Efraim Diveroli gets 4 years

From the AP's Curt Anderson:

A youthful arms dealer whose company once boasted a $300 million Pentagon munitions contract was sentenced Monday to four years in federal prison for trying to ship millions of rounds of prohibited Chinese-made ammunition to Afghan forces fighting alongside U.S. troops.

U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard imposed the sentence on 25-year-old Efraim Diveroli, who faced a maximum of five years behind bars after pleading guilty in 2009 to a fraud conspiracy charge. Three other executives in Diveroli's AEY Inc. are awaiting sentencing.

Lenard gave Diveroli credit for accepting responsibility for the crime but said he deserved a serious stint in prison because his scheme could have endangered U.S. military personnel and their Afghan allies. Much of the ammunition was decades old and could have been faulty.

"To participate in such a fraud when people are putting their lives on the line, that makes it so much sadder. For money," Lenard told a courtroom crowded with Diveroli family members and supporters from Miami Beach's tight-knit Jewish community, including two rabbis.

"Mr. Diveroli may have been clever, but not wise," Lenard said.

This was a win for for Diveroli's lawyers, Hy Shapiro and Howard Srebnick, who capped their client's exposure at 5 years and then got acceptance of responsibility credit for their client:

In return for Diveroli's guilty plea to the conspiracy charge, prosecutors dropped another 84 counts against him.

But his legal troubles are not over.

While out on bail awaiting sentencing in the Miami case, Diveroli was arrested in August in the Orlando area by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents, charged with being a convicted felon in possession of firearms.

Prosecutors in that case say Diveroli was attempting to broker another major arms and ammunition deal despite no longer having a license to do so and the Miami conviction. After pleading guilty in that case, Diveroli was ordered to forfeit several 9mm handguns and at least two semiautomatic rifles, according to court documents.

In one telephone call secretly recorded by ATF agents, Diveroli told an undercover agent posing as a potential arms buyer that "he keeps getting drawn back into this activity" despite his legal troubles.

"Once a gun runner, always a gun runner," Diveroli is quoted as saying in court papers.

Sentencing in the Orlando case is set for Jan. 25. Diveroli could get an additional 10 years in prison, but will likely get less.

Wednesday news and notes

1.  Judge Lenard accepted the guilty pleas today in the stolen patient record case.  (via Miami Herald).  We previously wrote about the case here, when the parameters of the deal were questioned.

2.  Jeffrey Epstein is a free man.  And the Daily Beast covers the case here, with video from his depo in which he walks out after being asked about the shape of his penis. 

3.  And, Rony Seikaly has a new single.

4.  Rumpole says never ever promise that your client will take the stand.  He's way wrong.  There are no absolute trial rules.  Now of course Blago's lawyers messed up by promising that he would testify and then not delivering.  But that doesn't mean you should never do it. 

Did you know that the Sears Tower is now called the Willis Tower?

I sure didn't.

Anyway, the leader from the Liberty City group -- Narseal Batiste -- who was convicted of attempting to blow up that building was sentenced to 13 1/2 years by Judge Lenard. She sentenced brothers Burson Ausgustin, 24, and Rotschild Augustin, 26, to six and seven years in prison. Patrick Abraham, 30, received more than nine years and 34-year-old Stanley Phanor, eight years. Prosecutors had asked for 70 years for Batiste and 30 years for the others. I was happy to see that Judge Lenard rejected those requests. From the BBC:

Sentencing Batiste, US District Judge Joan Lenard said: "You've done great harm to yourself, your family, the young men who were your followers, and you've violated the trust of your country."
Batiste apologised for the plot in court, saying he had "wanted respect".
"I wanted to be this person that I really wasn't. I've never been a violent person," the Associated Press news agency quoted him as saying.

Anyway, hope you have a nice Thanksgiving week... I'm trying to figure out my new iPhone. I think I miss my BlackBerry....

Sentencing question

So will the Liberty City 7 6 5 get more or less time than Jose Padilla? Remember that Judge Cooke sentenced Padilla to 17 years and his co-defendants to less time. (The over-under line was 20 years). Certainly the Liberty City defendants will be citing to Padilla's case and arguing that they should get way less time. We'll set the over-under in this case at 17 years, the same sentence that Padilla received, for the lead defendant. What do you all think the appropriate sentences are now that they have been convicted?

The "maybe-nots" have it (updated)

Have a rough day at the office ahead of you today? I bet Judge Lenard can sympathize. Apparently, "sternly order[ing]" the jurors in the Liberty City 6 trial "to follow the law and obey her instructions regarding their duty to deliberate" (as Curt Anderson put it for AP) did not do the trick. But she is not giving up on them yet. Motion for mistrial denied.

UPDATE: Deliberations are starting again with a new alternate subbing-in for the person now known as "the recalcitrant juror".

"Please help us, judge."

It didn't take. The mind-wipe, I mean. It didn't work.

Friday afternoon, deliberations over the fate of the Liberty City Six hit a new snag, according to reports by the Associated Press and the Miami Herald. Here's the abridged version of the AP report:

A few hours after an ill juror was replaced, a note signed by the jury foreman in the "Liberty City Six" case said a female juror "refuses to engage in discussions based on the evidence or the law" and that this could be "unfair to the defendants," according to U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard. The note said the juror was disruptive and had made comments offensive to others.

"Please help us, judge," the note said, adding the juror "feels deliberating is a waste of time."

In court Friday, the juror accused of not wanting to deliberate also sent her own note, complaining that she feels under "attack" from the others and hinted she may have made comments about the law that were "misinterpreted."

After summarizing the notes in court, Lenard summoned the jurors back into court and sternly ordered them to follow the law and obey her instructions regarding their duty to deliberate. Lenard told the panel to return Monday.

"This may clear up the problem," Lenard said outside the jury's presence. "Maybe not."

Trials

I was supposed to start a month-long trial this week in West Palm Beach, but it got postponed till next Monday. Here are some stories about other trials that started this week:

1. Participant or just translator? Shahrazad Gholikhan started trial in front of Judge Cohn. She is charged with attempting to export night vision goggles to Iran. This was the case that originally pled out to credit time served, but the government moved to vacate the sentence saying it had made a mistake in the guidelines. Judge Cohn then resentenced her to 29 months. Then the defense moved to vacate the plea, saying that everyone had thought it was a CTS case. Judge Cohn agreed and here we are in trial. Vanessa Blum covers it here:

The strange legal odyssey that led an Iranian woman to surrender last year to face charges she tried to supply Iran with U.S.-made night vision goggles took another turn Tuesday with opening statements to jurors in Fort Lauderdale federal court.A prosecutor told jurors that Shahrazad Mir Gholikhan, 30, conspired with her former husband to illegally purchase thousands of military-grade night vision goggles and traveled to Vienna in 2004 to obtain a sample pair.Gholikhan's attorney countered that she went to Vienna without knowing her ex-husband's plan and served only as his translator.

2. The Venezuelan cash smuggling case started up before Judge Lenard. Here's Curt Anderson's take:

A wealthy Venezuelan businessman went on trial Tuesday on U.S. charges that he illegally acted as his government's agent in an elaborate scheme to conceal the source of $800,000 in political cash carried in a suitcase into Argentina.
Prosecutors say Franklin Duran, 40, was doing the bidding of Venezuela's intelligence service when he and others used promises of $2 million in cash and veiled threats of violence to make the cover-up work. The FBI taped dozens of conversations between Duran and his alleged cohorts on the telephone and in South Florida restaurants and coffee shops.
Jury selection began Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard, with the trial expected to take up to six weeks. Duran, who has pleaded not guilty, faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of conspiracy and failing to register with the U.S. as a Venezuelan agent.
The purported cover-up involved a cash-stuffed suitcase brought into Argentina aboard a Venezuelan aircraft in August 2007 that prosecutors say was intended as a contribution for new Argentine President Cristina Fernandez. Both she and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have denounced the trial as politically motivated, but U.S. officials deny that.
Still, the case has further strained the already sour relationship between the U.S. and Venezuela. Duran's lawyer, Ed Shohat, has repeatedly insisted the trial is intended mainly to embarrass Chavez and his allies in Latin America and that Duran wasn't even aware of the registration law he is accused of violating.
"Our view is that this case is a political attack," Shohat said.

Should Liberty City 7 jury hear from "radicalization" expert?

Yes, says Judge Lenard who is going to permit the government expert Raymond Tanter to testify as to how regular people become terrorists. From Vanessa Blum's article in the Sun-Sentinel:

The federal government's leading expert witness in its terrorism case against seven Miami men will take the stand this week to answer what may be the most pressing question facing law enforcement since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: How do ordinary individuals become terrorists?

In what will be the first testimony of its kind in a U.S. terrorism trial, Raymond Tanter is expected to tell jurors that most would-be terrorists start off as unremarkable individuals seeking a sense of belonging and purpose within an extremist group.Prosecutors want Tanter, a political science professor at Georgetown University, to tell jurors the seven defendants accused of plotting to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago fit that profile and were on a path likely to end in violence.

Tanter's testimony is based on a theory called the radicalization process. It is important to the government's case because the defendants — who have no Middle Eastern roots, mostly grew up in South Florida and practiced a blend of religions — may not fit jurors' notions about terrorists.Defense lawyers tried unsuccessfully to block Tanter from testifying, describing his theories as unscientific and too new to be considered reliable.