By Gina Tabonares
Variety News Staff

FORMER Senator William “Willy” Bruce Flores surrendered in Hawaii on Saturday to begin his eight-month incarceration in connection with his government corruption conviction in 2005.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey J. Strand confirmed yesterday Flores’s surrender.
Strand told Variety that the former Democrat senator will serve his time in a federal detention center in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Strand said he was informed by the U.S. Marshals Office in Hawaii about the surrender.
Flores surrendered after the U.S. District Court of Guam denied his petition to post bail while he is appealing his sentence.
Flores was sentenced on Oct. 27, 2005 after pleading guilty to money laundering charges filed against him and former chief of staff Gil Shinohara.
Aside from the eight months imprisonment, Flores was also ordered by visiting Judge William Alsup to serve 200 hours of community service, and pay Bank of Guam $150,000 in restitution. He was also placed under three years of supervised release.
Flores appealed his conviction and asked to shorten his jail time but was denied by the District Court.
He also filed an appeal before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals but his sentencing was affirmed by the appellate court.
Prior to his latest motion to stay execution, Flores made several attempts to post bail pending the resolution of his appeal but was repeatedly turned down by the court.
Before Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood gave the former lawmaker a deadline to surrender, she allowed a 30-day stay of execution of his sentence after his mother died last month.
Arguing that the sentencing judge was improperly biased against his client, Flores’s lawyer, David J. Highsmith, filed a motion to vacate, set aside or correct sentence in the District Court.
Judge Tydingco-Gatewood ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office to file any opposition to Flores’s petition on or before April 27, 2007 and schedule a May 2, 2007 deadline for Flores to reply to the government’s opposition.
The court stated that if it finds that a hearing is necessary on Flores’s motion, it will schedule a court hearing at a later date.
Flores, as part of his plea agreement, cooperated with federal authorities and testified against Shinohara and Takahisa Goto, who were sentenced in federal court for concocting a scheme to defraud the Bank of Guam of some $300,000.
The bank originally loaned the conspirators $2 million to purchase Pedro’s Plaza and committed to lend them an additional $1 million to renovate and repair the typhoon-damaged, abandoned multi-story office building in Hagatna.
Instead of making the renovations, they diverted $300,000 for their personal use.
Shinohara was sentenced to a 32-month incarceration with a $10,000 fine, and had to pay $150,000 in restitution, while Goto was ordered to be locked up in his house for three months with electronic monitoring and two years of probation.