Criminal Law: April 2008 Archives

A suburban wife and mother who has been living in Carmel Valley was in custody Wednesday, thirty-two years after escaping from a Detroit prison. Marie Walsh of Carmel Valley was known as Susan Lefevre in 1975 when she was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison for conspiracy and violation of drug laws. Walsh had escaped with the help of her grandfather after serving only one year in prison.

Deputy U.S. Marshals arrested the 53-year-old mother of three Thursday after the Michigan Department of Corrections Absconder Recovery Unit received an anonymous tip on her whereabouts in late March.

Walsh has lived in Carmel Valley for the past 10 years. Authorities said she was leading a normal life in a San Diego suburb, living in a nice house in an affluent neighborhood.

Walsh was booked into Las Colinas county jail, where she is awaiting extradition to Michigan to serve the rest of her sentence.

Another dangerous affluent suburban mother of three off the streets and in jail where she belongs.

John M. Hanamirian

           A former Internal Revenue Service agent has been sentenced to one year in prison, supervised release for one year and a $10,000.00 fine for carrying out a scheme to obstruct the IRS by fraudulently using net operating losses (typically generated from the operation of a business) to offset his personal income tax liability and for attempting to sell those same losses to other individuals or, what I often call, trafficking in losses. The defendant, Mr. Harry Wilner of New Jersey, was sentenced in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Lower Manhattan).

Apparently, Wilner was a "team leader or coordinator" in the Large and Mid-Size Business Division of the New York branch of the IRS and he worked and supervised the audits of large financial institutions. Wilner's scheme went like this: Wilner served as a corporate officer of NIA Advertising, Inc a company that he used to generate a loan of $849,000.00 to another company, Royal Magazine, Inc. where Wilner also held a position. The "loan" it seems never existed, but the effect of recording the loan, and assumedly, repayment of the loan, on the books of those two companies generated losses and of those losses, Wilner claimed some for himself and like all good criminals, got even greedier, and tried to sell some to others. Implied, but not reported, was that Wilner probably communicated the fact of his IRS employment to those from whom he received monies in exchange for the losses, again probably implying that he had some control over audits by virtue of his position. Good stuff, huh.

John M. Hanamirian

Criminal charges

As a result, the towns where “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep” were penned are on high alert.

No word yet on whether Mary’s carrier had refused coverage on the grounds that either Mary or one of her lambs had conspired to have their residence set ablaze.

Jeffrey Resnick

            It is not a good time to be a New York Yankee.  It has been seven years without a championship in which time not only have the Red Sox won two titles, but they came back from a 3-0 deficit (and losing in the ninth inning in Game 4) to beat the Yankees and advance to the World Series.  Not only are the Yankees second best on the field but they can not take a joke.

By now you have surely heard that the Yankees are building a new stadium.  As a joke, construction worker Gino Castignoli buried a Red Sox jersey underneath the new stadium last year.  The Yankees found out and, rather than letting the jersey stay there, spent approximately $50,000.00 to remove the jersey.

Even though this was unnecessary, the Yankees could have generated good public relations because they are donating the jersey to Boston’s Jimmy Fund, which raises money for cancer treatment and research.  Instead, the Yankees sourly have said they may pursue criminal and civil charges against Castignoli.

Memo to Yankees: Grow up.  You have no cause of action and no damage.  As Castignoli says, “Anybody with half a brain knows it was all done in fun.”  Try putting your efforts into beating the Red Sox on the field, not in the courtroom. 

Jeffrey Resnick 

APRIL 15 2008: The Department of Justice released it's sentencing memorandum, the document provided to the Probation Department and the court regarding the misdemeanor criminal tax crimes for which Mr. Wesly Snipes was earlier this year found guilty of having committed. In the memorandum, the Department urges the court to sentence Mr. Snipes to a term of 36 months imprisonment and a fine of at least $5 million dollars. This is, unbeknownst to most, in addition to the tax, interest and additions to tax he will be responsible for independent of the criminal tax consequences.

As you may recall,Mr. Snipes was acquitted of the felony charges against him and this recommendation for 3 years in jail and a five million dollar fine is for the three misdemeanor failure to file income tax return charges for which he was convicted.  The three years seems a bit harsh. It's not like he is Martha Stewart or some other dangerous criminal.

John M. Hanamirian

In the context of his visit to the United States this week, Pope Benedict said he was "deeply ashamed" of the clergy sexual abuse scandal in the Church and will work to make sure pedophiles don't become priests.

"It is a great suffering for the Church in the United States and for the church in general and for me personally that this could happen," Benedict said. "It is difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betray in this way their mission ... to these children." "I am deeply ashamed and we will do what is possible so this cannot happen again in the future," the pope said.

Benedict's trip to the United States is the first since the scandal involving priests sexually abusing young people. The church has paid out more than $2 billion in abuse costs since 1950, with hundreds of millions in settlements since 2002. Six U.S. dioceses have declared bankruptcy in recent years because of the financial toll of the scandal. 

Some feel as though the church has been complicitous in the abuse noting that although a few bishops accused of molestation have stepped down, no bishop has been disciplined for failing to keep abusive clergy away from children. Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as archbishop of in 2002 after church files were made public showing he and other church leaders had allowed accused clergy to continue in public ministry.

John M. Hanamirian 

Yes, the Department of Justice announced the creation of a national "tax defier" or TAXDEF (it's the government, there has to be an acronym) inititative the purpose of which is "to reaffirm and reinvigorate the Tax Division's committment to investigate, pursue and prosecute those who take concrete action to defy and deny the fundamental validity of the tax laws". Apparently, the term "tax protestor" is now out of favor due to the potential it had for representing some "noble effort" says Assistant Attorney General Nathan J. Hochman. Hochman further stated:

"These folks link themselves to so-called patriotism, but at the end of the day, all it is about for them is their greedy self-interest." This TAXDEF initiative should send an unequivocal message to honest taxpayers that, to the extent any of their neighbors on their right or on their left engage in tax defier conduct, their neighbors will go to bed knowing that tomorrow may be the day when their crime will be prosecuted to the fullest".

I don't even know where to begin. Okay, first the TAXDEF or Defier Intitiative is obviously a response to Mr Snipes' acquitttal of the felony offenses for which he was charged. Second, I quoted Hochman because if I hadn't, some would have said something was lost in the translation. I actually checked the announcement date to see if it was April 1, but it was April 8. 

Let's make this deal. How about next time you lose a case where a major motion picture actor admits his crimes in a 500 page written statement and there is a website that details how the crimes were committed, we don't thereafter spend tens of millions of dollars on nonsensical deterrence efforts. Next time, just spend the money to prosecute the case. Then, just then, my neighbors might sleep. 

John M. Hanamirian

Judge Marvin Arrington is fed up with the defendants he keeps seeing in his courtroom, so on Tuesday, he ordered white lawyers out of his courtroom so he could lecture African-American defendants.

"In retrospect, it was a mistake," Judge Marvin Arrington told reporters. "Because my sheriff said to me, 'Judge, that message should be given to everybody' -- 'Don't violate the law, make something out of yourself, go to school, find a role model, somebody that will help you advance your life.'"

Arrington, who is African-American, is a judge in Fulton County, Georgia.

"I came out and saw the defendants, and it was about 99.9 percent Afro-Americans and at some point in time, I excused some lawyers -- most of them white -- and said to the young people in here, 'What in the world are you doing with your lives?'"

The judge apparently thought his message would make a greater impact if he delivered it to a black-only audience.

"I didn't want them to think I was talking down to them; trying to embarrass them or insult them; be derogatory toward them, and I was just saying, 'Please get yourself together,'" Arrington said.

He said he would open his court doors to everyone today and "I am going to give the same identical speech: 'You've got to do better.'

Sometimes the message is more important than being politically correct.   

John M. Hanamirian

Mr. Wahid purportedly formed a number of companies, each bearing the acronymn for a governmental agency to whom you would make a check payable. For instance, IRS, Inc. He would then prepare tax returns for his clients showing thousands of dollars of tax due and instruct the client to make a check payable to the appropriate agency and, of course, deposit those checks into the accounts he created for the corporations he owned. He then didn't report the income. Brilliant.

April 15th is coming.

John Hanamirian