wife, Wendy Hee, asked the judge to consider alternatives to prison, such as probation, home confinement or community service. She talked about his generosity over the years in donating to social service organizations. When the Waianae High School football team was robbed, she said, he replaced their stolen helmets and shoulder pads and bought them all new cleats.

Prosecutors detailed dozens of personal expenses that Hee had Waimana pay for, including family vacations to Tahiti, Switzerland and Disney World, expensive jewelry and meals at high-end restaurants. They say he paid his wife and children $1.6 million in salaries and benefits over the years even though they didn’t really work for the company.

However, Wendy Hee said that her husband “is basically a humble man, who does not spend money on himself.”

“We do not live lavishly,” she said, adding that they have lived in the same home in a middle-class neighborhood for 35 years. “We don’t frequent fancy restaurants, we don’t buy designer clothes, and do not own any major possessions except for our house.”

Hee’s daughter, Breanne Hee-Kahalewai, said her father is a “very dedicated and loving family man, an extremely hard worker, generous in everything he does and an advocate for the Hawaii community.”

She talks about the time she had an accident in third grade and her father left work to take her to the hospital to get stitches, and the months he spent in the hospital at the side of his ill mother.

Sandwich Isles employees also describe a generous and kind boss. Ka‘i‘inioku‘upu‘uwai Patelesio remembers when she gave birth to a baby boy four months early who was “very, very sick.” She says Hee visited her in the hospital.

Business and political leaders in Hawaii also recounted their long friendships with Hee.

Former Associate Justice Duffy wrote, “Al is a man of his word, and I am proud to call him my friend.”

Morita, the former PUC chairwoman, recounted their time on the East Coast together, when Hee, now 61, was at the Naval Academy and she was working in Washington, D.C., for former U.S. Sen. Hiram Fong. She said he was like a “big brother you could count on,” helping fix things around her apartment and on her old Volkswagen Beetle.

Until January, Morita led the PUC, which along with the Federal Communications Commission is responsible for regulating Sandwich Isles and some of its affiliated companies. She and other commissioners had to annually certify to the FCC that Sandwich Isles was appropriately using the millions in federal subsidies it was receiving to provide telecommunications to rural areas.

Morita never raised questions about Sandwich Isles’ finances in PUC documents and continued to sign off on the company’s certification even as the FCC was raising major questions about the company’s books. The PUC recently suspended the company’s subsidies while the FCC conducts a new audit in light of Hee’s tax convictions.

Morita said that she always separated their friendship from their regulatory dealings.

“As chair of the PUC, I was always concerned about how, if it were known, my friendship with Albert would be perceived,” Morita wrote. She said she urged her staff “to use extra caution to ensure transparency and fairness in addressing telecommunication certification issues so we could never be accused of improper conduct.”

“It would have been easy for me to stay on the sidelines and not to expose myself but that is not what life-long friends do through the ups and downs of our lives,” she wrote.

• Letters of support for Albert Hee