Archive for the ‘Law’ Category

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You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#77 in a series)

Friday, December 17th, 2021

This is a couple days old, but I missed it. Hattip to Mike the Musicologist.

Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith was formally accused of “willful and corrupt misconduct” by a civil grand jury that had investigated the embattled official.

…

Court documents filed Tuesday revealed that jurors accused Smith of seven corruption-related acts, including favoritism and improperly issuing concealed-carry weapons permits.

…

Six involve ongoing criminal indictments alleging Smith engaged in political favoritism and traded favors by leveraging her control over issuing concealed-carry weapons permits.
The seventh accuses her of failing to cooperate with the county law-enforcement auditor in an investigation into negligence allegations stemming from a 2018 jail inmate’s injury that led to a $10 million county settlement, the Mercury News reported.

The articles I’ve read don’t say, but I’m 99 44/100ths percent sure that this is related to the Apple scandal that I wrote about a while back.

Now, I am not a lawyer, I am not a California lawyer, and I am especially not Perry Mason. (They renewed that crap for a second season? What is wrong with people?)

But, as I understand it, the “civil grand jury” indictments are not criminal. The “civil grand jury” in California is chartered to investigate “actions or performance of city, county agencies or public officials.”

The jurisdiction of the Civil Grand Jury is limited by statute and includes the following:

  • Consideration of evidence of misconduct against public officials to determine whether to present formal accusations requesting their removal from office
  • Inquiry into the condition and management of public prisons within the county
  • Investigation and report on the operations, accounts, and records of the officers, departments, or functions of the county including those operations, accounts, and records of any special legislative district or other district in the county pursuant to state law for which the officers of the county are serving in their ex officio capacity as officers of the districts
  • May investigate the books and records of any incorporated city or joint powers agency located in the county

So this isn’t the equivalent of criminal charges, but it is a grand jury saying “We think you’re corrupt as fark”.

It also has the authority to launch the process of removing an elected official from office. Accusations can be taken to trial by district attorneys.

More from KRON4:

Count 1: Illegally issuing concealed carry weapon permits (CCW) to VIP’s
Count 2: Failing to properly investigate whether non-VIP’s should receive CCW permits
Count 3: Keeping non-VIP CCW applications pending indefinitely
Count 4: Illegally accepting suite tickets, food, and drinks at Sharks game
Count 5: Failing to report Sharks game gifts on financial documents
Count 6: Committing perjury by failing to disclose Sharks game gifts
Count 7: Failing to cooperate with internal affairs investigation surrounding treatment of Andrew Hogan

Posted in Apple, California Über Alles, Guns, IANAL, Law, Politics | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 16, 2021.

Thursday, December 16th, 2021

Elfrida von Nardroff, historical footnote.

She kept a low public profile for much of her life, but back in the 1950s, she was on television. Specifically, the quiz show “Twenty-One”.

Over several months in 1958, Ms. von Nardroff charmed television viewers as she defeated one opponent after another on her way to winning $220,500 ($2.1 million in today’s dollars). That dwarfed the $129,000 (nearly $1.3 million) that the show’s most famous contestant, Charles Van Doren, an English instructor at Columbia University, had won in 1956 and 1957.

Of course, you know where this is going, right?

Within months after she took home the $220,500, Frank S. Hogan, the Manhattan district attorney, convened a grand jury to investigate quiz shows. Herbert Stempel, whom Mr. Van Doren had defeated on “Twenty-One,” had revealed that the producers had coached him extensively. An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight in 1959 followed. (The scandal became the focus of the 1994 film “Quiz Show,” directed by Robert Redford.)

…

Mr. Stone delved into Ms. von Nardroff’s claims of deep research and found them dubious. He saw little evidence for her claim that she had analyzed “Twenty-One” topics so extensively that she had filled numerous notebooks.
He sent investigators to the main branch of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, where they showed her picture to see if anyone recognized her from all the time she said she had spent there. They did not. (Ms. von Nardroff said she had taken out books but did not do research at the library, Mr. Stone recounted.) She admitted that the article in This Week was only “impressionistically true.”

…

She, Mr. Van Doren and 12 other contestants were arrested that October and charged with second-degree perjury, a misdemeanor. She and nine other contestants, including Mr. Van Doren, pleaded guilty in early 1962 and received suspended sentences.

For the historical record: bell hooks.

Posted in History, Law, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#AI of a series)

Wednesday, December 15th, 2021

CNN had an opening, now that they’ve canned Fredo. So who better to hire?

I missed this, probably because I don’t pay much attention to that network. Thank you to Gun Free Zone for tipping me off.

Posted in Law, Media | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 15, 2021.

Wednesday, December 15th, 2021

Frank “Frankie” Little Jr., a guitarist and songwriter with the O’Jays.

Little, born in 1943 and raised in Cleveland, was a guitarist and songwriter for The O’Jays in the mid-1960s. Eddie Levert, the lead singer for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band, told WEWS-TV Little moved with the group to California that decade, but didn’t stay on the West Coast.

…

“He could have been a great entity in the music business, but he was in love and love drove him back to Cleveland,” said Levert, who lost track of his one-time bandmate in the ensuing years.

…

Little was only with the band for a short time, The O’Jays said in a statement to Rolling Stone. He worked with Levert on a handful of songs, including 1964’s “Do the Jerk” and 1966’s “Pretty Words.”
“He came out with us when we first ventured out of Cleveland and traveled to Los Angeles, but was also in love with a woman in Cleveland that he missed so much that he soon returned back to Cleveland after a short amount of time,” the band said.

Mr. Little died sometime around or prior to February of 1982, but his death was not announced until recently, when his remains were identified.

The partial remains — first discovered in February 1982 in a garbage bag behind a now-shuttered business in Twinsburg, Ohio — were identified as Little’s using DNA provided by a close relative, police said in a statement Tuesday.
“In October 2021, the DNA Doe Project provided the names of potential living relatives, who were able to provide Frank’s name,” Twinsburg police said, adding that Little’s identity was later confirmed by a medical examiner who ruled his death a homicide.

…

Little’s partial remains were found in a garbage bag after a worker discovered a skull in snowfall behind the business, WEWS reported. The bones and body were “cut up” prior to being placed in bags, according to an original coroner’s report obtained by the station.

Cara Williams, actress. 55 credits in IMDB.

High points include “The Defiant Ones”, “We Go to Monte Carlo”, “The Man From the Diners’ Club”, and the wife of Harry Morgan’s character in “Pete and Gladys”.

Posted in Law, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

True crime watch.

Tuesday, December 14th, 2021

The Maund Automotive Group runs a lot of automobile dealerships, many in the Austin area. Erik Charles Maund is a partner in the group.

Erik Charles Maund has been indicted on murder for hire charges.

Allegedly, he asked a former girlfriend in Nashville if he could see her while he was in the area. Her new partner replied back and tried to blackmail Maund (who is/was married).

As a result, Maund is accused of hiring Peled and Brockway, in addition to North Carolina resident Adam Carey, 30, to help him deal with the threats and demands. Peled is a former member of the Israeli Defense Forces and owns the Austin-based Speartip Security services business. The DOJ says the business advertised it helped clients respond to extortion demands.
The department says Maund withdrew $15,000 from his account on the same day an “intelligence report” was prepared and given to Peled. Next, the department says Carey and Brockway traveled to Nashville to watch Williams and Lanway.

…

The indictment says Maund transferred around $750,000 via wire from his bank account to an account controlled by Peled — as payment for the kidnapping and murder of Williams and Lanway.
According to the arrest affidavit, Brockway and Carey murdered Lanway and Williams with several gun shots to the head before disposing of them at a construction site.

Of course, Mr. Maund and the other parties involved are entitled to the presumption of innocence. But the news coverage of this should be interesting to watch…

Posted in Law | Comments Closed

Tweet of the day.

Friday, December 10th, 2021

I don’t live in NH, so I don’t have a roo in this fight. But I did read the text of the proposed legislation.

While I am generally supportive, my one concern is that the appeal process for denial of a permit is to the state fish and game commission. I think it would be better if the appeal process was handled by a separate dedicated judicial body…

…a “kangaroo court”, if you will.

(I’ll see myself out.)

Posted in Law, Mammals, Politics | Comments Closed

Super quick legal note.

Friday, December 10th, 2021

21 new charges against Alex Murdaugh.

Posted in Law, Murdaugh | Comments Closed

Brief memo from the legal beat.

Thursday, December 9th, 2021

There’s a guy in Houston named Dennis Laviage. I have not heard of him previously, but he’s supposedly a well known scrap metal dealer “best known for buying Houston’s scraps with $2 bills”.

Mr. Laviage is engaged in a lawsuit against a former Houston Police sergeant, Jesse Fite. Mr. Laviage accuses Mr. Fite of withholding evidence from a judge, leading to a wrongful arrest.

In Texas, scrap metal buyers like Laviage are required to report purchases to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). The city of Houston also requires they send reports to a national database called Leads Online. This is, in part, so law enforcement can trace potential metal thieves who sell stolen scraps to unsuspecting buyers.
In 2015, C&D Scrap Metal was using a program called Scrap Dragon to fill out the proper forms and send them off to DPS and Leads Online. In the summer of that year, a glitch in Scrap Dragon withheld a handful of C&D’s reports from DPS, but all of the reports were still being filed with Leads Online. Once Laviage became aware, he notified police and insisted that he would file reports with DPS manually until the software issue was resolved.

…

Still, Fite continued his pressing until March 2016, when he filed for criminal charges against Laviage. In an application for Laviage’s arrest warrant, Fite accused the scrap metal dealer of “intentionally and knowingly” failing to report those scrap metal purchases to DPS. In the application, nowhere did it state that Laviage contended he knew about the issue and was actively trying to correct it.
A judge found probable cause for Laviage’s arrest based on the application. Several Houston police officers arrested him at his now-shuttered Heights location soon after. In September 2018, a jury found Laviage not guilty of the misdemeanor charge, and the case was expunged from his record. In December that year, Laviage filed a lawsuit in Harris County against Fite for false arrest and malicious prosecution, which was eventually moved to the federal court in the Southern District of Texas.

What’s interesting about this case to me is: last week, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Fite cannot raise a “qualified immunity” defense in this case. In theory, “qualified immunity” states that law enforcement can’t be sued for doing things within the scope of their employment. (I Am Not a Lawyer, and I am oversimplifying here.) In practice, “qualified immunity” has been used to cover a wide range of questionable behaviors: Reason has run a lot of stories on qualified immunity abuses.

Generally, a rejection of a QI defense is rare, so this story is noteworthy on that basis alone. But it also gives me a chance to throw in something absolutely unnecessary, but I think semi-relevant to metal theft:

Posted in Cops, IANAL, Law | 4 Comments »

“I feel blessed to live in such times.”

Monday, December 6th, 2021

That was a comment from a friend of mine when I sent this story around last month.

I didn’t blog it at the time because it was all rumors and I had no reliable or semi-reliable sourcing on it. But ESPN published an article over the weekend, so now it can be blogged.

Jeff Banks, who is an assistant coach at UT, and his girlfriend are being sued.

Why?

Their monkey allegedly bit a child.

According to the lawsuit, the child, identified as C.C., was trick-or-treating with two friends on Halloween and was invited to attend a haunted house. The lawsuit says that, after completing the haunted house, the child and his friends were taken to a monkey that Thomas kept in the backyard. According to the complaint, the child was told the monkey was trained to give high-fives.
“Instead of giving a high five, Danielle Thomas’s monkey aggressively bit down on C.C.’s hand and refused to let go,” says the lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by ESPN on Saturday. “C.C. was forced to manually pry the monkey’s jaw open. There was so much blood that C.C. was unable to see the full extent of the injury.”

…

According to the lawsuit, “Instead of showing any semblance of care for an injured child, Danielle Thomas was instead worried about the risk of her monkey being taken away. … Danielle Thomas stated to the physician that the monkey had bitten her before and that she was fine, implying that the monkey therefore did not have rabies.”

The family claims that Ms. Thomas has not yet provided vaccination records for the monkey. It isn’t clear from the article if C.C. had to go through the whole series of rabies shots.

Interesting side note:

Thomas is also identified as “Pole Assassin” in the lawsuit, her stage name as a dancer. She once appeared on “The Jerry Springer Show” with the monkey.

Posted in Law, Mammals, Monkeys, Primates, Sports | Comments Closed

Memo from the legal beat.

Wednesday, November 24th, 2021

I feel like I have to write about this story, since I don’t think it has received much attention, and it sits at the odd intersection of crime and publishing. I’m trying to step lightly here, because what happened to both of the people involved is horrible, and I hope they are able to find some measure of peace.

Anthony J. Broadwater was exonerated on Monday. He was convicted of rape and spent 16 years in prison, but his conviction was thrown out:

…a state judge, his defense lawyers and the Onondaga County district attorney agreed that the case against him had been woefully flawed.

What makes this story slightly more significant than many of these cases is: the victim was Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky, a non-fiction book about the attack.

Ms. Sebold used a fictitious name for Mr. Broadwater in her memoir, identifying him as Gregory Madison.

Ms. Sebold identified Mr. Broadwater as her attacker, but it seems like there were problems, even at the time:

After evidence was collected from a rape kit, she described her assailant’s features to the police, but the resulting composite sketch didn’t resemble him, she wrote.
Mr. Broadwater was arrested five months later, after Ms. Sebold passed him on the street and contacted the police, saying she may have seen her attacker.
But she identified a different man as her attacker in a police lineup. In her memoir, she writes that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him looked alike and that moments after she made her choice, she felt she had picked the wrong man. She later identified Mr. Broadwater in court.

…

In their motion to vacate the conviction, the defense lawyers J. David Hammond and Melissa K. Swartz wrote that the case had relied solely on Ms. Sebold’s identification of Mr. Broadwater in the courtroom and a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis.
They also argued that prosecutorial misconduct was a factor during the police lineup — that the prosecutor had falsely told Ms. Sebold that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her — and that it had improperly influenced Ms. Sebold’s later testimony.

Kind of interestingly, this whole thing was triggered by a planned film version of the book:

Timothy Mucciante was working as executive producer of the adaptation of “Lucky,” but began to question the story that the movie was based on earlier this year, after he noticed discrepancies between the memoir and the script.
“I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together,” Mr. Mucciante said in an interview.
Mr. Mucciante said that he ended up leaving the production in June because of his skepticism about the case and how it was being portrayed.

He hired a PI, they gathered evidence, they approached a lawyer (and, coincidentally, Mr. Broadwater hired the same lawyer), one thing led to another which led to the motion to vacate the conviction, and Mr. Broadwater is no longer a sex offender.

Ms. Sebold had no comment on the decision, a spokesman for Scribner, which published “Lucky,” said. The spokesman said that the publisher had no plans to update the text.

Posted in Books, Law | 1 Comment »

Noted.

Friday, November 19th, 2021

Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam did not kill Malcolm X.

Mr. Aziz and his co-defendant, Khalil Islam, were exonerated on Thursday after a review initiated by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., found that they had not received a fair trial. The investigation found that evidence pointing toward their innocence had been withheld by some of the country’s most prominent law enforcement agencies, and that at least some information was suppressed on the order of the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover.

Posted in Cops, FBI, History, Law, NYPD | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 12, 2021.

Friday, November 12th, 2021

Still on the road, but taking a few minutes to round up some obits from the past few days. Sorry if this seems compressed.

F.W. de Klerk.

John Artis, historical and legal footnote. He was the other guy convicted with Hurricane Carter.

“The police and Passaic County law-enforcement establishment was out to get Rubin, and I got tied in only because I was with him on the night of the shootings,” Mr. Artis told The New York Times in 1988. “I was always the guy in the background, the other guy in the case that no one knew or cared about.”

Jerry Douglas. He was most famous for “The Young and The Restless”, but he had a pretty extensive career. “Barnaby Jones”, “Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockleman, Private Eye”, “The Dead Don’t Die”…

…and he was a “Mannix” three-timer. Sadly, IMDB has messed up the site to where I can’t easily get a list of his episodes.

Posted in 1970s, History, Law, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 29, 2021.

Friday, October 29th, 2021

Richard Hammer, author. He wrote two books on the My Lai massacre:

Mr. Hammer’s account of the My Lai slaughter in 1968, “One Morning in the War: The Tragedy of Son My” (1970), was frequently reviewed alongside one by Seymour M. Hersh, who had broken the story — “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath.” (The village of Son My included the hamlet of My Lai.)
“Richard Hammer — knowing perhaps that Hersh had the jump on him — tried to put the incident in perspective and thereby ended up writing the better book,” the book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times.“He took the time,” he added, “to explain the gradual depersonalization of the Vietnamese in American soldiers’ eyes — to make us understand how even women and children begin to seem hated and dangerous.”
Mr. Hammer followed up that book with another centered on the massacre, “The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley,” which John Leonard of The Times numbered among “a handful of public-affairs books published in 1971 that people will be reading a generation from now.” William Styron, writing in The Times Book Review, called it “an honest, penetrating account of a crucially significant military trial.”

…

Mr. Hammer also wrote and narrated the film “Interviews With My-Lai Veterans” (1970), which won an Oscar for best documentary (short subject).

Additionally, he was a two-time winner of the Edgar award for “best fact crime” for books unrelated to My-Lai: The CBS Murders: A True Account of Greed and Violence in New York’s Diamond District and The Vatican Connection: The True Story of a Billion-Dollar Conspiracy Between the Catholic Church and the Mafia (affiliate links).

Viktor Bryukhanov, the guy who took the rap for Chernobyl.

After serving five years in prison, Mr. Bryukhanov returned to government service in Ukraine to head the technical department in its Economic Development and Trade Ministry.

It really was a different country, wasn’t it?

Sonny Osborne, of the Osborne Brothers.

Best known for their 1967 hit “Rocky Top,” the Osborne Brothers pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing in which Bobby Osborne sang tenor melodies pitched above the trio’s other two voices, instead of between them, as was the custom in bluegrass. Sonny Osborne sang the baritone harmonies, with various second tenors over the years adding a third layer of harmony to round out the bright, lyrical blend that became the group’s calling card.
The Osbornes broke further with bluegrass convention by augmenting Mr. Osborne’s driving yet richly melodic banjo playing — and his brother’s jazz-inspired mandolin work — with string sections, drums and pedal steel guitar. They were also the first bluegrass group to record with twin banjos and, more alarming to bluegrass purists, to add electric pickups to their instruments, abandoning the longstanding practice of huddling around a single microphone.

This is in the NYT article, and I’ve posted this before, but fark that: I’m in the mood right now for some insurrectionist music.

Eleonore von Trapp Campbell, of the von Trapp family.

Mrs. Campbell’s father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, had the seven children who were the basis for the singing family. Maria Kutschera married the captain after Agathe von Trapp died.
Georg and Maria von Trapp had three children, who were not depicted in the movie; Mrs. Campbell was the second. Early on, she sang soprano as a member of the Trapp Family Singers, who performed in Europe before World War II and, after fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, continued to do so in the United States and internationally.

Martha Henry. She was 83.

For the last role of her long career, Martha Henry, one of Canada’s finest stage actors, played the character in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” known simply as A. Mr. Albee’s character description reads in part, “a very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow.”
As Ms. Henry took to the stage at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in August to begin the play’s two-month run, the cancer she had been dealing with for more than a year was well along. She used a walker in the first shows. In September she performed the role from a wheelchair, soldiering on in the demanding part through the final performance, on Oct. 9.

David DePatie, co-creator (with Friz Freleng) of “The Pink Panther”.

George Butler, documentary filmmaker. Among his credits: “Pumping Iron”, aka “the movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star”.

NYT obit for Val Bisoglio.

In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.
“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 26, 2021.

Tuesday, October 26th, 2021

Francis Wayne Alexander. Mr. Alexander is believed to have died sometime between 1976 and 1977, but his death was not announced until Monday.

Mr. Alexander moved to Chicago from New York with his wife in 1975, officials said. The couple divorced months later, and Mr. Alexander remained in Chicago.
He lived on Winona Street on the North Side of Chicago, in a neighborhood where Mr. Gacy was known to have targeted other victims, including William Bundy, a 19-year-old construction worker.

…

The Sheriff’s Department was aided by a nonprofit organization, the DNA Doe Project, whose all-volunteer staff tries to match unidentified remains with genetic profiles that had been uploaded to an open-source genealogy database.
Using DNA from one of Victim No. 5’s molars, the DNA Doe Project found connections to Mr. Alexander’s family. Detective Moran followed up with research, interviews and further DNA testing before confirming that he had found the identity of the victim.

The confirmed identification of Mr. Alexander leaves five remaining unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office is actively working to identify those as well.

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#76 in a series)

Wednesday, October 20th, 2021

Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-Nebraska) was indicted yesterday.

Specifically, he’s charged with the ever popular lying to the Feds.

The indictment stems from a separate federal investigation into Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese Nigerian billionaire who was accused of conspiring to make illegal campaign contributions to American politicians in exchange for access to them.
Foreign citizens are prohibited by federal law from contributing to U.S. election campaigns. Mr. Chagoury admitted this year to providing approximately $180,000 to four candidates from June 2012 to March 2016. He said he had used others, including Toufic Joseph Baaklini, a Washington lobbyist, to mask his donations.
Mr. Fortenberry, who has served in Congress for 15 years, was one of those politicians. He is not disputing the fact that the donations, ultimately from Mr. Chagoury, were illegal.
“Five and a half years ago, a person from overseas illegally moved money to my campaign,” Mr. Fortenberry said in his video. “I didn’t know anything about this.”

But the government is saying he’s lying about not knowing the donations were illegal.

The government said in court filings that in spring 2018, one of Mr. Fortenberry’s fund-raisers told the congressman that he had funneled $30,000 from Mr. Baaklini to the 2016 re-election event, but that the money “probably did come from Gilbert Chagoury.”
The fund-raiser, referred to as Individual H in the indictment, was cooperating with law enforcement when he spoke with Mr. Fortenberry, according to the indictment.
Despite the fact that the donations were most likely illegal, Mr. Fortenberry did not take appropriate action, such as filing an amended report with the Federal Election Commission or returning the contributions, the indictment said. It was not until after the Justice Department contacted him in July 2019 that Mr. Fortenberrry returned the contributions, according to the document.
In his initial interview with the F.B.I. in 2019, Mr. Fortenberry said that the people who had contributed during his fund-raising event in 2016 were all publicly disclosed, and that he was unaware of any contributions made by foreign citizens, according to the indictment.

Noted:

Mr. Chagoury entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department in 2019. Under that agreement, he admitted to wrongdoing. The department can use those admissions in other matters. He also agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in their investigation. In return, the U.S. government agreed to drop the charges. The matter was ultimately resolved this year, when Mr. Chagoury paid a $1.8 million fine.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

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