Here is how the “Justice” system goes after big fry.
Excerpted from the capable lawyer, Harvey Silverglate, acclaimed author of “Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent“:
In 1981, Bill Weld, a blue-blooded, Harvard educated Mayflower descendant became US Attorney for Massachusetts. When Weld assumed his office, a number of high profile political corruption cases recently had splashed across the Boston Globe’s pages; Weld saw official corruption as his primary target, both because of its seeming ubiquity and, I suspect, due to the utility which prosecuting such cases might have on a nascent political career.
Weld wanted to fry a big fish, and it seemed that he had the perfect target: then-Mayor of Boston Kevin Hagan White. There was only one problem: White seemed cleaner than Caesar’s wife! So Weld did the next best thing—he would start at low level corruption, and eventually work his way up to the boss.
Weld started with a bureaucrat in the Boston Redevelopment Authority named George Collatos. In 1982, Collatos was caught in a tape-recorded sting attempting to extort $45,000 from a contractor. Fearing three years in federal prison, Collatos jumped at a deal; he would have his sentence reduced if he would testify to who higher up in city government was involved in the extortion. Collatos was to be the first domino in a line leading straight to the Mayor’s Office.
Collatos was not close enough to Mayor White to claim that he knew first-hand of any of the mayor’s suspected wrongdoings; instead, Collatos focused his testimony on the man who would become my client: Theodore “Teddy” Anzalone, a confidant, fundraiser, and friend of the Mayor. Collatos claimed that Anzalone, acting for the mayor, solicited an $8,000 cash bribe from the C.E. Maguire Company of Providence, a company with contracts to provide engineering services to the massive rebuilding projects undertaken at the time by the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Weld’s strategy here was clear: if he could get Anzalone through Collatos, he could get White through Anzalone.
Having been turned onto Anzalone by Collatos, Weld searched hither and yon for something prosecutable. He settled on three charges. The first was the $8,000 extortion charge, the second was a money laundering charge involving a birthday party for the mayor’s wife, and the third was a money laundering charge involving the transfer of $100,000 cash. Taken together, Weld thought, the charges represented a clear conspiracy to hide money that was, itself, ill-gotten through extortionate activities on behalf of the mayor. Never mind that they did not have a clear linkage between the alleged extortion money and the laundering: Weld’s thought was that the jury would make that link on its own.
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The prosecutors erupted in outrage and anger. After all, here it was the defense that had engineered a sting, a tactic normally left for the prosecution team. They tried to argue that the judge should exclude this evidence from the jury’s knowledge. They argued surprise. In reality, they must have known it was a lost cause, as Gertner and I had no legal or ethical obligation to report to them Collatos’s attempted extortion of Anzalone as soon as it happened. We had merely given the feds a taste of their own medicine.
But, as he adds, “in the end, though, when fighting against the federal government, nearly all victories become at least partially Pyrrhic“.
Read the rest of the story here…
You may have known the concept. Now you know what it’s called, too.
Another article on this (behind a paywall).
