She zeroed in on ex-CapRadio GM’s alleged embezzlement. ‘He knew how to hide it’
The square arch door opened to gleaming black marble floors reflecting golden lanterns and plush seats. The cavernous lobby at Raffles Dubai, a lavish hotel, featured imported stone columns from Egypt, hand-carved with hieroglyphics by a specialist. Wilting roses encased in glass cylinders greeted guests.
Jun Reina, then Capital Public Radio’s general manager, and his wife stayed at the resort during an April 2021 trip, according to social media posts. “Fabulous experience! Living up to its 6 star rating!” wrote Reina’s wife, Mayet, in a Facebook post that was later taken down.
The vacation was among those cited Friday by Sacramento County sheriff’s Detective Monica Bustamante in a review of personal expenses allegedly charged by Reina, 60, to the NPR affiliate licensed to Sacramento State. Reina used his corporate credit card to buy his wife’s $900 Emirates Airlines flight to the United Arab Emirates. They also charged a $1,678.74 meal, according to credit card statements, at Nusr-Et Steakhouse, famous for serving steaks wrapped in gold foil.
“It’s shocking to the conscience,” Bustamante said Friday in an interview at the Sheriff’s Office headquarters in Old Foothill Farms recounting her work that brought criminal charges against Reina.
Reina’s arrest Thursday answered some of the questions that had swirled around his conduct at CapRadio for more than two years. He is expected Monday to enter a plea to embezzlement, fraud and grand theft charges stemming from the alleged misappropriation of more than $1.3 million between 2016 and 2022. Reina is scheduled to appear in a basement courtroom at the Sacramento County Main Jail, where he posted bail four days earlier.
Bustamante, the lead detective on the case, described Friday an investigation that began in January 2024. She said a portrait emerged of an executive who exploited the station’s lack of internal controls and weak oversight to carry out what she described as a prolonged scheme of deceit that mirrored the life of a well-to-do jet-setter.
“(There’s) definitely a continuance of a pattern,” she said. “It’s the repetition.”
The broadcaster struggled financially under Reina’s tenure, accumulating millions of dollars in debt as part of a failed relocation project to downtown Sacramento. Reina and his predecessor pursued plans to lease and renovate two buildings but never raised enough money to move from the station’s Folsom Boulevard offices near the edge of the university’s campus.
A lone detective and a yearslong paper trail
For two years, Bustamante personally reviewed thousands of credit card statements, bank records and other documents while reconstructing what she described as a systematic manipulation of CapRadio’s finances.
She analyzed spreadsheets and tracked spending patterns, she said. The paperwork filled 16 three-inch binders. Her desk was covered in sticky notes marking different threads of the investigation. She interviewed about three dozen people, including numerous former CapRadio board members.
“And that’s not even all of it,” Bustamante said. “I stopped printing things after a while.”
Following the money also required working closely with witnesses who had first-hand knowledge of CapRadio’s inner workings and Reina’s conduct. The property crimes investigator spent hours with a witness reviewing expenses line by line to determine whether each served a legitimate business purpose.
The receipts, expense reports and individual transactions revealed a tangled record of how a trusted leader is now accused of duping a nonprofit and a university for years.
“(He was a) phenomenally smart person on how he knew how to hide it,” Bustamante said. “He made a lot of effort at that part.”
Reina’s attorney in a separate civil case wrote in a court filing that his client’s potential errors were unintentional and made in good faith. Reina joined the station in 2007 as chief financial officer and was promoted to lead the station in 2020. He resigned in June 2023 after an extended medical leave. CapRadio’s financial wounds came to light eight weeks later.
But Bustamante said a CFO would reasonably be expected to understand the organization’s internal finances. She said Reina linked a company-issued credit card to his Apple Pay account and should have recognized the difference between charges billed to his personal American Express account and those billed to the company.
The former public media executive failed to file expense reports for international travel and indulged in fine dining that former CapRadio board members described as unnecessary, Bustamante said.
How the case finally caught up with him
Reina went to great lengths to hide his conduct — actions contained in piles of ledgers and files Bustamante pored over, she said.
When charging what appeared to be personal transactions to CapRadio, Reina altered internal records so that the charges appeared to be legitimate to the business, Bustamante said.
Reina also forged documents tied to a local broadcast tower contractor, Magnum Towers, prosecutors alleged in the criminal complaint. The alleged fraud surfaced when CapRadio’s external auditors requested supporting documentation for a large charge, Bustamante said.
The receipt for work on the tower was “manipulated,” she added.
The forensic complexity of Bustamante’s often solitary detective work contributed to a 21-month delay in what many believed would be a prosecution. Bustamante submitted the case for charging consideration in August, and the District Attorney’s Office issued an arrest warrant in November. The roughly three-month wait was the longest Bustamante said she had ever experienced to learn whether a case would move forward.
Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho framed the charges Thursday as a breach of public trust, emphasizing the ripple effects on CapRadio’s roughly 35,000 individual members and 250 business supporters. The case, Ho said, underscored the seriousness of an alleged abuse of authority at a nonprofit that received nearly $10 million annually in donations after its financial crisis became public.
“When someone entrusted with financial oversight is alleged to exploit that position for personal gain, it undermines public confidence and harms the community the organization serves,” Ho said.
The payoff for the Sheriff’s Office veteran of two decades was bittersweet.
Bustamante was there at the downtown jail watching Reina surrender. The 5-foot-4 man with salt-and-pepper hair stood still as a sheriff’s official tightened metal cuffs, according to a video posted by the Sheriff’s Office of the arrest. After months of grinding work, she said she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“So, I did both,” she said.
This story was originally published January 31, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
