Star Tribune
Anton Lazzaro, former GOP activist, sentenced to 21 years for sex trafficking
Businessman and former Republican activist Anton Lazzaro was sentenced Wednesday to 21 years in prison on sex trafficking charges involving five 15- to 16-year old girls he paid to have sex with him.
Lazzaro, 32, was labeled a sexual predator in a brief submitted by prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minneapolis, who had asked U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz to sentence Lazzaro to 30 years in prison. His attorney had asked for a 10-year sentence, the mandatory minimum.
Lazzaro was convicted after a jury trial in March of both conspiracy and five separate counts of recruiting and paying the underage girls for sex. He claimed during the trial and in a post-trial brief submitted by his attorneys that the cash outlays he made were gifts, not payments, and that the girls were eager to have sex.
During the trial, prosecutors introduced evidence that Lazzaro plied the girls with liquor before having sex with them, and in one instance had sex with a girl who had passed out from drinking too much alcohol.
Federal prosecutors presented evidence at trial that Lazzaro paid Gisela Castro Medina, then an 18-year-old University of St. Thomas student, to recruit other teen victims. Castro Medina, now 21, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction charges and testified against Lazzaro at his trial. She will be sentenced Sept. 5.
Lazzaro’s 2021 arrest proved an embarrassment for the Minnesota Republican Party, for which he had become a major donor. Jennifer Carnahan, who had close ties to Lazzaro but denied any knowledge of his criminal activities, stepped down as state GOP chair a week after his arrest.
In their brief, prosecutors noted that Lazzaro praised and emulated Jeffrey Epstein, the New York financier and convicted sex offender who was charged with trafficking minors before he died by suicide in 2019.
This is a developing story. Check back with startribune.com for further details.
A 63-year-old Eveleth man died from injuries suffered in a house fire in the northern Minnesota city Friday morning.
Dale Wallander of rural Eveleth was found with burns covering most of his body at the end of the driveway to his house in the 7100 block of Antoinette Road in Eveleth at about 11:26 a.m. Friday, according to a press release from the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office.
Law enforcement arrived to find his house engulfed in flames. Wallander was transported to a metro area hospital by Life Link air medical service, but died of his injuries, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
The cause of the fire is under investigation by the Sheriff’s Office and the State Fire Marshal.
Brooklyn Park police arrested two people Saturday in connection with an early-morning shooting that left one man dead.
Police responded to a shooting in the 7900 block of Lee Avenue North at about 4:36 a.m. Saturday, and found a man with a gunshot wound, according to a Brooklyn Park Police Department press release. The man was pronounced dead at the scene and hasn’t yet been identified.
Later Saturday, Brooklyn Park detectives arrested two suspects who are being held at the Hennepin County Jail, according to police.
“We passed three of them and we did it [in a] bipartisan [way],” said Walz, who represented southern Minnesota in Congress for a dozen years before running for governor.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz holds Matt Kucharski’s dog, Libby, a 6-year-old German Shorthaired Pointer, to give her a drink during the annual Minnesota Governor’s Pheasant Hunting Opener. (Anthony Souffle)
Following the event, Walz’s motorcade wound its way north and east across farm country, past combines in fields harvesting corn, to downtown Sleepy Eye, where he slipped into a crowded brewery. In many ways, the trip resembled any year for a pheasant opener, save this time the motorcade, a dozen vehicles long, stretched out the back side of a downtown Sleepy Eye alleyway.
One patron, who declined to give her name but said she grew up in Madelia and lived in New Ulm, was purchasing a six-pack of beers when she told the bartender, “Is that Walz? I don’t got time for that guy.”
Later, when Walz briefly emerged from a side room, a chorus of cheers reached him from the balcony, before he hustled out to the motorcade.
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