Summary

On May 5, 2015, Anthony Vincent Zito of Saugus, California, was sentenced in U.S. District Court, Sacramento, California, to 24 months of probation and ordered to pay a $2,500 fine. 

Between October 2006 and February 2008, Zito, a WECO Aerospace Systems, Inc. (WECO), Burbank Repair Station Manager, conspired with others to conceal facts from customers and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about WECO's fraudulent repairs.

WECO was an FAA-certified repair business with facilities in Lincoln and Burbank, California. According to court documents, WECO was permitted by the FAA to repair certain types of aircraft parts, including starter generators and converters for various types of aircraft, including small helicopters used by tour companies and law enforcement agencies. WECO employees regularly failed to follow FAA regulations in repairing and overhauling the aircraft parts. In many cases, WECO did not have equipment capable of performing FAA required tests on the parts. However, at both locations WECO employees performed repairs and returned parts to customers, falsely certifying that the parts had passed tests and been repaired in accordance to FAA standards.

We conducted this investigation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security-Office of Inspector General, with assistance from the FAA.