Full-court press put on alleged Kealoha mailbox theft, according to officers

The Honolulu Police Department marshaled some of its top talent to conduct a six-day investigation into the theft of the Kahala mailbox belonging to then-Police Chief Louis Kealoha and his wife, Katherine Kealoha, according to testimony Friday at the federal conspiracy trial against the couple.

Not only did the elite Criminal Intelligence Unit conduct a 24/7 surveillance operation of the suspect, but two of the department’s top homicide detectives were pulled from their regular duties to work the case.

The activities were described by eight former and current members of the Honolulu Police Department who testified on the third day of a trial in which prosecutors hope to prove that the Kealohas, along with three former and current Honolulu police officers, conspired to frame Katherine Kealoha’s uncle for stealing the mailbox in a scheme to discredit him in a family financial dispute.

The trial is the culmination of a nearly two-year-long FBI and federal grand jury investigation that resulted in the indictment of the Kealohas, Lt. Derek Wayne Hahn, officer Minh-Hung “Bobby” Nguyen and retired Maj. Gordon Shiraishi.

Among the testifiers Friday was current Deputy Police Chief John McCarthy, who said he met with Katherine Kealoha in his office at her request shortly after the mailbox theft in the summer of 2013 to discuss a potential elder abuse case against her uncle, Gerard Puana.

McCarthy said the then- deputy prosecutor seemed nervous and upset and had told him if her husband found out she was meeting with him, “he would kill her.”

McCarthy said he was unaware Gerard Puana and Katherine Kealoha’s grandmother, Florence Puana, were suing her over money Gerard Puana gave his niece to invest in a hui along with some of the proceeds of a reverse mortgage on the grandmother’s home.

The elder abuse case didn’t go anywhere, however, after he indicated to her that he would have to dig deeper into the evidence and double-check original source documents, he testified. He tried to follow up, he said, but Kealoha said her husband wasn’t interested in pursuing the case.

Earlier in the day, HPD officer Landon Tafaoa described how the Criminal Intelligence Unit mobilized to follow Puana around the clock for six days until he was arrested.

Tafaoa said the unit was told Puana was one of the top suspects in the mailbox theft and that there were safety concerns for the chief’s family.

The unit’s officers staked out Puana’s Wilhelmina Rise home with four or five vehicles in two 12-hour shifts, he said. During the stakeout, Puana’s pattern of activity was not suspicious and only that of “a regular citizen.”

The team would follow Puana everywhere, he said, and ended up losing him in traffic at least once a day, he said.

During the stakeout, neighbors were becoming suspicious. At least one neighbor confronted Tafaoa about what he was doing. He told her he was part of a police detail monitoring the area.

“She said she was glad I was there,” he said.

Even Puana grew suspicious. He took a picture of Tafaoa’s black Ford Explorer and called police to complain that people were following him, the officer said.

Former HPD Assistant Chief Richard Robinson, who was head of the Criminal Investigation Division in 2013, testified that the Criminal Intelligence Unit, then headed by defendant Shira­ishi, had two of his top homicide detectives assigned to the mailbox case.

Robinson said he was angered by the move.

“It goes against the rules,” he said. “That’s a (terrible) assignment for a homicide detective.”

Also testifying Friday was former HPD officer Nalei Sooto, who said he was ordered to arrest Puana for theft about a week after he and his partner were summoned to the Kealohas’ Kahala home to view surveillance video of the theft.

Sooto, a plainclothes officer assigned to Waikiki at the time, said he met defendant Nguyen, who is married to the former chief’s niece, at the Kealohas’ gate in Kahala and was ushered to a backyard pool room.

It was there he was shown the grainy footage of the mailbox theft and was asked whether he could identify the man, but he could not, he said.

Sooto said that while it was not uncommon for a Waikiki detective to review hotel video surveillance, he had never done it at the chief’s house.

In the afternoon, police officer Malcom Lutu testified that he and Puana were members of the same competitive Pearl City powerlifting team in the mid-’80s and that he last saw him at a 2000 reunion.

Later, when Lutu watched the video of the mailbox theft, he was pretty sure the grainy thief wasn’t Puana because he didn’t have the same weightlifter’s body he had remembered.

“In my mind, knowing Mr. Puana, it wasn’t him,” said Lutu, who is now president of the State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers.

Also testifying Friday was David Chang, former commander of the department’s Criminal Intelligence Unit, who said that in 2018, after he was subpoenaed by the FBI, he found documents linked to the Puana incident in a file that was slated to be destroyed.

The trial is the first of two trials stemming from a series of events that go back more than a decade, according to court documents. The Kealohas allegedly drafted three former and current police officers to participate in the scheme to tag Puana for stealing the mailbox along with documents it allegedly contained.

The theft of the box constituted a federal crime and gave the FBI a way in to conduct its investigation, starting in 2015.

The second trial, concerning bank fraud charges, involves only the Kealohas and is set for October. In addition, Katherine Kealoha and her brother, Rudolph Puana, are scheduled to return to court in January for a drug conspiracy indictment.