Movie producer racked up $1M in tax debt, ‘forcibly’ retook his seized home, feds say
A former movie producer accused of skipping out on taxes and then breaking into and occupying a Utah home that was seized to pay his debt was sentenced to six years in prison, federal prosecutors said.
Paul Kenneth Cromar also was sentenced to pay restitution and serve three years of supervised release once he’s out of prison, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a Dec. 26 news release.
It appears Cromar acted as his own attorney. McClatchy News reached out to his stand-by attorney Dec. 30 and was awaiting a response.
Cromar, owner of Blue Moon Productions LLC, racked up tax debt of more than $1 million after he failed to pay taxes between 1999 and 2005. He was audited in 2005 and assessed more than $703,000, but he made no payments for more than a decade, prosecutors said.
In 2019, when his tax debt topped $1 million, a judge ordered the sale of his Cedar Hills via auction, according to prosecutors.
Cromar tried to keep the sale from happening, including by filing false documents and trying to intimidate prospective buyers, prosecutors said.
He’s accused of breaking in before the sale closed and illegally occupying the home for five months, “fortifying it with firearms, sandbags and wooden boards tactically placed throughout the house,” according to prosecutors.
In a sentencing memo, prosecutors described Cromar as “an unrepentant, fanatical tax defier” who “disrupted an otherwise peaceful, close-knit community, putting it on the edge of violence for many months.”
He called armed anti-government militia members to the home, and “but for the well-timed intervention of state law enforcement, (he) may have succeeded in turning his former neighborhood into a shooting gallery and scene of tragedy,” according to prosecutors.
After this standoff, Cromar and his wife were arrested peacefully in September 2020, Desert News reported at the time.
In June 2024, a jury found him guilty of one count of attempting to evade and defeat the assessment or payment of tax and one count of forcible or attempted rescue of seized property, according to the sentencing memo.
On Linkedin, Cromar wrote that he did “diverse and exciting” production work ranging “from animated feature films to interactive kiosks, to documentaries films and facing down armed Kuwaiti guards.”
He listed the animated films “All Dogs Go To Heaven” and “The Princess and the Pea” as the among the films he worked on in various capacities.
Cedar Hills is about a 30-mile drive northwest to Salt Lake City.
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