$10,000 hotel stays, golf abroad: CapRadio docs reveal ex-GM’s alleged credit card misuse
Just before the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered the world, Capital Public Radio’s then-CFO Jun Reina embarked in January 2020 on a tropical vacation with his wife at the Westin Denarau Island Resort & Spa in Fiji.
Blue waters rippled against sandy shores dotted with swaying palm trees. Verdant lilies floated in a serene pond. But these weren’t unusual sights: the couple traveled often and widely. They enjoyed fine dining around the world.Reina golfed frequently — when not working, you could find him teeing on the green, his bio on X reads.
It appears now that much of that international travel, many of those golf excursions, more than a half-dozen meals at Sacramento’s two Michelin-starred restaurants and much more all came on the dime of CapRadio and, by extension, its donors.
Nine months before the Fiji trip, a credit card linked to Reina was used to purchase nearly $1,500 in plane tickets through Fiji Airways, plus another $1,600 on Travelocity.com. During a 10-day stretch surrounding an Instagram post he made of his South Pacific vacation Jan. 18 of that year, four airline expenses marked “FJ Passenger Ticket” at $850 apiece showed up on the transaction list — as did a $871.52 charge from Westin Denarau Island resort.
These were just several of the hundreds of transactions included in a new version of the forensic examination into CapRadio’s finances first shared in August by Sacramento State, which owns CapRadio’s broadcast license.
Following a request in December from the newspaper’s lawyers, the university this month provided The Sacramento Bee with 130 pages of documents redacted from the original edition of the report.
Sacramento State chose to withhold from public view a large portion of the report prepared by auditors at Roseville-based accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen. The university has said law enforcement asked them to withhold publishing the attachments due to an ongoing investigation probing potential financial improprieties at CapRadio. A Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said last week that this investigation remains ongoing.
The new documents include an itemized list of transactions made between December 2017 and May 2022 by an American Express credit card controlled by Reina. Reina was CapRadio’s chief financial officer from 2017 until his promotion in July 2020 to general manager, a role he held until he resigned from the station in June 2023. Reina made a salary of $253,080 in the fiscal year ending June 2022, CapRadio tax filings show.
In 2021, Reina’s card was used to pay for $10,250 at the now-closed Westin Hotel in St. Maarten in the Caribbean. This vacation was on top of trips to Hawaii and Vermont that same year.
Some travel and entertainment expenses, not mentioned in the audit, were approved by the station: A CapRadio tax filing covering July 2022 through June 2023, after the American Express transactions flagged by auditors took place, said the nonprofit broadcaster approved “travel, a travel agent, and a golf membership for the general manager.” No such item appeared in CapRadio tax documents from 2015 through 2021.
Reina did not respond to requests for comment.
Reina’s apparent personal spending of CapRadio funds could be tracked in part to social media posts on the personal pages for Reina and his wife Mayet Reina. The latter in October 2019 posted to Facebook a photo of the menu to a restaurant called Kjolle in Lima, Peru. The same day as the Facebook post, Jun Reina’s CapRadio card spent $182.69 at Kjolle and $347.95 for lodging at a South American hotel chain with a location in Lima, the transactions show.
The Reinas also posted about their April 2021 trip to Dubai. The American Express card was used April 4, 2021, for a nearly $1,700 meal at a Dubai steakhouse and a $900 payment to Dubai-based Emirates Airline.
What was Reina’s card used for?
The disclosure of the documents for the first time shed light on exactly what expenses Reina has been linked to and where funds apparently went.
American Express transactions attributed to Reina’s card, for which auditors said they could not find either supporting documentation or a CapRadio-related business purpose, included the following:
▪ More than $166,000 on “business services,” nearly all of it coming in the form of “station programming” purchases that ranged from $13,000 to nearly $29,000. Eleven such transactions are noted between December 2017 and December 2018.
▪ More than $145,000 in travel, lodging and vehicle rental costs, including a three-night, $11,258 stay at downtown Sacramento’s Kimpton Sawyer Hotel; a $10,250 stay at a Westin resort on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten; and a $5,122 flight transaction that appears to have been booked on Japan’s All Nippon Airways. The total does not include flights that may have been booked using credit card miles.
▪ More than $75,000 on home goods and services, including purchases of $26,090 and $13,106 on gardening supplies, both made in December 2017.
▪ More than $28,000 on phone and telecommunication costs, almost all of it in the form of AT&T bills.
▪ More than $27,000 at restaurants, including a $2,975 charge at Sacramento’s Echo and Rig steakhouse that coincided with the first night of the Kimpton Sawyer booking. Also listed are five meals totaling $4,096 at The Kitchen and four totaling $2,515 at Localis — Sacramento’s two Michelin-starred restaurants.
▪ More than $17,000 in golf club membership fees at at least six different clubs from late 2020 through spring 2022, including a $4,285 charge at Oregon’s Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in September 2021.
▪ About $17,000 in charity and donations, much of it to the Sacramento SPCA.
▪ About $15,000 toward automotive goods and services, excluding car rentals, including an April 2021 payment of exactly $5,000 to Folsom Lake Hyundai.
▪ About $4,400 for health and fitness, including a $1,672 purchase of sporting goods on Black Friday in 2019 and a $600 payment to Echelon Fitness in the days just before New Year’s Eve heading into 2022.
▪ More than $2,800 for medical expenses, in the form of two payments to a Davis dental practice.
Auditors with CliftonLarsonAllen said they could find no documentation or receipts to support $460,831.93 on the American Express card controlled by a CapRadio executive, “Subject #1.” More than $250,000 in expenses linked to Subject #1 were determined by auditors to have no business-related purpose, at least pertaining to CapRadio.
Subject #1 was first identified as Reina by CapRadio journalists. Sacramento Bee journalists independently confirmed Reina’s identity around the same time.
The volume and scope of the purchases are vast. Included in the documents as a separate attachment is a copy of CapRadio’s bylaws, showing a rule that employees must receive written authorization for any credit card purchase exceeding $500.
The Bee’s review of the American Express transactions showed just over 200 transactions above that amount.
This story was originally published January 9, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
