NY Times covers airport case

OK, so it was a little more involved than that because the characters were a world-renowned physicist and a super model.  The physicist chatted with the model online and really wanted to meet her in person.  All he had to do was carry one of her bags....  You know where this is going:

Frampton didn’t plan on a long trip. He needed to be back to teach. So he left his car at the airport. Soon, he hoped, he’d be returning with Milani on his arm. The first thing that went wrong was that the e-ticket Milani sent Frampton for the Toronto-Santiago leg of his journey turned out to be invalid, leaving him stranded in the Toronto airport for a full day. Frampton finally arrived in La Paz four days after he set out. He hoped to meet Milani the next morning, but by then she had been called away to another photo shoot in Brussels. She promised to send him a ticket to join her there, so Frampton, who had checked into the Eva Palace Hotel, worked on a physics paper while he waited for it to arrive. He and Milani kept in regular contact. A ticket to Buenos Aires eventually came, with the promise that another ticket to Brussels was on the way. All Milani asked was that Frampton do her a favor: bring her a bag that she had left in La Paz.

While in Bolivia, Frampton corresponded with an old friend, John Dixon, a physicist and lawyer who lives in Ontario. When Frampton explained what he was up to, Dixon became alarmed. His warnings to Frampton were unequivocal, Dixon told me not long ago, still clearly upset: “I said: ‘Well, inside that suitcase sewn into the lining will be cocaine. You’re in big trouble.’ Paul said, ‘I’ll be careful, I’ll make sure there isn’t cocaine in there and if there is, I’ll ask them to remove it.’ I thought they were probably going to kidnap him and torture him to get his money. I didn’t know he didn’t have money. I said, ‘Well, you’re going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?’ And he said, ‘You can contact my brother and my former wife.’ ” Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon’s warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.

On the evening of Jan. 20, nine days after he arrived in Bolivia, a man Frampton describes as Hispanic but whom he didn’t get a good look at handed him a bag out on the dark street in front of his hotel. Frampton was expecting to be given an Hermès or a Louis Vuitton, but the bag was an utterly commonplace black cloth suitcase with wheels. Once he was back in his room, he opened it. It was empty. He wrote to Milani, asking why this particular suitcase was so important. She told him it had “sentimental value.” The next morning, he filled it with his dirty laundry and headed to the airport.

Frampton flew from La Paz to Buenos Aires, crossing the border without incident. He says that he spent the next 40 hours in Ezeiza airport, without sleeping, mainly “doing physics” and checking his e-mail regularly in hopes that an e-ticket to Brussels would arrive. But by the time the ticket materialized, Frampton had gotten a friend to send him a ticket to Raleigh. He had been gone for 15 days and was ready to go home. Because there was always the chance that Milani would come to North Carolina and want her bag, he checked two bags, his and hers, and went to the gate. Soon he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He thought it must be for an upgrade to first class, but when he arrived at the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Asked to identify his luggage — “That’s my bag,” he said, “the other one’s not my bag, but I checked it in” — he waited while the police tested the contents of a package found in the “Milani” suitcase. Within hours, he was under arrest.

 The article is a fun read, but it leaves a lot of important details till the end.  Meantime, this is the woman who Professor Frampton was trying to meet:

And here is Frampton:

Friday afternoon notes

1.  Maria Elena Perez of Nevin Shapiro infamy is in trouble with the Southern District of Florida.  Judge Moreno issued this order referring her to the disciplinary committee based on the NCAA investigation and her prior conduct. 

2.  Curt Anderson interviewed the FBI undercover informant in the Khan case.

3.  The Dyer building is still empty, but Miami Dade College wants to take it over.  From John Pacenti's article:

The Dyer building was left vacant due to health concerns after the Wilkie D. Ferguson Courthouse opened.
Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno welcomes the idea of the college acquisition.
"Miami Dade College could make repairs for a fraction of the cost of the GSA," Moreno said. "They've done a magnificent job with the Freedom Tower."
The slim tower is a Miami landmark that the college took over in 2005. It was the home of the defunct Miami News and was used by the federal government to process refugees fleeing Fidel Castro's communist Cuba.
Moreno said Padron intends to preserve the historic nature of the courthouse but noted some security changes would be needed. Tunnels link the Dyer courthouse to the Federal Detention Center across the street, and access would need to be sealed. The courthouse also connects to other buildings in the federal complex.

 

Your next Magistrate will be one of these 5 candidates

Richard A. Beauchamp, a partner at Panza, Maurer & Maynard
Sowmya Bharathi, Assistant Federal Public Defender
Candace Duff, a partner at Greenberg Traurig
Steven Petri, Assistant United States Attorney
Alicia Valle, Assistant United States Attorney

Two private lawyers, two prosecutors, and one public defender.

Thanks to my tipsters.

Tipsters unite

Yesterday the Magistrate Appointment Committee, led by David Rothman, interviewed 15 applicants (which narrowed the field from over 50).

 The committee then recommends that the District Court interview 5 of those applicants. The process is very secretive, so I don't have the 5 names yet, but if you know of someone who got out of committee, let me know.

In other news, Eric Holder defended the Aaron Swartz prosecution yesterday. I think the exchange is pretty telling:

I think that's a good use of prosecutorial discretion to look at the conduct, regardless of what the statutory maximums were and to fashion a sentence that was consistent with what the nature of the conduct was," Holder testified, adding that Swartz and his attorneys had rejected the plea offers.
Holder was responding to questioning from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who suggested that the prosecutors handling the case were overzealous and guilty of misconduct.
In 2011, Swartz was charged with breaking into a computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloading 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, a subscription service for academic articles.
Swartz was an accomplished programmer and activist who argued that more online information should be free to the public.
Critics, including Swartz's family and members of Congress, have accused prosecutors of seeking excessive penalties in the case.
"Does it strike you as odd that the government would indict someone for crimes that would carry penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million fines, and then offer them a three month prison sentence?" Cornyn asked.
Holder insisted that the charges themselves are less important than the penalties sought by prosecutors and said several months in prison would have been appropriate based on the crime.
But Cornyn worried that such harsh potential penalties could empower prosecutors to "bully" defendants into pleading guilty.

Shocker! Defendants being bullied into pleading guilty.  Say it isn't so!

Khan convicted

The jury came back this morning guilty on 4 counts in the only defendant remaining in the Pakistani Taliban case.

Why doesn't the SDFLA have a drug court?

Seems like this District would benefit from such a program, which are up and running in numerous districts around the country. The front page of the NY Times profiles the new federal drug court and Judge Gleeson, who is yet again out in front of cutting edge criminal practice:

Federal judges around the country are teaming up with prosecutors to create special treatment programs for drug-addicted defendants who would otherwise face significant prison time, an effort intended to sidestep drug laws widely seen as inflexible and overly punitive. The Justice Department has tentatively embraced the new approach, allowing United States attorneys to reduce or even dismiss charges in some drug cases. The effort follows decades of success for “drug courts” at the state level, which legal experts have long cited as a less expensive and more effective alternative to prison for dealing with many low-level repeat offenders. But it is striking that the model is spreading at the federal level, where judges have increasingly pushed back against rules that restrict their ability to make their own determination of appropriate sentences. So far, federal judges have instituted programs in California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington. About 400 defendants have been involved nationwide. In Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Thursday, Judge John Gleeson issued an opinion praising the new approach as a way to address swelling prison costs and disproportionate sentences for drug trafficking. “Presentence programs like ours and those in other districts mean that a growing number of courts are no longer reflexively sentencing federal defendants who do not belong in prison to the costly prison terms recommended by the sentencing guidelines,” Judge Gleeson wrote. The opinion came a year after Judge Gleeson, with the federal agency known as Pretrial Services, started a program that made achieving sobriety an incentive for drug-addicted defendants to avoid prison. The program had its first graduate this year: Emily Leitch, a Brooklyn woman with a long history of substance abuse who was arrested entering the country at Kennedy International Airport with over 13 kilograms of cocaine, about 30 pounds, in her luggage. “I want to thank the federal government for giving me a chance,” Ms. Leitch said. “I always wanted to stand up as a sober person.”

Doug Berman has uploaded the Gleeson opinion here, and it's worth a read.

Claudio Osorio pleads guilty

But not before Judge Altonaga. He was scheduled to plead before her this week, but she recused. The case was reassigned to Judge Dimitrouleas and he took the plea today to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1349, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1956(h). AUSA Lois Foster-Steers is prosecuting the case.

Verdict in Steiner case

The verdict is in for Steve Steiner and Henry Fecker. It was a 54 count indictment. Fecker was found not guilty of all counts and Steiner was found not guilty of about 75% of the counts. Trial was before Judge Kathy Williams.