Peter Lattman notes this Jeff Smith/Rocky Mountain News article on Cliff Stricklin, the former Enron Task Force prosecutor who is gearing up as lead prosecutor in the upcoming criminal trial in Denver of Joseph Naccio, the former Qwest CEO. Naccio is charged with several fraud counts alleging that he sold over $100 million of stock during the first five months of 2001 while knowing that the telco’s finances were weakening. Naccio contends that he believed that the company’s finances and prospects were fine, and that his stock sales were simply a diversification strategy that he was pursuing at the behest of his investment advisors.
Although the article describes Stricklin’s goal of keeping the Naccio trial simple, it does note Stricklin’s dubious (and rather complicated) handling of the trial of the first Enron Broadband case, which ended in a crushing prosecution defeat:

In the Enron Broadband case in 2005, Stricklin failed to win convictions against the five former executives on trial. Three were acquitted on some charges, and the jury deadlocked on charges against the other two.
During the trial, the prosecution presented a videotape it said had been shown to stock analysts in 2000 when it hadn’t, a mistake Stricklin apologized for in his closing arguments. Stricklin also had to rebut defense arguments that some of the prosecution witnesses had tailored their testimony out of fear of being charged themselves.

That description soft-pedals Stricklin’s performance in the first Enron Broadband trial, which — as noted earlier here — exemplified the DOJ’s “anything for a conviction” attitude toward businesspeople in the post-stock market bubble era. Stricklin might also remember to be careful about what he asks on re-direct examination of cooperating witnesses during the Naccio trial.

The Conglomerate’s Lisa Fairfax notes that the Chinese government has handed a death sentence to a businessman who apparently was running a sort of Ponzi scheme making wine, tea and medical potions from black ants, which are widely believed in China to have medicinal value in the treatment of such ailments as arthritis.
On the other hand, the U.S. government goes after two businessmen who pioneered the enormously valuable risk management of natural gas prices for producers and industrial consumers and prosecutes one to death and sentences the other to an effective life sentence.
Who would have ever imagined that Russian government would look the most reasonable in its sentencing of alleged business wrongdoers?

I swear, you can’t make this stuff up.
A couple of weeks ago, the government was moving in on Wall Street in connection with its overwrought jihad on internet gambling interests. But now, Radley Balko notes that authorities are racheting down on an even more insidious gambling problem — great-grandmothers who run betting pools on NFL games at the local Elks Lodge!:

A volunteer waitress and a widowed great-grandmother who tends bar at the Lake Elsinore Elks Lodge are due in court later this month after pleading not guilty to misdemeanor charges of operating an illegal gambling operation.
Margaret Hamblin, 73, and 39-year-old Cari Gardner, who donates her time as a waitress at the lodge, face up to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine for allegedly running a $50 football pool at the facility, the Press-Enterprise reported.
The charges stem from a Nov. 20 investigation by state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents into an anonymous tip that lodge members bet on NFL games.
Behind the bar, the armed agents found an envelope with $5 from each of the 10 members taking part in the pool. The person who came closest to guessing the combined score of the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New York Giants was to pocket the contents, according to the Press-Enterprise.
“It was just regular ‘Monday Night Football,’ ” said Hamblin, who has tended bar for 40 years, six of them at the lodge. “We were sitting at the bar, and the gang wanted to do something,” she said, according to the newspaper.
Timothy Clark, who heads the department’s Riverside district, which issued the citations, said football pools “are a violation of the law, and we will take whatever we feel is appropriate action to ensure compliance by our licensees,” the newspaper reported.
Clark said he has recommended a one-year probationary period during which the lodge could host no gambling activities, or it would face a 10-day license suspension, according to the Press-Enterprise.
That means the end of events such as a “50-50” raffle in which proceeds typically go to scholarship funds and local charities for disabled children and veterans, Hamblin told the newspaper.
Hamblin and Gardner, who are represented on a pro bono basis, must return to court Feb. 28 for a preliminary hearing, at which a judge will determine if there are grounds to order them to stand trial.
In the meantime, beverage control officials are reviewing the Elks Lodge license, according to the newspaper.

Feel safer?

Jamie Olis, the former Dynegy mid-level executive whose prosecution and sentencing represents one of the most brutal examples of the federal government’s criminalization of business since the bursting of the stock market bubble earlier this decade, has finally received a small measure of relief in the latest stage of his ordeal.

Yesterday, the Bureau of Prisons finally transferred Olis from the downtown Houston Federal Detention Center to the Bastrop, Texas federal prison unit. The Bastrop unit is the original prison that Olis was assigned to when he began serving his sentence almost three years ago and is thankfully the most convenient location for Olis’ family members to visit him.

Olis spent over a year in the Detention Center in Houston — a facility that is meant to house prisoners for only short periods — because of prosecution foot-dragging in regard to his re-sentencing and then a four-month delay in assigning him to a permanent facility after he was re-sentenced. Here’s hoping that Bastrop will be Olis’ final prison destination before his release, probably in late 2009 or early 2010.

On the heels of the 10th Circuit’s scathing decision last month setting aside the convictions of former Westar Energy executives David Wittig and Douglas Lake, this Greg Burns/Chicago Tribune article reports that the legal tug-of-war between U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson and the appellate court over her handling of the criminal cases against Wittig continues.
As Burns reports, Judge Robinson re-sentenced Wittig earlier in the week to 24 months in prison on a bank fraud conviction that was not related to the larger prosecution of Wittig and Lake in regard to Westar. Judge Robinson handed down that sentence despite the fact that the 10th Circuit had already struck down two of her previous sentences on that charge, the most recent of which suggested that the sentence on the charge should be a maximum of six months. Wittig has already served over a year in prison.
Beyond his reporting on Wittig and the Westar-related criminal cases, Burns’ article is well worth reading simply for the depth of his analysis of how the prosecutions reflect the questionable nature of the regulation-of-business-through-criminalization policy that the federal government and state actors such as Eliot Spitzer adopted after the bursting of the stock market bubble at the beginning of this decade. As Burns notes, the Westar prosecutions have played more on widespread resentment of wealthy businesspersons than on clear lines of criminal liability. Such analysis is a refreshing change of perspective from what much of the mainstream media serves up about prosecutions of business interests.

Earlier this week, Michael Kopper, one of the few true crooks in the Enron affair, traipsed off to a federal prison in west Texas to begin serving the 37 month sentence that he received in return for his testimony that helped place four ex-Merrill Lynch executives in prison for a year in connection with the sordid Nigerian Barge case.

Meanwhile, former Dynegy executive Jamie Olis — whose only “crime” may have been some faulty judgment in doing what his bosses told him to do in attempting to bolster Dynegy’s finances — continues to sit in a dank, cramped jail cell in downtown Houston’s Federal Detention Center awaiting reassignment to a federal prison.

It’s now been over four months since Olis had his absurd original 24-year sentence reduced to a still egregious six years, which is the same length of sentence that Kopper’s boss, Andrew Fastow, is serving.

Olis has now been in the Federal Detention Center — essentially a holding tank for federal prisoners — for going on 14 months since the Fifth Circuit tossed out his 24-year sentence. Olis has now served over 40% of the time that he has been in prison in a jail facility not meant or equipped to hold prisoners serving lengthy sentences.

The Chronicle’s Tom Fowler follows up with this story about Olis’ ordeal, in which a governmental official observes that Olis’ reassignment has been “slowed because of the holidays and the recent spate of bad weather.”

Uh, Olis was re-sentenced over two months before the holidays. And I don’t recall the weather being all that bad over that period.

It’s understandable if Olis and his family are reluctant to request that the federal court examine what on earth is going on at the Bureau of Prisons that it can’t manage to assign Olis to an appropriate federal prison. Hell, the way this ordeal is going, the BOP in response to such a request might just throw away the keys to Olis’ cramped cell.

But the delay in reassigning Olis has now moved well beyond the realm of reason and is beginning to resemble the brutal nature of his original sentence.

Is the BOP simply impervious to such matters?

As anticipated, U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore this afternoon vacated the conviction of former Enron Broadband executive Kevin Howard on five counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, and falsifying books and records. Kristen Hays’ Chronicle article on the decision is here and the NY Times story on the decision is here.

Inasmuch as Judge Gilmore vacated Howard’s conviction, the Justice Department could try him again, which would be the third time on the same charges. Don’t bet against the DOJ doing just that.

The Enron Task Force prosecuted the first two cases against Howard in the same manner as the case against the defendants in the now utterly discredited Nigerian Barge case. The Task Force first asserted an unwarranted expansion of a criminal law intended to punish kickbacks and bribes against a businessman-defendant who did no such thing. Then, the Task Force took the case to trial and blatantly appealed to the strong juror resentment against anyone having anything to do with Enron to obtain a popular conviction against a supposedly wealthy businessman.

Shattered lives, families and careers now lie in the wake of this outrage. Who is going to answer for that?