(Sioux City)– An Arnolds Park man who defrauded a Florida innkeeper while on supervised release on bank fraud and wire charges was sentenced Tuesday to three years in federal prison. 63-year-old Ronald Goldberg was sentenced following a three-day hearing in federal court in Sioux City.
Evidence presented at the hearings showed in January, 2019, Goldberg checked into an ocean-front hotel in Palm Beach, Florida with a credit card from a luxury automobile dealership in Dallas, Texas. When the automobile dealership called the hotel to question a charge on its credit card bill, the hotel confronted Goldberg. He then left the hotel in the middle of the night without paying his hotel bill in full.
At the time of the incident, Goldberg was on supervised release for a 2016 conviction of bank fraud and one count of wire fraud in South Dakota. Goldberg has a lengthy criminal history including prior federal convictions for wire fraud and interstate transportation of money obtained by fraud in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, interstate transportation of stolen securities, possession of stolen securities, bank fraud, attempted escape in the Southern District of Florida, forging a signature of a U.S. Magistrate Judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and wire fraud in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. After the Iowa federal court issued a warrant for Goldberg’s arrest in 2021 to answer to the 2019 incident, Goldberg did not surrender himself and was eventually arrested in a hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
