A former Los Angeles Police Department officer was convicted Monday of taking $350,000 worth of cryptocurrency from a 17-year-old in a 2024 home invasion robbery.
Witnesses in the two week trial described how Eric Halem and three other men posed as police serving a search warrant to enter a high-rise apartment in Koreatown rented by a teenager who had amassed a small fortune in crypto.
Prosecutors said the 17-year-old — sworn-in to testify under just his first name, Daniel — gave up a hard drive containing Bitcoin after Halem and his alleged accomplices threatened to kill him.
After deliberating for less than a full day, a Los Angeles County Superior Court jury found Halem guilty of kidnapping and robbery. He is scheduled to be sentenced on March 31.
Halem, 38, who appeared in court in an orange jumpsuit, served 13 years in the LAPD. By the time he left the department in 2022, he had developed lucrative side businesses, including renting luxury cars and launching an app that allowed actors to audition remotely. He was also flirting with the idea of developing a reality show about his life, former associates told The Times.
At the time of the robbery, he was still serving as a reserve officer with the department.
In her closing argument last week, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jane Brownstone told jurors that Halem broke the oath he took as a police officer. “Instead of protecting, he preyed on the community,” she said. “Instead of serving, he schemed.”
According to trial testimony and evidence, Halem and his alleged accomplices drove to Koreatown in a green Range Rover and an orange Lamborghini Urus owned by the former officer’s car rental business, DriveLA.
Wearing vests that identified them as police, they took the elevator to the 18th floor and punched in the access code to the teenager’s apartment, which they’d obtained from a conspirator who’d rented the unit to the 17-year-old.
After restraining the teenager’s girlfriend with LAPD-issued handcuffs, the men subdued the 17-year-old, cuffed him and threatened to shoot him if he didn’t give up his hard drive, the two victims testified.
In her closing remarks, Halem’s attorney Megan Maitia blasted the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division and the District Attorney’s office for what she called a “lazy, careless investigation.”
Investigators cherry-picked from terabytes of data a handful of text messages that they showed to jurors, she said.
Brownstone pointed jurors to a series of text messages that Halem sent and received after the robbery.
In one, Halem said he was monitoring police radio traffic. And after detectives arrested two of his alleged accomplices, Halem wrote in another text message that he knew they were “talking.”
“Someone I know fed wise called me,” he wrote in the message, without elaborating.
Maitia said detectives hadn’t corroborated the story of the 17-year-old victim, who admitted on the witness stand obtaining his crypto fortune through fraud, and simply took him at his word when he said he’d been robbed of $350,000 in Bitcoin.
She also scoffed at the prosecution’s suggestion that the robbery crew was well-organized. If Halem had been involved, she questioned, why had he used cars from his own company, which were equipped with GPS trackers.
“This is not a sophisticated case,” she said. “This is a dumb case. These guys are knuckleheads.”
Halem’s lawyers called no witnesses and the former officer didn’t testify in his own defense.
His co-defendants have yet to stand trial and maintain their innocence. One, Gabby Ben, has twice been convicted of fraud and is alleged to have ties to Israeli organized crime. At a bail hearing in November, Ben, 51, shrugged and shook his head when Brownstone said he was affiliated with the “Israeli mafia.”
