Laurel IT contractor gets prison for stealing 4,800 DOJ phones
A Laurel IT contractor stole more than 4,800 DOJ phones and left taxpayers with a loss topping $1.3 million. He was ordered to repay $1,319,172.85.
Javan King, a 42-year-old Laurel IT contractor, was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison for a phone-theft scheme that pushed more than 4,800 government cellphones out of the U.S. Department of Justice and left taxpayers with a loss of more than $1.3 million.
U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb imposed the sentence after King pleaded guilty Feb. 10 to one count of mail fraud. Cobb also ordered two years of supervised release and restitution of $1,319,172.85, while prosecutors had asked for a 24-month term. According to the Justice Department, King worked for the DOJ Civil Rights Division from about 2021 through 2025 and used his access as an information technology contractor to request thousands of mobile devices the department did not need. The phones were shipped to him at DOJ, then sent to phone-reselling businesses that paid him more than $1.3 million.
The financial damage went beyond the devices themselves. Prosecutors said DOJ also paid AT&T for unnecessary phone lines and phones, which helped drive the actual loss to more than $1.3 million. They said King spent the proceeds on gambling at MGM casinos and on FanDuel, private school tuition, vacations and a down payment on a $92,000 Range Rover SUV.
The scheme unraveled in late August 2025, when a private citizen in Kentucky contacted DOJ after learning that an iPhone she had bought online belonged to the department. The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General investigated the case, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Kondi Kleinman prosecuted it. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro called King’s conduct a "brazen betrayal of the public trust" that drained taxpayers of more than a million dollars.
Beyond the prison term, the case exposes a basic controls failure inside a major federal agency. King did not need to break into a warehouse or hack a database to move hundreds of devices and more than $1 million in value. He was able to operate through normal procurement and shipping channels, which is exactly where stronger inventory checks, carrier bill reviews and approval controls are supposed to catch an insider before government property turns into private cash.
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