In Boulder, Colorado, hair salon owner Joy Douglas “received a $1,000 ticket from an animal-control officer for coloring her white poodle, Cici, pink by using organic beet juice.” Everyone seems to agree that the dye job is not physically harmful to the pooch, who is well cared for in other ways, but Boulder has a town ordinance against animal-dyeing, aimed at Easter-season tormentors of bunnies and chicks, and several residents ratted Douglas out. She says the idea of the pink fur was to raise awareness for breast cancer. (“Boulder’s pink poodle owner preps for legal fight”, Denver Post, Mar. 11).
Author Archive
Fled home, rode bus to end of the line
The Hampton Roads Transit bus driver told the 13-year-old girl, who was “upset about a family situation” and had gone out after curfew, that she had to get off the bus at the end of the line. A man approached, befriended and later allegedly assaulted her. Her mother has now filed a $10 million suit against the transit system. Plaintiff’s lawyer Jason Roper says “someone” should have “call[ed] someone… You can’t tell me that no one could foresee this happening.” (Duane Bourne, “HRT, driver sued over sexual assault on teen”, Virginian-Pilot, Mar. 2)
The case of the traveling grape
Suits over slips attributed to fallen produce in grocery aisles are routine, of course, and grapes are among the most commonly named food items. The distinctive aspect of this British case seems to be the plaintiff’s theory that the grape might have gotten stuck to his shoe while in the store and then caused his mishap later, in the parking lot. (“Man sues M&S for £300K over grape”, BBC, Mar. 11).
More: Judge rules for defendant Marks & Spencer (BBC, Mar. 12, h/t commenter David Townsend).
Whited sepulchre watch
Client #9, also known as Eliot Spitzer, enthusiastically enlisted in a crusade for tougher anti-prostitution laws and specifically for steps to raise the penalties for “johns” who patronized the women involved. The campaign bore fruit, and in his first months as Governor Spitzer signed into law what advocates call “the toughest and most comprehensive anti-sex-trade law in the nation”. Among other provisions, the law “lays the groundwork for a more aggressive crackdown on demand, by increasing the penalty for patronizing a prostitute, a misdemeanor, to up to a year in jail, from a maximum of three months.” (Nina Bernstein, “Foes of Sex Trade Are Stung by the Fall of an Ally”, New York Times, Mar. 12).
Massachusetts mulls “sexual fraud”
Eliot Smurfer
The Money Laundering Control Act of 1986 was meant to criminalize the practice of “smurfing”, or evading reporting requirements on the transfer of large sums of cash by breaking the sums down into transactions below the threshold. (“Smurfs” were low-level operatives who agreed to go into banks repeatedly making deposits slightly below the trigger amount.) Who’d’ve imagined the law would trip up the best-known white collar crime prosecutor of our era? Newsday has the story, which has a Long Island angle:
Spitzer last year had wanted to wire transfer more than $10,000 from his branch to what turned out to be the front for the prostitution ring, QAT Consulting Group, which also uses a number of other names, in New Jersey, the sources said.
But Spitzer had the money broken down into several smaller amounts of less than $10,000 each, apparently to avoid federal regulations requiring the reporting of the transfer of $10,000 or more, the sources said. …
Apparently, having second thoughts about even sending the total amount in this manner, Spitzer then asked that the bank take his name off the wires, the sources said.
Bank officials declined, however, saying that it was improper to do so and in any event, it was too late to do so, because the money already had been sent, the sources said.
The bank, as is required by law, filed an SAR, or Suspicious Activity Report, with the Internal Revenue Service….
Millions of SARs are generated each week and flow into the Internal Revenue Service nationwide, but an analyst at the regional IRS office in Hauppauge [L.I.] noted Spitzer’s particular SAR and singled it out for attention to criminal investigators, the sources said.
The assumption, the sources said, was that Spitzer was being victimized either by a blackmailer or an impostor. The agents also speculated that perhaps the governor was involved in some sort of political corruption, the sources said.
Beldar (writing a day or two ago; note his update and caveats in an excellent post today):
If there were no other organized crime connections, that’s the kind of crime that might well result in a no-prison time recommendation and sentencing calculation for a first offender pleading guilty and cooperating.
AP also covers the smurfing charges, while Scott Greenfield has thoughts on the gradual erosion of financial privacy; I opined on some related matters in Reason a while back. WSJ law blog and Andrew McCarthy @ NRO discuss other charges that prosecutors might conceivably deploy against the governor. McCarthy, incidentally, contends that “innocent people in legitimate cash businesses have no concern” from the reporting requirements, which is not what I’ve heard.
More details from Wednesday’s NYT: It appears bank Suspicious Activities Reports separately directed investigators’ interest to Spitzer’s transactions and to the escort service front, QAT Consulting, and then the two investigations converged. “When he was New York State’s attorney general, Mr. Spitzer himself used the reports [SARs] to make his cases.”
Earlier here.
Radio today
This morning I was a guest on WTKK’s “Michael Graham Show” out of Boston to discuss the Spitzer scandal. I was also the guest of Mike Rosen on Denver’s KOA for a discussion of the case of the New York lawyer who’s suing casinos for $20 million after her out-of-control gambling ruined her career.
Spitzer and white-collar prosecution: live by the sword…
I’ve got a piece in this morning’s National Review Online on some of the ironies of the Spitzer scandal, which recalls echoes of the former prosecutor’s own “imperial CEO” rhetoric and may hinge on a crime — the “structuring” of cash transactions — whose enactment was very much part of the trend toward more ferocious white-collar law enforcement that you might call Spitzerization. (Walter Olson, “Saving Spitzer”, Mar. 11). P.S. I’ve also rounded up a lot of web coverage of the scandal over at Point of Law.
Spitzer and “structuring”
A helpful reader sends along the following information about the offense of “structuring”, which federal investigators are reportedly looking at closely in connection with the Spitzer affair:
If Spitzer structured cash transactions to evade reporting requirements, he may be guilty of a felony. 31 U.S.C. 5324 prohibits certain actions by any person who acts with the purpose of evading the reporting requirements of Section 5313 (Currency Transaction Reports). The definition of structuring for purposes of currency transaction reporting is found at 31 C.F.R. 103.11(gg). The elements of the structuring regulations are:
A person acting alone, in conjunction with others, or on behalf of others,
Conducts or attempts to conduct,One or more transactions in currency,
In any amount,
At one or more financial institutions,
On one or more days,
For the purpose of evading the reporting requirements of 31 C.F.R. 103.22 (requiring CTRs).
The definition is specifically written to include those transactions which occur beyond a single business day and transactions which are conducted through more than one financial institution, but only if the purpose of the transaction(s) is to evade the reporting requirements.
The reader adds: “The IRS Manual on the BSA structuring provisions is here.”
More: Kerr @ Volokh, WLS @ Patterico, Daniel Gross @ Slate , Mark Steyn (“Almost every white-collar federal offense – wire fraud, mail fraud – boils down to ‘paying for the train ticket'”), American Lawyer, ABC News, as well as my new piece @ NRO.
Yet more, from Eric Turkewitz: “It seems likely that an amount in excess of $10,000 must be at issue if this is what was being investigated, which means more of a mess than Eliot already has. And to tickle the bank to act, it may be a sum well in excess of that amount, because I wouldn’t think an investigation would be opened if they simply saw two transactions of, say, $6,000 each a few days apart. There could be substantially more at play here.”
Client 9 from outer space: Spitzer news open thread
You know you want to discuss it, so go ahead (news reference).