Fresno area school founder charged for using public funds to pay lavish expenses
The U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday that it is charging Nicolas Retana, 67, with one count of embezzling money from a program that receives federal funding. His indictment was unsealed and Retana was arraigned Monday, according to a news release.
Retana co-founded Ezequiel Tafoya Alvarado Academy in Madera in 2005 and served as its executive director until he was fired in 2020 following allegations he physically abused students. The school, which serves students in grades K-8, is now called Liberty Charter School.
Two years ago, an audit of the school concluded $1.06 million in public funds were potentially misused between 2016 and 2020, and that Retana was tied to the alleged fraud. The FBI launched an investigation of Retana after the audit.
Now, the federal government says Retana 'concealed the misused funds by mislabeling the expenses in school accounting records and misrepresenting the expenses when asked.'
'For example, Retana purchased new Ford F-150 Raptor pickup trucks for his two sons using school funds,' the federal news release says. 'He also had a personal relationship with a self-proclaimed sex worker turned relationship coach whom he paid $12,000 using school funds.'
The 2023 audit of the school also found nearly $38,000 went to Retana's daughter's higher education expenses.
If Retana is convicted of embezzlement, he faces 'a maximum statutory penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine,' the federal news release says.
John McClure, executive director of Liberty Charter School, said in a Wednesday statement to The Bee that it was the school that requested an investigation by law enforcement at the outset of the case.
'We want to thank both the FBI and Department of Justice for their hard work on this case,' McClure said in an email. 'The charter school and its board will continue to cooperate with law enforcement as this case moves forward.'
The Bee's attempts to reach Retana on Tuesday were unsuccessful.
But in a 2023 phone interview with The Bee, Retana said the audit report's findings were simply 'not true.' He added that the motivation behind the report was racism against him because he is a Chicano who has spoken out about the lack of effort schools put into Latino students.
'There's no ifs, ands or buts about it,' Retana told The Bee in 2023. 'I've always been a target.'
2023 audit: Wild spending at Madera school
In 2023, when Liberty Charter School was still called Ezequiel Tafoya Alvarado Academy, McClure said he had filed a police report related to some of the audit's findings three years prior.
'I can assure you that these issues all stopped when I took over as Executive Director and will never happen again,' McClure said at the time.
The Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team, the state's school finance watchdog that provides financial guidance to schools, initiated the audit in 2021.
The auditors found charter funds were used to make payments totaling $37,563 to colleges between 2016 and 2018. They also found Retana's daughter held several communications positions at the school before being hired as a teacher in 2016.
'Interviews with charter staff indicated that these charges were for (Retana's) daughter's college education,' the audit report said.
The report also said Retana's two sons were hired as custodians and later became the school's night security officers. Both received gas cards from the charter and both were issued Ford F-150 Raptors. The audit found that both of them crashed their trucks – each of which cost about $40,000 – and that one of them used his in a hit-and-run.
An invoice found in the report also showed the school's board approved a $12,000 payment to an 'Associate #2' for six '8th Grade Life Coaching Workshops' in 2019. The report stated that interviews with staff revealed Retana may have been romantically involved with the life coach, though he denied that in his 2023 interview with The Bee.
The report found that the life coach did not possess any type of teaching or counseling credential in California. But Retana said a credentialed counselor is not what he was going for.
'I just wanted someone who was going to be able to do to deal with the eighth-graders, that they would like and that they could work with,' he told The Bee in 2023.
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