One (not so) Shining Moment

Judge Moreno took into consideration that this defendant did a whole lot of good both before and after getting popped in this case.  From Dave Ovalle:

The judge heard a long list of bad stuff about Jorge Hernandez, the heavily tattooed, bodybuilding ex-U.S. Army soldier who ran one of the largest Molly drug rings in Miami history.
Three beautiful women, his ex-lovers facing prison time themselves, blamed Hernandez for fueling their drug addictions while convincing them to help smuggle in kilos of the synthetic drug from China. Two of them accused him of physical and psychological abuse.
One of his buddies insisted he helped Hernandez only to partake in the lifestyle of night clubs, porn stars and luxury rides.
But once he was caught, Hernandez proved to be an ace undercover operative – making drug deals that helped agents bust 13 other people. “The best I’ve seen in my experience,” federal prosecutor Marton Gyires told the judge on Monday during his sentencing.
That cooperation, combined with Hernandez’s impressive service in the military– he served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Arabic-speaking translator – persuaded U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno to shave some time off what could have been a sentence of at least 10 years in prison. The end result: Hernandez, 37, will serve only four years.
“It wasn’t just service. It was combat duty,” Moreno said. “He should be given credit for his service to the military.”

Another defendant didn't fare as well:

Moreno also sentenced Seth Daniel Murray, 28, the son of two Miami-Dade corrections officers. Murray also wired money and picked up Molly packages, although his lawyer insisted it was only to “endear” himself to the lifestyle enjoyed by Hernandez.
“If someone says beautiful women, porn stars and ‘you can drive my Bentley,’ most people are going to say ‘yes’,” lawyer Scott Saul said.
Judge Moreno sentenced Murray to 50 months in prison, but not before noting: “The fact that he was enamored with the Hernandez lifestyle – I’m sure that love has dissipated by now.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article69913522.html#storylink=cpy

Back to Blogging

Hey, sorry about the slow blogging last week.  I was trying a short case before Chief Judge Moore, and now I'm back.  What did I miss?

Housing Market bubble part 2, this time due to foreign investors -- via the Miami Herald:

In Miami, secretive buyers often purchase expensive homes using opaque legal entities such as offshore companies, trusts and limited liability corporations.
Offshore companies are legal as long as the companies declare their assets and pay taxes. But the secrecy that surrounds those companies makes it easy and tempting to break the law.The U.S. Treasury Department is so concerned about criminals laundering dirty money through Miami-Dade County real estate that in March it started tracking the kind of transaction most vulnerable to manipulation: shell companies buying homes for at least $1 million using cash.

Those deals are considered suspicious because a) the real buyers can hide behind shell companies and b) banks aren’t involved in cash transactions, circumventing any checks for money laundering.
Cash deals accounted for 53 percent of all Miami-Dade home sales in 2015 — double the national average — and 90 percent of new construction sales, according to the Miami Association of Realtors.
“A property owned in the name of a shell company is not transparent,” said Jennifer Shasky Calvery, director of the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen), the Treasury agency behind the new policy. “There may be legitimate reasons to be non-transparent, but it’s also what criminals want to do.”
The temporary initiative also applies to Manhattan and expires in August. It requires that real-estate title agents identify the true, or “beneficial,” owners behind shell companies and disclose their names to the federal government. In Miami-Dade, the rules apply to homes sold for $1 million or more. In Manhattan, where real estate is more expensive and where foreign buyers also flock, the threshold is $3 million.
No other jurisdictions are being targeted.

Even a former Supreme Court Justice from Brazil is allegedly involved according to the MH:

When Brazilian news outlets found out then-Supreme Court chief justice Joaquim Barbosa had bought a Brickell condo in 2012, they asked the well-respected jurist how much he paid.
Barbosa refused to say.
The problem? In Florida, real-estate sales are public.
But not Barbosa’s.
Miami-Dade County property records seemed to suggest the 61-year-old paid a big, fat zero for his one-bedroom condo at Icon Brickell, one of the trendy neighborhood’s best-known condo towers.
Buyers are supposed to pay a documentary stamp tax when they close on a property. In Miami-Dade, the tax amounts to 60 cents for every $100 paid for the property. Sales prices aren’t listed on deeds — but they can be calculated from the tax.
The deed for Barbosa’s unit lists no tax. (Even when someone gives their property away to a family member, they pay a nominal tax.)As it turns out, Barbosa didn’t get the apartment for free. The unit’s seller sent the Miami Herald a contract showing Barbosa paid $335,000 in cash. The tax on that sale would have amounted to about $2,000.
Three real-estate attorneys consulted by the Miami Herald could see no reason why Barbosa wouldn’t be subject to the tax.
“This is a very unusual deed,” said one of the attorneys, Joe Hernandez of South Florida law firm Weiss Serota.
It’s not clear why the Florida Department of Revenue didn’t flag the nonpayment and impose a fine. A spokeswoman said the department could not comment on individual cases.
Details of Barbosa’s purchase came to light after a massive leak of documents from inside Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

Congrats to the Srebnick brothers for their SCOTUS win

The case is Luis v. United States, issued today.  Here's the intro by Justice Breyer:

A federal statute provides that a court may freeze before trial certain assets belonging to a criminal defendant accused of violations of federal health care or banking laws. See 18 U. S. C. §1345. Those assets include: (1) property “obtained as a result of ” the crime, (2) property“traceable” to the crime, and (3) other “property of equivalent value.” §1345(a)(2). In this case, the Government has obtained a court order that freezes assets belonging to the third category of property, namely, property that is untainted by the crime, and that belongs fully to the defendant. That order, the defendant says, prevents her from paying her lawyer. She claims that insofar as it does so, it violates her Sixth Amendment “right . . . to have the Assistance of Counsel for [her] defence.” We agree.

 And here's a picture of Howard arguing the case, from SCOTUSblog:

United States v. Dracula

For real, this guy's nickname is Dracula because "he sometimes dressed up as a vampire, complete with yellow contact lenses and gold-plated fangs."  You can guess how the 11th Circuit decided the case...  Here's the intro by Judge William Pryor:

This appeal and cross-appeal require us to review the convictions and sentence of Damion Baston, an international sex trafficker nicknamed “Drac” (short for Dracula) who sometimes dressed up as a vampire, complete with yellow contact lenses and gold-plated fangs. Baston forced numerous women to prostitute for him by beating them, humiliating them, and threatening to kill them, and he pimped them around the world, from Florida to Australia to the United Arab Emirates. Baston challenges the sufficiency of the evidence for one conviction, a supplemental jury instruction, and the award of restitution to his victims. Those challenges fail, but the cross-appeal by the government about a refusal to award one victim increased restitution has merit.

Get ready for traffic and t-storms...

...spring break is over.

Bummer.

Any trials starting up in Federal Court this week?

In the meantime, here you go...

The NY Times has this funny piece by Scott Shane. Maybe the other DM and I should do a post.

TAKE a glance at who wrote this article and you’ll understand the problem. Who’s who?

Two people with the same name can get mixed up — in both senses. Throw in the Internet, which can make geography irrelevant, and the possibility for confusion rivals that of a Shakespeare comedy, without the happy ending.

Just ask us.

For more than two decades, Scott Shane the business-school professor and Scott Shane the journalist have been mistaken for each other by co-authors, collection agencies, Google, a journalism school, public relations firms, an ex-congressman, a book distributor — and, yes, this newspaper. Being Internet doppelgängers has never been more than a persistent nuisance. But it reflects an era in which a person is not just flesh and blood but also an electronic composite, patched together from words, numbers and images, accessible at a click.

Dave Ovalle does this nice obit on Red from the state courthouse:

Outside Miami’s criminal courthouse, he was known to many only as “Red” the panhandler, a distinctive character woven into the colorful fabric of the justice community, as much a fixture as attorneys, hot-dog carts and TV news trucks.

On the Internet, his wild, woolly and wall-eyed mugshot made him a briefly viral meme to be mocked or, oddly enough, the face of an online ad hawking a dubious blood-pressure cure.

In real life, he was a 34-year-old named Brett Heinzinger, a man whose only luck seemed bad. He was born to heroin addicts, heard his grandfather murdered as a child, got addicted to drugs as a young man and wound up in South Florida chasing his next cocaine score and living under an overpass.

He died here, too — run down by a motorist on a dark rainy January night on Northwest 12th Avenue, under the Dolphin Expressway, next to the courthouse. The car never stopped. Next to him, Miami detectives found the foam cup he used to panhandle, seven pennies inside.