Stan Lee Memorabilia
RIVERSIDE – A 59-year-old Corona man who filed income tax returns without declaring hundreds of thousands of dollars that he had pocketed from selling Stan Lee-signed memorabilia was sentenced Thursday to a year in federal prison.
Mac Martin Anderson pleaded guilty in March to two counts of willfully subscribing to a false tax return under a plea agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
During a hearing at U.S. District Court in downtown Riverside Thursday, Judge Kenly Kiya Kato sentenced Anderson to the 12-month term and ordered him to pay $482,833 in restitution to the government.
Prosecutors said the defendant netted about $1.2 million from his undeclared vending operation.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, from 2015 to 2018, Anderson had a personal relationship with the late Marvel Comics publisher and sold Marvel-related items bearing Lee’s autograph to various dealers, brokers and fans at comic conventions.
In exchange for selling these items, Anderson received payments from buyers, typically in the form of cash or checks. These payments were considered regular income by the IRS, requiring declarations of the earnings on Anderson’s tax returns for each year that he received money, according to the government.
Prosecutors said that from the $1.2 million in profits stemming from the memorabilia sales, Anderson owed the IRS $482,833 — the amount the court directed him to pay back.
Lee — the man behind fictional superheroes Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Black Panther — died Nov. 12, 2018, at 95.
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