Former Oakland Youth Nonprofit Head Pleads Guilty to Stealing More Than $500,000

Updated 4 p.m. Wednesday

The former executive director of an East Oakland youth boxing program pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to one count of mail fraud and one count of tax evasion in connection with embezzling at least $549,000 from the organization, a figure significantly higher than had been previously reported.

The theft included a substantial donation presented by Steph and Ayesha Curry.

Shortly after taking the helm at the East Oakland Boxing Association in late 2016, Solomon Howard — whose legal name is Howard Solomon — became an authorized signatory on the organization’s Wells Fargo bank accounts and began transferring funds and donations into personal and business accounts he controlled at other banks, according to court documents and the plea agreement.

Howard, 38, used the embezzled funds and donations to pay for expenses that had no connection to his job — including a vacation rental, a new car and more than $100,000 of Amazon purchases — and falsely reported them as “program supplies” and other generic expenses, according to federal charges (PDF) filed in February.

On Wednesday, Howard acknowledged that he transferred the money without informing EOBA’s board or anyone else affiliated with the organization. He also admitted to tax evasion by failing to report the embezzled funds as income on his tax filings from 2017 through 2021, and by misstating expenses associated with two purported businesses he claimed were operating at a loss — causing an estimated $287,000 in tax losses to the IRS, according to court filings.

Howard is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 14 by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine or twice the gross gain from the fraud, and must pay at least $549,132 in restitution to the EOBA.

Howard’s attorney, Randy Sue Pollock, declined to comment.

Howard also admitted to pocketing a $50,000 check that the Currys presented to him in 2019 as part of an episode of Ellen DeGeneres’ show, “Ellen’s Greatest Night of Giveaways.”

In the episode, Howard described the East Oakland Boxing Association as an after-school program “focused on keeping young folks off the streets and engaged in more holistic wellness activity.” He said it serves kids in “essentially kind of the forgotten part of Oakland, where a lot of poverty, crime, violence and negative activities happen.”

At the end of the episode, the Currys delivered a box-truck full of supplies and revealed the surprise check, donated by the show.

“Hopefully it goes a long way, man,” Steph Curry told Howard as the two men hugged.

“This was a devastating moment for our community but one that EOBA had been preparing for,” the organization said in a statement shortly after the charges were announced.

Founded in 1987, EOBA offers boxing lessons to children and young adults, and provides a range of other youth development programming, including gardening, cooking and academic support. Most participants come from lower-income backgrounds.

“The kids that come to this program, they already don’t have much,” said Dawna Williams, EOBA’s interim executive director. That makes it that much harder to understand how “somebody [could] take it from them, what somebody entrusted us with.”

Williams said she was on the organization’s board of directors in 2021 when she began to notice numerous accounting irregularities. When she questioned Howard about it, he was suspiciously evasive, she said.

“We were met with lots of excuses and things like that,” she said. “And that was just like, ‘Oh no, something’s not right here. Something is really off.’”

As the board continued its probe, Howard abruptly laid off his entire staff of about nine people and then resigned, Williams said.

“He terminated everyone to kind of cover his tracks, I think,” she said. “We hired an independent accounting expert to come in and review our books, because he had also terminated the bookkeeper.”

“It was like a DOGE moment here,” she added, referring to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Williams said the board contacted the IRS in 2021, which referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“I knew that we could not allow somebody to do this to the kids and do this to the people who trusted us with this funding,” she said. “We knew that we had to find justice here. However long it took, whatever it took, we had to find justice.”

Since leaving EOBA, Howard has become a “transformational life coach,” according to his LinkedIn profile.

“He needs to have his day in court. And hopefully he makes some level of restitution,” Williams said. “I don’t think he’s remorseful at all.”

She said EOBA has since taken steps to ensure this will never happen again, including using an external bookkeeper and requiring multiple signatures on all checks.

“The small mom-and-pop nonprofits, they do need to have someone who is professionally there to manage their books and have some level of oversight,” she said. “I’m happy for us to have that oversight. That just keeps us on our Ps and Qs, [so] this will never happen again for us.”