A federal grand jury has hit Jimmy Fabian, the president, owner, and operator of Celebes Staffing Services Inc., with a superseding indictment charging him with 18 federal counts tied to an alleged $7 million employment tax scheme that ran through a Philadelphia-area labor-leasing company supplying temporary workers to factories, including a major food plant in Charleroi, Pennsylvania.
The indictment, returned Thursday, charges Fabian with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, 13 counts of willfully failing to collect, account for, and pay over employment taxes, and four counts of aiding and assisting in preparing false corporate tax returns, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The case, first detailed by DailyVoice.com, alleges that Fabian and two co-conspirators underreported the number of Celebes employees and the wages paid to them from roughly September 2020 through at least June 2024. Prosecutors say Celebes workers included people who were not authorized to work in the United States.
The new indictment supersedes one filed in August 2025 that had already charged Fabian and two alleged co-conspirators, per the same account. Federal prosecutors say Celebes provided temporary workers to businesses for a fee, and that Fabian caused false corporate income tax returns to be filed for the company, which underreported its gross receipts. Court filings identify the client businesses only as Companies A, B, and C, the outlet notes.
How Fabian Allegedly Hid His Ownership
Prosecutors allege Fabian concealed his full, 100 percent ownership of Celebes by listing a co-conspirator as a 50 percent owner instead. Staffing agencies in the scheme also deducted money from workers' wages to cover transportation and operating costs, the report states. The Justice Department says the Investigation is being carried out jointly by IRS Criminal Investigation and Homeland Security Investigations, with the case prosecuted by Assistant Deputy Chief Thomas F. Koelbl and Trial Attorney Joseph D. G. of the department's Tax Division.
Fabian faces up to five years in prison on the conspiracy charge and on each of the 13 employment-tax counts, along with up to three years in prison on each of the four false-tax-return counts, according to the DOJ. Under Title 26 of the U.S. Code, that statutory framework — up to five years per willful failure-to-pay count and up to three years per false-return count — is what turns a multi-quarter payroll scheme into a stack of potential decades behind bars.
A Worker's Account From Inside Fourth Street Foods
One worker named Rene told City Journal he began working at Fourth Street Foods through Celebes after receiving his work authorization card, and that the agency never gave him documentation needed to prove his employment or income even though he received paychecks from Celebes. Rene eventually became a supervisor at the plant, but he described the staffing-agency business as suspicious in that interview. Fourth Street Foods, which has roughly 1,000 employees, relied heavily on temporary and immigrant labor, and Celebes was identified as one of three staffing agencies described as key conduits for labor in Charleroi, per City Journal.
CEO Chris Scott of the Charleroi-based food manufacturer, legally known as Fourth Street Barbeque, said in an October 2024 interview that immigrant labor made up an estimated 70 percent of the plant's roughly 1,000-person workforce, which leaned on third-party temporary staffing agencies for assembly line jobs, according to City Journal. That same reporting found entry-level food processing workers in Washington County earned an average of $16.42 an hour in 2023, while Charleroi staffing agencies typically started workers around $12 an hour while billing client factories over $16 an hour to cover overhead and transportation.
A Regional Pattern of Federal Crackdowns
Fabian's case is not the first of its kind in the Mon Valley. In July 2025, Andy Ha, the 28-year-old owner of Charleroi staffing agency Prosperity Services Inc., was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $3.63 million in restitution for harboring unauthorized workers and failing to pay employment taxes in the same region, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Separate federal civil forfeiture proceedings tied to Charleroi staffing investigations saw agents seize nearly $1 million in cash from a local staffing operation employee's vehicle following allegations of off-the-books cash payments to workers, as reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
In the wake of Ha's sentencing, Charleroi Borough council members announced in August 2025 that they planned to seek financial relief from the Justice Department out of Ha's $3.6 million restitution judgment to help reimburse the municipality for emergency and public-service resources spent during the surge in unregulated staffing agency activity, according to the Mon Valley Independent. IRS Criminal Investigation maintains an overall conviction rate exceeding 90 percent in criminal tax cases prosecuted in federal court, underscoring the steep odds facing defendants once a case like Fabian's reaches a grand jury.
For workers navigating this system legally, the costs of compliance have also climbed. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services raised the filing fee for Form I-765 Employment Authorization Documents from $410 to $470 for online filings, and $520 for paper filings, effective April 2024 — a regulatory hurdle for the same immigrant workforce that agencies like Celebes were built to supply.
