A former longtime Labor Department employee admitted Friday to running a bootleg movie operation within the department’s headquarters in Washington.
Ricardo Taylor — a three-decade Labor veteran who was the supervisor of the department’s mailroom — will serve 24 months’ probation with no prison time after pleading guilty to a federal charge of copyright law violation.
According to court documents, Taylor, 57, used a five-bay DVD burner to copy and then sell pirated movies. Court documents say Taylor began his operation as early as 2008, and he ran the pirating operation during work hours, selling his colleagues pirated DVDs for $4 or $5 each.
As part of the operation, Taylor took advantage of his Department of Labor email and contacts in order to help his colleagues place their orders, authorities said.
In 2013 alone, Taylor’s last year in the Labor Department, he made more than $19,000 from his pirating scheme, copying and selling 1,268 copies to his colleagues.
It was not clear when Taylor was charged. A message left with his attorney late Friday afternoon was not immediately returned.
In addition to his job at the Labor Department, Taylor also was a manager of a movie theater over the past decade.
Court documents state that Taylor kept a ledger of his sales, including his customers’ names. The list has not been released to the public.
