B-Girls jury still out

They started deliberating on Thursday and could be heard laughing in the jury room on Friday afternoon.  Not sure what that means... But no verdict yet.  As soon as I hear something, I will post it.

The cat comments are weird, but the comment about Judge Rosenbaum's investiture was nice.

And speaking of investitures, the Senate is confirming more district judges... When will Judge Thomas be confirmed?


Finally, Richard Catalano can now listen to Justin Timberlake as loud as he wants.  Here's Richard:    

RIP Myles Malman (UPDATE)

He was a good guy, who most recently tried the B-Girls case in Miami before Judge Scola.

I didn't realize he played baseball at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  From their webpage:

Malman graduated from FDU in 1967 and played baseball for three years. He was very active in the baseball alumni program. In 2010, Malman was presented The Pinnacle, the highest award the University bestows upon its alumni. Pinnacle recipients are chosen on the basis of success or distinction in their chosen fields; significant contributions to society and humanity through public or humanitarian service; and outstanding service to the University, or reflection of the unique character of Fairleigh Dickinson in their lives.

In presenting the award, his longtime friend and colleague Robert H. Silbering said, "You have been a dear friend to FDU over the years. As a former member of FDU's baseball team, you generously support a scholarship established in honor of the late baseball coach Harvey Woods. You also give back your time and energy through lectures and mentoring.

Malman was the managing director of Malman, Malman & Rosenthal in Hollywood, Fla. He specialized in criminal and civil litigation, and maintained an extensive national white-collar criminal practice including securities and health-care fraud.

Malman served as Deputy First Assistant and Special Counsel to the United States Attorney of the Southern District of Florida during his lengthy career as a federal prosecutor, managing a 200-lawyer office. He was co-lead counsel in the successful prosecution of Gen. Manuel Noriega on drug and money-laundering charges. In 1992, he received the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service in recognition of his litigation skills. Malman handled the only successful federal Civil Rights Act prosecution in the Southern District of Florida and is the recipient of six Department of Justice Superior Achievement Awards for Outstanding Performance.

Over the years, he led and participated in high-profile civil cases, including class-action litigations against manufacturers of silicone breast implants, tobacco, General Motors pickup trucks and others. He also represented and negotiated contracts and business deals for professional players in the National Hockey League and the National Football League.

Malman served on the faculty of the National Institute of Trial Advocacy at Hofstra University Law School and taught in the Intensive Trial Advocacy Program at Widener University Law School. He lectured in criminal and civil trial practice and Florida criminal procedure for the WestBar Review Course. Malman also appeared on national television as an expert in legal matters, consulted on major Hollywood motion picture projects and testified before
Congress on criminal justice matters.

Malman was born in New York City and served as an Assistant District Attorney for 10 years as well as Senior Trial Counsel and adviser to longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau. In the 1960s, he served in the U.S Army Military Police Corps in Vietnam.

Malman is survived by his wife, Jill, and their two children, Parker and Mallory.

UPDATE -- The Miami Herald has this obit:

Myles Malman may not have been a marathon man, but he sure lived like one.
As an attorney, he tried months-long cases, most notably the drug-trafficking prosecution of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in Miami. For clients, he traveled to New York, Russia and Israel. And as an older father, he stayed in shape on the tennis court to keep up with his young son and daughter.
Malman, a New York native who worked for the city's legendary district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, before moving to South Florida in the 1980s to become a federal prosecutor, died of brain cancer on Sunday at his home in Hollywood.
Before his death at age 67, Malman had lived long enough to see a movie in which he appeared — American Hustle — nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. He got a nonspeaking part after he gave some advice to director David O. Russell, who conferred with Malman about a scene filmed on location in the Boston area.
But it was in the courtroom where Malman made his mark, gaining a reputation as a formidable but fair attorney.
Veteran Miami lawyer Norman Moscowitz praised Malman as an “effective and tenacious advocate” as both a prosecutor and defense attorney.
“He was a decent and honorable person and that always came across in court, which is why jurors liked him so much,” said Moscowitz, who worked with him in the U.S. attorney’s office and later on defense cases.

What is fraud?

 This is THE debate in white collar circles over the past few years.  Takhalov (the B-girls case) got the discussion going again in the 11th Circuit.  Interestingly, the Supreme Court keeps reversing convictions based on strange new theories that district judges and appellate courts allow.  The latest question hails from the Third Circuit -- is it federal wire fraud for a college dean to lie in order to increase U.S. News Rankings?  From Law360:

The former dean of the Fox School of Business at Temple University has asked the Third Circuit to throw out his conviction on charges that he falsely inflated the school's stats to boost its ranking in U.S. News & World Report, arguing that students still got a good education in exchange for their tuition.

In an appellate brief filed Friday, Moshe Porat — who was sentenced to 14 months in prison and a $250,000 fine after being convicted on mail and wire fraud charges last year — said the government failed to show how falsely inflating the school's numbers constituted a deprivation of students' "property," as required by federal fraud statutes.

"Imagine that an excellent but unheralded lawyer procures false nominations to be named a 'Super Lawyer.' A client hires the lawyer based on the honor, and the lawyer provides top-notch counsel," Porat's brief said. "The lawyer's conduct is dishonest and morally questionable, but has the lawyer committed federal property fraud? The answer is plainly no—even if the client later learns the truth about the fake honor, and even if the client feels duped and would have hired a different lawyer had he known the truth."

And the response:

Philadelphia federal prosecutors urged the Third Circuit on Friday to reject a bid by the former dean of Temple University's business school to toss his conviction for falsely inflating the school's stats to boost its U.S. News & World Report ranking, slamming his argument that the conduct didn't amount to property fraud.

In its response brief, the government called Moshe Porat's appeal "an exercise in straw man advocacy," rejecting his argument that the falsely inflated stats given to U.S. News didn't deprive students at Temple's Fox School of Business of a good education.

"Porat was charged with and convicted of defrauding business school applicants, students, and donors out of money," the government's brief said. "He accomplished this, in part, by giving false information to U.S. News, knowing that this information would result in false rankings that students and donors valued, and knowing that Fox would then broadcast these rankings far and wide in order to gather tuition money and donations from the people who were the targets of the fraud."

B-girls trial still ongoing

Some girls flirt with some guys and take them for a bunch of money and we've made a federal case out of it.  And a long one!  It started back in early October!  It's the Energizer Bunny trial. 

David Lat is profiled here in Details. The intro:

Earlier this year, after weeks of hearing rumblings from a network of tipsters, David Lat, the 37-year-old managing editor of Above the Law (ATL), one of the most widely read legal blogs on the Web, published a story he never dreamed possible. In the post, cheekily titled "Where's LeBoeuf? An Update on Doings at Dewey," Lat broke the news that one of most prestigious law firms in the world, Dewey & LeBoeuf, which employed more than 1,300 attorneys in 12 countries in 2007, was on the verge of imploding. "I was flummoxed," says Lat, a former Assistant United States Attorney. "It seemed absurd."

Dewey & LeBoeuf was the child of a 2007 boom-time megamerger between a 100-year-old firm bearing the name of three-term New York governor Thomas Dewey and another old Gotham stalwart that represented some of the nation's biggest utilities and insurance companies. In the legal world, the possible dissolution of Dewey & LeBoeuf was on par with Lehman Brothers' monumental bankruptcy in 2008. Lat, a blogger by trade, had the skinny on what was really happening in those hallowed halls. Armed with a network of inside sources, a dogged reporter's sense, and a good, old-fashioned hunch, Lat dropped the latest in a string of bombs on the beleaguered legal profession.
After that initial post, the doomsday stories—and scoops—came fast and furious: Dozens of partners were leaving (ATL had the names), and an internal memo (leaked to Lat) actually blamed "U.S. legal blogs" for making some of the firm's woes public. That was followed by the announcement of a 60-day-notice policy designed to retain the remaining partners—more than 20 percent had announced their depatures by this time —and reports that Dewey was considering closing three international offices. In late April, Steven Davis was ousted from his role as chairman, and the Manhattan District Attorney's office began a criminal probe to investigate his actions. Finally, on May 28, three months after Lat's first post, Dewey filed for bankruptcy. For Lat and his staff, the story was only just beginning.
"We would get our intel in a number of different ways," he says, citing a flood of e-mails and texts, including information from friends and friends of friends who worked there and a "well-placed source at the firm" who leaked the memo. ATL even unearthed details about the company's downfall in what appeared to be minor stories—like the firm prohibiting lawyers from using Federal Express and not being able to afford black car service. "[Web] traffic during the Dewey period was phenomenal," recalls Lat, whose breaking stories were cited by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Throughout the summer, Lat kept tabs on the key players, digging around for answers about what went wrong and reporting that, even as the firm was sinking, many of its multi-millionaire partners were still pulling in six-figure checks. "They were like pigs at the trough, all muscling each other aside to get a share of the feed," Lat says. "The story delved into a lot of themes, whether it's greed or anxiety or the distribution of spoils in the legal profession." In other words, it was catnip for Lat and the ATL faithful.

The NY Times is covering border searches and whether our devices should be subject to search just because it's the border:

The government has historically had broad power to search travelers and their property at the border. But that prerogative is being challenged as more people travel with extensive personal and business information on devices that would typically require a warrant to examine.

Several court cases seek to limit the ability of border agents to search, copy and even seize travelers’ laptops, cameras and phones without suspicion of illegal activity.

“What we are asking is for a court to rule that the government must have a good reason to believe that someone has engaged in wrongdoing before it is allowed to go through their electronic devices,” said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing plaintiffs in two lawsuits challenging digital border searches.

A decision in one of those suits, Abidor v. Napolitano, is expected soon, according to the case manager for Judge Edward R. Korman, who is writing the opinion for the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

In that case, Pascal Abidor, who is studying for his doctorate in Islamic studies, sued the government after he was handcuffed and detained at the border during an Amtrak trip from Montreal to New York. He was questioned and placed in a cell for several hours. His laptop was searched and kept for 11 days.

According to government data, these types of searches are rare: about 36,000 people are referred to secondary screening by United States Customs and Border Protection daily, and roughly a dozen of those travelers are subject to a search of their electronic devices.

Courts have long held that Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches do not apply at the border, based on the government’s interest in combating crime and terrorism. But Mr. Pascal’s lawsuit and similar cases question whether confiscating a laptop for days or weeks and analyzing its data at another site goes beyond the typical border searches. They also depart from the justification used in other digital searches, possession of child pornography.

“We’re getting more into whether this is targeting political speech,” Ms. Crump said.

Friday morning news and notes

1.  The former Hialeah mayor and his wife have been indicted on tax evasion charges.  Via Jay Weaver:

In 2010, while peeling back the layers of Hialeah’s “shadow banking’’ industry, federal prosecutors pressed the city’s mayor about allegations that he had collected exorbitant cash interest payments on more than $1 million in loans he made to friends and acquaintances.
Julio Robaina’s answer? Not true.
On Thursday, Robaina’s words came back to haunt him, when a federal grand jury indicted him and his wife on charges of conspiring to evade income taxes, making loans at sky-high interest rates, failing to report secret cash payments — and lying to federal authorities.
He made the statements at issue in August 2010, while preparing an unsuccessful run to become Miami-Dade County mayor.
Robaina, 47, and his wife Raiza Villacis Robaina, 39, who operated two loan companies, are accused of receiving the undisclosed cash payments as interest on the personal loans they made to friends, including convicted Ponzi schemer Luis Felipe Perez. The loans were doled out as part of an informal banking system operating below the radar in Hialeah.
The indictment alleges the couple tried “to enrich themselves by concealing, disguising and failing to report the true and correct amount of their income to the Internal Revenue Service.”
Husband and wife, scheduled to surrender to authorities and have their initial court appearance Friday, proclaimed their innocence through Julio Robaina’s defense attorney.

 

2.  The defendants in the B-Girl case who went to trial and lost got whacked; the judge went above the guidelines for each of them according to the Herald.  Jay Weaver is all over the courts today:

A South Beach nightclub operator was sentenced Thursday to 12 years in prison for directing a bunch of “bar girls” to seduce and swindle customers at a string of Russian-style lounges.
Albert Takhalov was convicted in December along with two other businessmen of fleecing hundreds of thousands of dollars from dozens of male patrons by racking up bogus bills for champagne, vodka and caviar on their credit cards at seven private Miami Beach clubs.
Takhalov, 31, cried as he apologized to U.S. District Judge Robert Scola, saying he made a “great mistake” but “had no intention of breaking the law.” Other tearful family members asked for leniency, to no avail.
Scola, who found that Takhalov committed perjury on the witness stand at his trial, expressed no sympathy for the defendant, saying “he doesn’t have a right to lie.”

3.  Paula McMahon covers the big takedown in the staged accident case:

The vehicle collisions looked like typical South Florida accidents with motorists and passengers reporting they needed treatment from chiropractors and massage therapists.
But investigators said the crashes were carefully staged by willing participants who were trained how to defraud the insurance system to make money for themselves and a highly organized group of medical professionals, clinic owners and recruiters.
Investigators announced charges Thursday against 33 people they said were involved in staging accidents for insurance fraud — the latest hit in a three-year investigation that identified about $20 million in fraudulently obtained payouts from insurers.
"If you get upset about your car insurance premiums going up, this crime is one of the reasons why," said William J. Maddalena, the assistant special agent in charge of FBI Miami. "Every time an insurance payout is made for a staged accident in Florida, we all feel the pain in the pocketbook."
Operation Sledgehammer, a state and federal investigation, has led to charges being filed against a total of 92 defendants from Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Those already convicted have been ordered to pay more than $5 million in restitution to insurance companies so far, prosecutors said.

The operation got its code name when undercover investigators saw suspects using a sledgehammer to make vehicles look like they'd been in an accident.
The fraud involved a "massive," complicated, highly organized scheme that investigators said included everyone from clinic owners and medical staff who provided fraudulent diagnoses and prescribed fake treatment, to office workers who billed for the services, and recruiters who found accident "victims" and trained them to stage collisions on the streets and highways of South Florida.