NY Tax Dodging State Senator Gets 2 years at Club Fed

The New York Daily News is reporting that the former State Senator convicted on multiple counts of tax evasion who offered his services as a diplomat in lieu of jail, was sentenced to 2 years at the nearby Club Fed instead.  The story:

"[L]ongtime state legislator who admitted evading taxes and trying to influence a grand jury was sentenced Friday to nearly two years in prison.  Former state Sen. Vincent Leibell pleaded guilty in December, resigning after 28 years in the state Legislature.  Federal guidelines suggest a sentence of 18 to 24 months, and prosecutors had asked for the upper limit. The judge decided on 21 months.

Leibell had suggested that instead of prison, he be assigned to an American "nation-building team" in the Middle East. The Department of Justice called that request absurd, and the judge didn't mention it at sentencing.
Leibell, a Republican, had been elected Putnam County executive a month before his guilty plea. He gave up that post as well as the last month of his Senate term.

He admitted he filed false tax returns for 2003 through 2006.  Leibell spent 12 years in the Assembly before his 16 years in the Senate. The felony convictions don't affect his public pension, estimated at about $70,000 a year."

Fudging Is Another Word for Lying

A lawyer who is a candidate for a municipal court is admitting that he "fudged" the law enforcement endorsements listed in his campaign literature.  This is Joan Rusek's story from the Chagrin-Solon Sun News:

"Republican Chardon Municipal Court candidate Dennis Coyne admitted he 'tried to fudge' endorsements 'a little'  on his campaign literature during an April 19 phone call with Police Chief Jon Bokovitz.  That phone call was recorded, as are five phone lines that go through the Bainbridge police station’s nonemergency line [. . .] Those calls are answered by emergency dispatch operators.

Coyne was returning Bokovitz’s call. Bokovitz had called Coyne after a resident questioned him.
That resident received Coyne’s campaign postcard which states he is 'endorsed and supported by every police chief in Geauga County.'

The [campaign] literature, headlined with 'Honest – Ethical – Experienced,' also states Coyne is endorsed by 'every mayor, every prosecutor and every criminal public defender' in the county.  The resident questioned the endorsement because it has been a long-standing policy for the chief to not endorse candidates and issues other than a Bainbridge police levy.

[Police Chief] Bokovitz said he told Coyne, 'No,' when asked for an endorsement in January.  'There can be hard feelings with other candidates,' Bokovitz said. “Because it falls under political party lines, it can also create hard feelings with residents who belong to a different political party.'  In fact, Bokovitz would have been in an awkward position because one of his bosses, township Trustee Matt Lynch, is also running for the Republican ticket in the May 3 primary election."
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Ms. Rusek's article goes on at some length analyzing Mr. Coyne's rationalizations for lying about his claimed endorsements.

I'm not posting the story about Mr. Coyne to call him a liar, but the Sun News account fits into a couple of overlapping threads from the last couple of days:  the post at Bad Lawyer about the Judge who excluded the testimony and evidence which was supported by claimed expert testimony of an Alaskan State Trooper who said he could smell marijuana "grow operations;" and, the post and commentary at Scott Greenfield's Simple Justice blawg concerning a Las Vegas resident's beating at the hands of a violent cop provoked by the citizen's video recording of the officer involved.  In a larger sense the overlapping discussions relate to official honesty and integrity. 

Late yesterday morning I also heard James B. Stewart discussing (at the link you can listen as well, to Stewart talk about) his latest book, Tangled Webs with WAMU's Diane Rehm.  Stewart discussed high profile liars:  Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Martha Stewart, track and field star Marion Jones, Barry Bonds' trainer Greg Anderson, and Bernie Madoff.  Stewart provocatively asks about the corrosive effect that our lying.  Mr. Stewart concludes that failure to sanction lying degrades values and institutions and breeds widespread disregard for America and Americans internationally.  Let's go one step forward, (expected) petty lying by lawyers undermines the rule of law, respect for the law, and respect for legal outcomes. 

Personally, all this talk about lying and dishonesty makes me incredibly uncomfortable.  If you put "lying" into the search function of this blawg you will come up with dozens and dozens of posts over the last couple of years about lying cops, prosecutors, lawyers, politicians, judges, witnesses, and me.  This blawg is in many ways a reflection of the struggle on my part to come to grip with my dishonesty and lying.  It's real easy to see it in Clinton, Bush Rove, Madoff, but it's another thing to see the little bits of "fudging."  But fudging is lying.  There should be no place for "fudging" in the law.  That law enforcement and officers of the court are perceived to get away with it--is the problem.  And going forward, for me, there is no room for "fudging." 

More on Lying Florida Politicians

Remember the Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm, the journalist who told us the incredible story, re-posted on Bad Lawyer, of the North Miami, Florida mayor who can't remember who gave him the new Porshe?  Grimm has further tales of lying Florida politicians, all characters right out of the novels of Grimm's Miami Herald colleague, Carl Hiaasen:

"Four years ago, a Hillsborough County commissioner's wife bought a house on a lake in the Ozark Mountains with someone else's money.  Her hinky real estate deal in Arkansas now threatens to take all the fun out of political mendacity back in Florida.

Used to be that lying-by-omission on a candidate's financial disclosure form was a low-risk way to avoid embarrassing revelations. Like Bal Harbour City Councilman Joel Jacobi who failed to disclose that he was collecting rent on his condo. Which might have caused voters to wonder whether he actually lived in Bal Harbour.
Last year, the Florida Ethics Commission's advocate characterized Jacobi's credibility as `zero. If there is a number lower than zero, than it's that.'  Yet he was fined only $3,500. Chump change.

Among the sins of ousted Miami Commissioner Angel Gonzalez was a failure to disclose $135,000 in rental income. Other crimes led to his removal from office last year. The disclosure problem cost him a piddling $2,400 fine.  Another Miami commissioner in legal trouble, Michelle Spence-Jones, failed to disclose $46,000 legal liability. But that was considered the least of her alleged transgressions. Rung up a $500 fine.

U.S. Senatorial candidate Kendrick Meek's failure to disclose a relationship with a now-bankrupt medical waste firm amounted to a shrug.

And congressional candidate David Rivera still can't seem to remember his employers over these last few years. But Rivera's onetime claim to have worked for USAID magically disappeared from his amended disclosure form this week after the Miami Herald reported that the agency had no records of a relationship with Rivera.

Good timing, David. Suddenly, dodgy disclosures might mean something.

[But, Change is in the Air, at Least Temporarily]
Mearline Norman's Arkansas vacation house changed the calculation. The wife of Hillsborough Commissioner Jim Norman paid $527,717.34 for their resort home. Turns out that $500,000 of the cost was covered by Ralph Hughes, a Tampa concrete magnate who did lots of business with the Hillsborough County Commission.  Norman, who won this year's Republican nomination for state senate in a district with no Democratic opponent, failed to disclose the Arkansas house. The fellow who Norman defeated in the Republican primary filed suit.

The trial featured Big Jim claiming he never asked his wife, who hasn't worked since 1993, how she came up with the money. He explained the vacation home as the product of a `business partnership'  between Mearline and Ralph.  `The court finds this testimony patently absurd,' said Leon County Circuit Judge Jackie Fulford.

Then she utterly changed the game in Florida. On Friday, Judge Fulford tossed Norman off the ballot. A six-man committee from the Hillsborough and Pasco Republican Parties will choose a replacement candidate.

[But Has Anything Changed?]
Lying on disclosure forms finally meant more than a piddling fine. You could feel the tremors running through the political establishment.  Except the political establishment has never been much bothered by candidates who fudge disclosure forms. Not even a $500,000 omission.

The St. Petersburg Times reported this week that the nominating committee would likely replace the lying Jim Norman with -- you've guessed it -- the lying Jim Norman. So much for consequences."
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Locally, we have a suburban mayor, who was a high school drop-out.  He was the son of a man who owned and operated a gas station.  Over his many decades in public office, the Mayor became a millionaire.  How?  I'm not sure I have a precise answer. It had something to do with getting a "taste" of every development that happened in his affluent 'burb.

When one of his daughters accused him in a lawsuit of sexaully abusing her, the mayor dealt with the charges that he learned were about to surface in the media by preemptively calling his own press conference at the local firehouse--denouncing his daughter as "brain washed" by a hypnotist.  Hizzoner did not reveal what I knew, his other daughter corroborated the abuse, in depositions conducted by his attorneys. 

Later, Mayor Molester's constituents re-elected him.  Subsequently, he single-handedly undermined the expansion of the statute of limitations for victims of child sex abuse.  He testified at the OurState General Assembly through his testimony about the consequences of "false accusations" that "ruined [his] family" and caused him to have a heart attack.  The chain-smoking mayor omitted to mention that his marriage fell apart when he began screwing his City Hall secretary who was young enough to be his daughter. 

Mayor Molester sued me too, after  I appeared on the OurTown version of Good Morning America with his daughter.  In response to a question about the status of his daughter's lawsuit I accurately summarized the claim which had settled in his daughter's favor.   In the  "defamation" lawsuit he claimed I "smirked" when I provided the journalists with digest of his daughter's case against him. The case Mayor Molester filed against me was dismissed as frivolous. Unfortunately, it triggered a very poor decision on the part to shelter my finances from that time forward thinking I would protect my then newlywed wife.  I now recognize that these early practical decisions were the seeds of my destruction as a businessman; whihc I then compounded by many more unethical decisions on money management, as a practicing lawyer.