The owner of a downtown Oakland residential hotel was sentenced Wednesday to more than two years in federal prison for conspiring to have someone burn down his building for insurance purposes.
Richard Earl Singer, 45, of Tiburon pleaded guilty June 22 to a felony count of solicitation to commit arson for trying to get Hotel Menlo burned down. At a hearing in Oakland, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken sentenced Singer to 27 months behind bars and fined him $60,000.
Singer told an informant Dec. 28 that he wanted the seven-story hotel "completely totaled to maximize the insurance payout," Special Agent Cynthia Cunningham of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives wrote in a court affidavit.
Singer agreed to pay the informant $65,000 to have the hotel at 344 13th St. burned down by "someone in New York who was a professional," Cunningham wrote.
The Hotel Menlo and another Oakland hotel owned by Singer, the Ridge Hotel at 634 15th St., are both the subject of civil litigation "due to claims of uninhabitability," the affidavit said.
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