In a Grants Pass hotel, John Tobe Larson allegedly told a man he met for the first time that he needed an associate who owed him $75,000 from a marijuana drug debt “to disappear.”
He preferred “that the body is never (expletive) found,” and offered to pay $20,000 for the deed, according to a federal affidavit.
Larson said he’d give the hired killer a burner cellphone to use and directed the man to call him only by his nickname, “Maverick.”
On Wednesday, Larson, 71, was sentenced to three years and five months in federal prison for using a private plane to smuggle marijuana from southern Oregon throughout the United States and carry wads of cash back into the state.
A charge accusing Larson of hiring an undercover federal agent in a murder-for-hire scheme was dropped as part of the plea deal.
But Larson’s drug smuggling conviction stems from his arrest in the plot, detailed in the federal affidavit and sentencing memos.
Larson’s lawyer Per C. Olson said he would have challenged the murder-for-hire charge as entrapment had it not been dropped. He argued that the undercover agent and an informant who introduced the agent to Larson had steered Larson toward the idea.
Federal authorities searched Larson’s home and airplane hangar after his August 2019 arrest and found four kilograms of marijuana distillate. They seized a 1956 Piper PA-23 fixed wing aircraft and about $76,000 in cash.
Larson has been held at the Jackson County Jail since arrest and is expected to be released with credit for good time and time served.
The sentence – jointly recommended by prosecutors — was appropriate, given Larson’s age and poor health, Olson said. Larson is believed to have contracted COVID-19 and pneumonia while in the jail, Olson told U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken.
Court records lay out how, according to federal agents, Larson tried to hire a hit man.
After the initial hotel meeting, Larson and the undercover agent met up again less than two weeks later in a Grants Pass hotel room on June 27, 2019, and Larson turned over $10,000 in cash as a down payment, prosecutors alleged.
Larson gave him the target’s name, address and phone numbers and laid out how he wanted the victim’s body disposed of: at sea, so “lice and crabs” would eat away at the body,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Marco A. Boccato wrote in a sentencing memo.
Once Larson saw a picture of the body in a net, going over the side of a boat, he promised to pay the rest, the memo said.
Larson had told the undercover agent that he met the target when both were serving sentences in federal prison in Sheridan. Larson had been sentenced in 2009 to five years for operating a large marijuana grow in Alaska.
Larson said they had arranged to distribute large amounts of marijuana using his plane upon their release.
But Larson said he had “moved a bunch of loads for him, and he never paid me,’’ Boccato wrote. Larson also told the undercover agent that he was concerned this other person would “rat” on him, according to Boccato.
Larson claimed he started distributing marijuana in 1968 and has sold the drug on multiple continents, though most of his business in 2019 was occurring in Europe, according to the memo.
Larson and the undercover agent met up a third time, on Aug. 21, 2019, again in a Grants Pass hotel room and Larson turned over the amended final payment: $5,000 in cash and about a liter of marijuana distillate.
Distillate is a potent cannabis extract stripped of all material and compounds except for THC and CBD molecules.
The agent told Larson the intended target had been disposed of “off shore.”
The agent showed Larson a video purporting to be the victim being tossed into the ocean.
For good measure, the agent also showed him “prop teeth” that he claimed belonged to the victim.
When Larson left the hotel room, police arrested him.
Larson was prosecuted in federal court in Medford. He was sentenced via video conference before Aiken.
Larson’s son has argued he is the owner of the plane seized, and the court has yet to rule on whether to order the forfeiture of the plane. The judge did order that $75,900 in cash and 4,900 in Euros seized in the case be forfeited to the government.
— Maxine Bernstein
Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212
Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian
