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Never Too Young to Spam
Anthony Greco, who is 18, entered a guilty plea today in Los Angeles to making extortionate threats against an internet instant messaging company, MySpace.com, if it did not give him "exclusive" rights to send commercial e-mails to users of the company’s instant messaging service. According to a press release issued by the U.S. Attorney for
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Director of Plastic Surgery at Kentucky Added to Fake Botox Indictment
A grand jury in the Southern District of Florida (Ft. Lauderdale) added Dr. Robert Baker, the director of plastic surgery at the University of Kentucky, to an indictment charging three other doctors and four corporations with mail fraud in promoting the sale and use of fake botox (see Feb. 7 post here). The superseding indictment
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Ninth Circuit Upholds SEC Temporary Freeze Authority for Extraordinary Payments
The Ninth Circuit issued an en banc opinion (here) upholding Section 1103 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which authorizes the SEC to seek a temporary freeze on extraordinary payments by a publicly-traded corporation when it is being investigated by the Commission for possible securities violations. The case, SEC v. Yuen, involves a freeze on a $37
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Assertion of the Fifth Amendment Leads to Firing of Two AIG Executives
An article in the Wall Street Journal (here) states that two senior American International Group Inc. executives — Howard Smith, the company’s CFO, and Christian Milton, a vice president — have been fired because they indicated that they would assert their Fifth Amendment rights in response to the investigation of the company by the SEC
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“King Richard of HealthSouth”
Weston Smith, the fifth of the Guilty CFOs (a good name for a garage band, for which HealthSouth was infamous), began his testimony in the prosecution of former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, by noting that executives referred to Scrushy as the "king" because he made every decision. The defense objection to that description was upheld,
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Legal Ethics Blog by Ben Cowgill
A new blog that is worth checking out is Legal Ethics Blog by Ben Cowgill (here). Ben pitches his blog to practitioners, and his take on issues will be useful as the number of ethics/professional responsibility issues that arise in white collar crime cases is certainly growing with lawyers involved in advising clients and (unfortunately)
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Seizing U.S. Assets of Foreign Officials
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has set up a Foreign Corruption Task Force (fact sheet here) in Miami to locate and seize properties in South Florida owned by officials of foreign governments who use funds from corruption in their home countries to purchase assets in the U.S. An AP story (here) describes the Task Force
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Time Warner Settles SEC Action with $300 Million Civil Penalty
Time Warner agreed to settle a civil action with the SEC, which had been hanging over the company’s head for over two years, by agreeing to pay a $300 million civil money penalty. The investigation concerned the accounting for $400 million worth of round-trip transactions between Bertelsmann AG and AOL related to advertising. The SEC’s
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Leaking Information to Harm Opposing Counsel?
Mike on the Crime & Federalism blog has an interesting post (here) about a leak of information concerning a tax investigation of a prominent civil rights attorney, and Mike’s theory about the reason for the leak that is linked to the government’s subsequent motion to have him disqualified because of a potential conflict of interest.
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“That’s My Boy”
The ugly brawl at the Pistons-Pacers game in 2004 has triggered an interesting situation in which the attorney for the fan accused of throwing a chair into a large group that included Pacers players will be called to testify at his (now former) client’s trial. Kenneth Karasick is on the prosecutor’s witness list because, according
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