Category: Money Laundering

One Angry Man: Two sentencing hearings shed light on city’s shadow economy

By Jeffrey Anderson and Van Smith

Published in City Paper, March 26, 2008

U.S. District Court Chief Judge J. Frederick Motz’s temper flared during the March 20 sentencing hearing of Baltimore mortgage broker David Lincoln, who pleaded guilty last year to bank fraud for his part in an alleged drug and money-laundering conspiracy headed by fugitive Shawn Michael Green (“Flight Connections,” March 12).

“I’m getting myself riled up here,” Motz said from the bench. “I don’t understand why Mr. Lincoln isn’t here as a co-conspirator . . . on the white-collar end of a major drug operation.” Green, himself a former mortgage broker, clothing-store owner, and record-studio executive with a thin rap sheet, has been in hiding since early last year, after being indicted for cocaine and heroin trafficking and money laundering. The indictment calls for the forfeiture of property and assets totaling more than $4 million.

The senior judge’s remarks came as assistant U.S. attorney Kwame Manley was seeking a 10-month prison term for Lincoln for helping Green launder drug money. Motz indicated he would prefer to put the 38-year-old mortgage broker behind bars for 10 years. The judge’s comments were unusually stark and echoed widespread discontent among the federal judiciary regarding decades-old sentencing guidelines that weigh heavily against low-level drug offenders and street-corner dealers.

“So I’m going to postpone the sentencing, think it through myself,” he said before rescheduling Lincoln’s hearing until April 4, the same day that Green’s mother, Yolanda Crawley, is scheduled to be sentenced for using her son’s drug proceeds to pay off fraudulently obtained mortgages on luxury homes in Florida, Georgia, and Maryland.

On March 18, Motz had been less stern when a third participant in the mortgage-fraud scheme–attorney Rachel Donegan, Lincoln’s ex-lover–appeared for sentencing. Donegan, who surrendered her law license after pleading guilty last fall, left Motz’s courtroom in tears, even though the judge had sentenced her to three years probation rather than prison time.

Motz had justified Donegan’s light sentence after defense attorney Gregg Bernstein argued that she was a minor participant who did not know she was dealing with drug money, and that her judgment was clouded by Lincoln’s dominance over her. “I think those arguments are very well put,” Manley said, agreeing with his adversary. “I don’t have any quibble with that at all.” Another mitigating factor, Bernstein argued, was that Donegan was distracted by a bitter custody battle involving her young niece. “Tough to give probation to somebody who committed mortgage fraud who is a member of the bar,” Motz replied, before doing just that.

But on March 20, with Lincoln before him, Motz said he may have misread Donegan’s role. “I came in based upon the Donegan sentencing” believing that “she was motivated into committing a crime because she was trying to maintain a relationship that had fallen apart with Mr. Lincoln,” Motz said. “That may be inaccurate,” the judge observed, after hearing Lincoln’s attorney, William Purpura, oppose attempts to transfer blame to his client.

In addition, Donegan and Lincoln have been sued recently in connection with mortgage irregularities that suggest their improprieties may not have been limited to phony loan applications on behalf of Shawn Green. One lawsuit seeks a full audit of their loan-processing activities.

Outside the courtroom after his hearing, which fell on his birthday, Lincoln seemed taken aback when told by a reporter that Donegan received probation after blaming him for her actions. When asked whether the blame was misplaced, he paused, then replied coolly, “After I think it through, I’ll call you.”

Finger-pointing aside, Motz said his larger concern was how the case reflects entanglements between drug dealers and white-collar professionals. “Seems to me, Mr. Lincoln was on the edge of society” with people who are “probably worse than street dealers,” the judge said. “Here’s an intelligent person . . . taking illegal money and putting it into the legal mainstream.” In contrast to Manley’s recommended sentences for Donegan and Lincoln, Motz continued, prosecutors routinely go for 20-year career-criminal sentences against street dealers.

Manley acknowledged there was “some evidence” that Lincoln knew he was helping a drug dealer, and that the government could have charged Lincoln as a co-conspirator. However, the prosecutor said, “To be fair to Mr. Lincoln . . . he did not participate in the selling of drugs.” In addition, Manley said, Lincoln offered prosecutors a list of 10 clients referred to him by Green: “When people sit down with the government and make efforts to talk with us, help us out, we will do so in response.”

Lincoln and Donegan offered title services and mortgage brokering for real-estate transactions, turning out loan applications via two companies: Guilford Title and Escrow and First Metropolitan Mortgage. Green is described in court proceedings as a social and business acquaintance of Lincoln.

Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein told City Paper on March 20 that Green’s alleged conspiracy includes at least two other men charged with drug-trafficking crimes. In 2006, Green was stopped in a car containing nearly $1 million in cash, along with Maurice K. Phillips and Anthony W. Ballard, who since have been indicted in Pennsylvania and Maryland, respectively. Phillips is the alleged kingpin of the Phillips Cocaine Organization, whose members are charged with murder-for-hire to protect a $31 million international enterprise that stretched from Mexico to the U.S. East Coast. Unlike Green, Phillips and Ballard are in federal custody awaiting trial.

Adding to Green’s mystique are his ties to a pair of politically connected East Baltimore businessmen: Noel Liverpool Sr. and Milton Tillman Jr. Green turned to Liverpool Sr. in the mid-1990s for help in setting up a now-defunct urban apparel store, Total Male II, in Mondawmin Mall. Tillman Jr., a convicted felon and former club owner who boasts the largest share of Baltimore City’s bail-bonds market, is a founding board member of the company that owns the Total Male trade name, which Green used with the company’s written permission.

Law enforcement documents obtained by City Paper also show one of Green’s addresses as 2330 E. Monument St., a location shared by Total Male and two of Tillman Jr.’s companies: Four Aces Bail Bonds and New Trend Development.

Green and his far-flung connections loom over the pending sentencing hearings for Yolanda Crawley and David Lincoln–and the lenient sentence that Motz already handed to Rachel Donegan.

Challenging Donegan’s love-gone-bad story are court records claiming that other home loans processed by Guilford Title and Escrow are improper. Two lawsuits recently filed in Baltimore City Circuit Court portray a pattern of questionable conduct rather than an “isolated, aberrant episode” during the summer of 2005, as Donegan’s attorney successfully argued before Motz. The lawsuits allege that, since that summer, she failed to record numerous loan documents with the courts, a lapse that has clouded title to at least seven properties in the Baltimore area.

One lawsuit claims the total number of affected properties is unknowable without a full audit of the company. That has yet to happen, but the lawsuit contends available records “raised additional questions concerning the proper handling of funds received and disbursed by Guilford,” and calls transactions in and out of Guilford’s escrow account “highly unusual.”

The other lawsuit makes the same claim–that Donegan failed to record loan documents–regarding a home purchase by Carolyn Pratt and Cynthia Glover, also named as defendants. Pratt confirms she was in the bail bonds business at the time of the purchase and wrote bails in conjunction with Milton Tillman Jr.’s company as recently as 2006. A public-records search for contact information for Glover leads to an address related to Shawn Green’s drug conspiracy: 2339 Eutaw Place. The Reservoir Hill apartment building was owned by Green until the government seized it in a forfeiture proceeding and sold it at auction on March 20–the date of Lincoln’s cut-short sentencing hearing.

Pratt says she knows little about Donegan and Lincoln, and nothing about Green. “This mixes us up with something that we don’t even know anything about,” she says, adding that she and Glover are “kind of stuck in the middle of not knowing what these people are up to.” City Paper‘s attempts to reach Glover, including through Pratt, were unsuccessful.

Green’s alleged ties to the Phillips Cocaine Organization add to the intrigue. Details of his own conspiracy case remain under seal, but the Phillips indictment offers a road map for the convoluted world of high-level drug dealing.

The 62-page Phillips indictment that federal authorities filed last September identifies several key modus operandi requiring the services of lawyers and money managers. They include: compartmentalizing the organization so that members of the conspiracy do not know what the others are doing; using fraudulently obtained loans to purchase investment properties, and drug proceeds to repay those loans; employing relatives, friends or money-laundering associates to open bank accounts and purchase expensive homes and cars; and making cash payments to attorneys representing co-conspirators and other drug traffickers to engender loyalty.

The question Judge Motz will be asking at David Lincoln’s sentencing on April 4 is: To what extent was he knowingly involved with more than simply a handful of bogus loans? The question Lincoln and his lawyer could be asking is: How did Rachel Donegan get off without facing a single night in prison?

Team Player: Lawyer in Guyanese coke case accused of witness intimidation

By Jeffrey Anderson and Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Sept. 24, 2008

New York criminal defense attorney Robert Simels calls himself the “Rolls Royce of attorneys.” The claim is based in large part on his 90 percent acquittal rate and his representation of legendary gangsters such as Henry Hill of Goodfellas fame. But his stature as a legal titan is more complicated than his success in fighting for clients. It is also based on his controversial methods, which have long irked judges, prosecutors, and peers alike.

Simels’ critics, whose concerns have been aired publicly since the 1980s, at times in open court, may not find it surprising that he was recently arrested in New York on federal charges that he plotted to intimidate witnesses on behalf of the head of a violent Guyana-based drug organization.

Yet while Simels has carved a reputation in New York worthy of some twisted episode of Law and Order, he also has established a deep roster of clients with Maryland ties (see article at left), including the Guyanese kingpin with whom Simels was allegedly scheming this summer to “eliminate” witnesses.

The defendant’s name is Shaheed Khan, though he also goes by Roger Kahn and “Boss Man.” In the early 1990s, he was a gun-running, pot-dealing extortionist in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. He fled to Guyana after U.S. authorities charged him in 1993 with being a felon in possession of a firearm. There, Khan heads a vast cocaine-trafficking organization that operates a paramilitary death force called the Phantom Squad, according to separate U.S. charges filed in 2006.

On Sept. 10, the international intrigue surrounding the Khan organization peaked, as Simels and co-counsel Arienne Irving were arrested and charged in federal court. The affidavit for their arrest chillingly portrays the attorneys going too far to protect their clients’ interests, and raises questions about how far they might have gone in the past. Intercepted conversations, many of them recorded via body wire worn by an informant and member of Khan’s Phantom Squad, show Simels and Irving discussing violence as a means of “eliminating” witnesses or “neutralizing” their testimony against Khan.

The intercepted conversations suggest that Simels intended to place potential witnesses in difficult positions. According to the affidavit, which details a series of meetings and discussions over a four-month period, Simels explored “a range of options, from offering them money to murdering their family members.” In one of the conversations, Simels is recorded telling the Phantom Squad member-turned-informant that Khan “wants you to do whatever needs to be done.” Off limits, however, was another witness’ mother. “Don’t kill the mother,” Simels tells the informant during a June meeting at his law office, or “the government will go crazy.”

Federal prosecutors have been wary of Simels, who was an assistant U.S. attorney in the 1970s, long before the Khan case. He handled a drug-conspiracy case in New York City in 1988, for instance, in which two government witnesses recanted their sworn statements and a third was shot. After the shooting, Simels met privately in prison with the man who confessed to shooting the witness and got him to change his story, according to court records. Prosecutors told the judge that Simels had warned the confessor that he should not testify against his “friends” from the street “while his family was out there.” A legal logjam ensued, as Simels figured to become both a witness and the lead attorney in the case; the judge declared a mistrial.

In 2005, according to a New York Law Journal article published on Sept. 11, 2008, New York federal judge Joanna Seybert aired her suspicions that Simels withheld full information from his own client about a plea-bargain offer, possibly so the case would continue and Simels could continue getting paid or tap into some of his client’s drug profits. Just last year, in the Khan case, New York federal judge Dora Irizarry criticized Simels for revealing the names of potential witnesses at a press conference in Guyana. Irizarry declined to sanction Simels but wrote that his “reckless” conduct “degrades the standards of this profession.”

Now, as Simels faces witness-intimidation charges, Baltimore-based prosecutors and defense attorneys similarly express discomfort with him and his methods. One assistant U.S. attorney who has gone up against Simels, speaking on background, puts it like this: “He has done cases [in Maryland] a number of times involving serious, sizable drug dealers. He doesn’t have a good reputation. His clients never cooperate, even when it is in their best interests. I find that unusual, and one could wonder about whether his loyalty is to the client.”

Towson-based criminal defense attorney David Irwin, a former federal prosecutor, says Simels is aggressive and hard charging. But the veteran defender cautions that attorneys must be careful to balance such zealousness against ethics–and the law. “I tell my young associates,” Irwin says, “make sure when you are talking to a witness, that if someone were taping the conversation, you wouldn’t mind hearing it come out in court or in the media.”

Regarding the taped conversations that led to Simels being charged with witness intimidation, Irwin says, “It certainly sounds as if Simels is at least stomping on the line, if not stepping over it.”

The drug-dealing charges against Khan don’t indicate that his cocaine came to Maryland. However, in 2004, a large haul of Guyanese coke totaling more than 150 kilograms was seized coming from Georgia to Baltimore.

Simels’ attorney in the witness-intimidation case, Gerald Shargel, has been quoted in news coverage calling the government’s allegations against Simels false. “Bob Simels is well-known as a tenacious, effective, and highly capable defense lawyer, and he was doing his work,” Shargel said, adding that “it’s easy for prosecutors to make an accusation, but it’s quite another thing for them to prove it.”

Return Flight: Fugitive Shawn Green arrested

By Jeffrey Anderson and Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Dec. 24, 2008

After fleeing from a federal indictment in early 2007 (“Flight Connections,” March 12), Shawn Michael Green was arrested Dec. 14 in Pennsylvania and taken to Maryland to face drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges.

Aside from those charges, court records in other proceedings point to connections with an allegedly violent cocaine conspiracy under indictment in Pennsylvania involving associates of Green, who has hired New York criminal defense titan Robert Simels as his lawyer.

First appearances in federal court in Baltimore on Dec. 19 set a high-profile tone for Green’s case, in part because Simels is under indictment in New York on charges of witness intimidation (“Team Player,” Sept. 24.)

Between the Pennsylvania and Maryland cases, Green and his associates, who have alleged drug ties to Mexico and property interests all along the Eastern Seaboard, are now under the federal looking glass.

“It is a big country,” Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein said in a statement, regarding Green’s arrest. “But most fugitives on federal felony warrants are caught before long. We look forward to Shawn Green having his day in court.”

According to federal court documents, Green was a “known narcotics trafficker” in February 2006 when federal agents observed him in a Prince George’s County parking lot with two men currently indicted in federal court in Philadelphia: Maurice Phillips and Anthony Ballard, leaders of the alleged Phillips Cocaine Organization (PCO). After the meeting, in which Phillips retrieved a black duffel bag from Green’s car, agents stopped Ballard and seized more than $900,000 cash.

Phillips was indicted in 2007 on drug-trafficking, money-laundering, and murder-for-hire charges. Ballard, a 38-year-old Baltimore man with Eastern Shore ties, has agreed to plead guilty to drug-conspiracy charges in the PCO case, and in October in Maryland he pleaded guilty to drug-distribution charges and participation in a Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration identity-theft scam.

Green’s precise role in the PCO is unclear, and he has not been indicted in that case, but according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Linwood C. Wright Jr., in Philadelphia, “You can match the overt acts of the Phillips indictment” with the allegations against Green in Maryland “and draw your own conclusions.” In all, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland says it has seized or forfeited five properties belonging to Green, Ballard, or Phillips, who owns real estate from New Jersey to North Carolina. Another Baltimore man charged in the PCO case, Sherman Kemp, featured in the Stop Fucking Snitching DVD, pleaded guilty in Maryland in July to drug conspiracy and was sentenced to 180 months in prison.

In addition to his Pennsylvania ties, Green is an associate of politically connected businessman Noel Liverpool (“All Around Player,” Oct. 8.) Green, whose Reservoir Hill house was forfeited this spring, and Liverpool, a Morgan State University two-sport star in the 1980s, were in business together in the 1990s in a clothing store, Total Male II. Liverpool has never been the subject of drug-related charges.

While Green, age 42, was on the lam, his co-conspirator and mother, Yolanda Crawley, was convicted and sentenced for mortgage fraud and drug-money laundering. Lawyer Rachel Donegan and mortgage broker David Lincoln also pleaded guilty in the fraud scheme, which involved luxury homes in Maryland, Georgia, and Florida. Green’s role in this conspiracy is part of his current indictment.

The accusations against Green “demonstrate how criminal drug dealers operate in Baltimore,” according to Rosenstein. “People who do business with drug dealers often know where the money comes from,” he says. “Drug-enforcement efforts can be successful only if we follow the money.”

On Dec. 19, Simels arrived in Baltimore to enter his appearance on behalf of Green, who already had been brought before U.S. District Court judge James Bredar on Monday, Dec. 15, the day after his arrest. Perhaps 15 to 20 family members and friends of Green packed the courtroom, and several conferred at length with Simels before the hearing.

Though Simels did not contest prosecutor Kwame Manley’s request that Green be detained pending trial, he cautioned against holding him at the Supermax facility in downtown Baltimore, where he is currently detained. “I’m concerned about the potential cooperators also housed there that he may be unfortunately exposed to,” Simels said. Bredar left the issue to be worked out between counsel and set scheduling on motions leading up to a trial date that has yet to be set.

Flight Connections: Shawn Green is more than an accused drug trafficker on the run

Screen Shot 2019-04-11 at 9.02.50 AM
A booking photo of Shawn Michael Green, dating from the 2000s.

By Jeffrey Anderson and Van Smith

Published in City Paper, March 12, 2008

For more than two decades, East Baltimore clothing store Total Male has been associated with fashionable urban attire. Located on a bustling block of Monument Street, not far from the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, the popular store has also sold tickets to concerts and hip-hop DJ events.

But a federal drug and money-laundering indictment unsealed last year against 41-year-old fugitive Shawn Michael Green, who was the president of an affiliated West Baltimore store called Total Male II, complicates Total Male’s image as simply a place for scenesters to buy clothing and tickets to parties.

The indictment also opens a window into two well-connected East Baltimore businessmen with interests in Total Male–and in politics: Milton Tillman Jr., a sizable figure in real estate, nightclubs, and bail bonds, who was part of the company that owns Total Male, which is located at 2330 E. Monument St.; and Noel Liverpool Sr., a former football star at Morgan State University who has had interests in bars, apparel, and real estate, and who helped Green open Total Male II, in Mondawmin Mall in 1996; Total Male II has since closed.

The ties between these two men and Green suggest an overlap in the city’s legitimate business economy and the drug underworld.

Green suddenly disappeared sometime around March 26, 2007, when federal agents attempted to bring him in on drug charges after arresting his mother, Yolanda Crawley, and serving search warrants on a number of their Maryland and Florida properties. As a result, the investigation was disrupted, but the unsealed indictment accuses Green of drug trafficking since 1998 and calls for forfeiture of $4 million in cash, property, and other assets. On March 20, a four-story Reservoir Hill apartment building owned by Green is scheduled for auction as a result of the forfeiture.

Though Green remains at large, three of his co-conspirators–lawyer Rachel Donegan, mortgage broker David Lincoln, and Green’s mother–pleaded guilty last year for their parts in his alleged drug and money-laundering scheme and await sentencing in the coming weeks. All three copped to wire fraud that allowed Crawley to purchase luxury homes in Maryland and Florida using false loan applications. The probe into Green’s alleged conspiracy is ongoing, according to the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the indictment mentions “others” who are allegedly involved, in addition to Green, Crawley, Donegan, and Lincoln.

Green’s case is intriguing in part because he fled, but also because of the stature of Tillman Jr. and Liverpool Sr. Nothing to tie Tillman Jr. and Liverpool Sr. to Green’s alleged conspiracy has come to light publicly so far.

To some, these two businessmen are icons in the underserved communities of East Baltimore. Together, the two are fully in charge of large swaths of property that bear the scars of inner-city poverty. Between them, Tillman Jr., Liverpool Sr., and their family members, along with their various companies, own scores and scores of properties around the city and surrounding counties, including more than a few along East Monument Street. On a recent afternoon on Monument, for example, near where Total Male operates, there was a palpable sense of disorder along the strip of liquor stores, carry-outs, bail-bonds companies, and tax-service providers that populate the block. A Baltimore police officer was writing up an older gentleman for what appeared to be loitering while ignoring a crew of young street-bike riders as they tore off down the street popping wheelies.

The trade name Total Male was registered from 1993 until it lapsed in 1998 to All Pro Sports Enterprises Inc., which was formed in 1985 with Tillman Jr. as a board member. In 1996, Liverpool Sr. helped Green set up Total Male II, according to the attorney who filed the incorporation papers, with the written permission of Total Male’s resident agent.

Green is listed in incorporation papers as president of Total Male II, and his mother and his father, Michael Green, are also listed as officers of the company. Corporate records list the principal office as 2339 Eutaw Place–the address of Green’s forfeited apartment building scheduled to go to auction, which also served as home base for Green’s Platinum Hill recording studio.

Among the many mysteries surrounding Green and Total Male is the claim to the brand name. Anthony J. Dease of Royal Supreme Motors, an auto dealership and tag-and-title service a block away from Total Male’s East Baltimore location, claims that “I was in Total Male long before Shawn Green was there. I started the business like 25 years ago.” Dease was convicted for stealing city funds in the mid-1980s, but adds, “I work for the city now.”

Confusion about Total Male’s ownership structure is only partly cleared up by state business records. The trade name was owned by All Pro Sports, and in 1992 Dease was listed as the company’s president. In 1993, John H. Bates Sr.–who owned the Monument Street property that houses Total Male and other Tillman businesses–became the resident agent. The property is now owned by Tillman Jr.’s son Milton Tillman III, who bought it in 2005. Reached by phone in early March, Bates contends that he is “one part of Total Male, the one in Mondawmin Mall,” and when asked if he knows Shawn Green says, “Yes, I do,” but declines any further comment.

The formation of Total Male II comes with its own backstory. Attorney Leronia Josey drew up its corporate papers in the mid-1990s. She recalls dealing not with Shawn Green but with Noel Liverpool Sr. in setting up the company. Though she confirms that Bates gave Green written consent to use Total Male II as a business name, she says she never met Green.

“I remember [Liverpool] as an enterprising person who wanted to own a piece of the American Dream,” says Josey, a former member of the University System of Maryland Board of Regents who currently sits on the Maryland Higher Education Commission. “I do a lot of work for churches and small businesses. There was a big push for economic development at the time.”

According to Josey, Liverpool saw a market for fashionable urban apparel. “I went to Mondawmin Mall and said, `I need to see what you’re doing with this store,'” she recalls. “There were all these nice coats and jackets.” She says she hasn’t had contact with Liverpool in more than a decade.

Green’s indictment potentially sullies the images of Tillman Jr. and Liverpool Sr. as community leaders and raises questions about whether Baltimore’s illicit economy is intertwined with its legitimate business and civic landscape.

Most emblematic of this, perhaps, is their ties to politicians. One of Liverpool’s companies, Liverpool Enterprises Inc., has donated $4,000 to each of the campaign committees of Baltimore Comptroller Joan Pratt and state Sen. Joan Carter Conway. Conway’s CIG Professional Tax Services is located directly across the street from Total Male, at 2331 E. Monument St., and her husband, Baltimore City Liquor License Board employee Vernon Conway, is her partner in that business.

One of Tillman Jr.’s real-estate companies, New Trend Development, has donated $1,000 to Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith’s campaign and $500 each to former Baltimore City Councilman Keiffer Mitchell and former Baltimore State’s Attorney Stuart O. Simms, who ran for Maryland attorney general in 2006. Tillman’s 4 Aces Bail Bonds has contributed $4,750 to politicians since 2001, including $1,200 to Maryland Del. Talmadge Branch and $1,000 to state Comptroller Peter Franchot.

Though Liverpool Sr. has a clean criminal record in Maryland, Tillman Jr. has twice been convicted in cases that reverberated in Baltimore political circles. The first, in 1993, was an attempted $30,000 bribe of Gia Blatterman, then the acting chair of the Baltimore City zoning board. In 1996, shortly after Tillman was released from prison in that case, a jury convicted him of tax evasion for his use of front companies to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars in nightclub revenue. Most recently, Tillman Jr. and others were acquitted of illegally using property to underwrite bail bonds in criminal cases.

Attempts to reach Liverpool Sr. and Tillman Jr. for this article were unsuccessful. Jeffrey Chernow, an attorney for Liverpool Sr., did not return several calls. Tillman Jr.’s attorney Gregory Dorsey said he would relay a message to his client, who did not return the call.

Much less is known about Shawn Green. Despite being indicted as a longtime major drug trafficker, he has managed to fly below the radar. Federal court records in Florida indicate he has had previous drug arrests, but in Maryland he’s only been charged before with one crime: a 1992 disorderly-conduct charge in Baltimore City. In 2006, according to court documents, federal law enforcers seized more than $900,000 in cash from people they identified as Green’s associates. Federal law enforcers decline to say how the cash seizure helped investigators move the conspiracy case forward–or any other details or insights about the case against Green.

Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein insists that Green’s sudden disappearance last March is not unusual. “Usually we catch them in a week or two,” he says. “About five or 10 suspects a year remain at large.” He says he has no idea when Green fled but believes it was after federal agents arrested his mother and served search warrants at six properties on March 26, 2007. Rosenstein also does not seem flustered by Green’s flight. “There were two priorities,” he says, pointing to the intended arrest of Green and seizure of drugs, money and documents. “The main priority was to execute the search warrants.” He adds, “We have lots of evidence that we won’t disclose unless or until we go to trial.”

Which means there’s more to Shawn Green than what’s in the public record. And though Josey may have been satisfied that Total Male was simply helping its owners chase the American Dream, court records show that some of its employees and principals have engaged in illegal activity. Other than Dease and Tillman Jr., who have criminal backgrounds, those records show at least two Total Male employees were convicted on federal drug trafficking charges.

And then there’s Shawn Green, indicted for major drug-related crimes, but yet to be caught or convicted.

Femme Fatale: Accused drug trafficker Querida Lewis got a car salesman tangled up with Milton Tillman Jr.

By Jeffrey Anderson and Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Jan. 14, 2009

Visitors to Liberty Ford in Randallstown would probably have a hard time imagining Robert W. Koopman, a bespectacled, gray-haired customer service manager, mixed up with an alleged international drug trafficker. Sitting behind his desk inside the service bay, Koopman, with his quiet demeanor and warm handshake, seems more grandfather than gangster.

But through his acquaintance with a woman named Querida Lewis, who was indicted with two co-conspirators in Maryland last July for running a marijuana-trafficking operation from Mexico to Baltimore via Texas, Koopman’s life has become complicated. After buying a house in Owings Mills from Lewis in 2004, Koopman says Lewis got him to rent the house to Milton Tillman Jr., a politically connected bail-bonds impresario and two-time felon with a fearsome reputation who is under investigation by the IRS, the FBI, and the U.S. Department of Labor.

Now Koopman is suing Tillman. In a case filed late last year in Baltimore County Circuit Court, Koopman alleges that Tillman, who is listed as the sole lessee, owes him $12,400 for four months of unpaid rent at 9833 Bridle Brook Drive, a two-story home in the upscale Rolling Ridge subdivision. Yet public records show that after Lewis sold the property to Koopman, she continued to use the house as a residence and business address into 2008. Forfeiture documents springing from the criminal case against Lewis state that “drug traffickers very often place assets in names other than their own to avoid detection.” Tillman allegedly stopped paying rent in August, right after Lewis was arrested.

Court records show that Lewis was involved in a drug operation that extended to Corona, Calif.; McAllen, Texas; St. Paul, Minn., and Philadelphia. The investigation has led to seizure of more than $100,000 in cash and a car belonging to others tied to the alleged scheme, some of whom have not been charged. An unindicted co-conspirator has a trucking company that leased a warehouse and back lot at 300 South Kresson St. in East Baltimore, which wire-taps show were used to move drugs.

Lewis’ alleged activities, spelled out in court documents and other public records, also involved cocaine trafficking (though she is charged only with marijuana); residences on two coasts; a trucking company; a courier service; a Reisterstown Road funeral home; her mother, who has a church and nonprofit foundation; and a FedEx driver who handled drug packages addressed to Johns Hopkins University, where his wife works as an administrator. Lewis’ trial in U.S. District Court in Baltimore was scheduled to start Jan. 20, but has been delayed. She did not return calls for comment. Law-enforcement documents in the Lewis case do not indicate that Tillman is part of the drug investigation

After Lewis was arrested, Koopman posted a $50,000 bond for her in August, helping to secure her release pending trial. She has no criminal record, although in the mid-1990s her name came up in court documents when her then-husband was charged as a drug dealer, fled, and later was convicted.

“You’ll have to talk to my lawyer,” Koopman says when reporters visit him at Liberty Ford, where his colleagues seem amused by his plight. He says he is aware of Tillman’s reputation, which includes a history of ties to drug dealers, but won’t say much more. “I’ve read all the articles in City Paper” about Tillman, he says.

Tillman’s attorney Greg Dorsey, who has requested a jury trial in the lawsuit against Tillman, declines to discuss the relationship between Tillman, Lewis, and Koopman. “Those questions should be posed to Mr. Koopman,” he says. When reached by phone, Koopman’s lawyer, Norman Polovoy, hangs up.

After Koopman bought the Bridle Brook Drive house and listed it as his principal residence, state records show that Lewis’ mother, Beverlie Woodland, ran Arrival Messenger Couriers, a company Lewis started in 1994, out of the house. Though Woodland is not charged in Lewis’ case, court records state she “is aware” of her daughter’s criminal activities and “is taking an active role in collecting and hiding” Lewis’ drug money. In August, Lewis was released to Woodland’s custody pending trial. The U.S. Attorney’s Office would not comment.

Woodland and her husband, Bishop Robert F. Woodland, are incorporators of Destiny of Hope Apostolic Ministries and officers of the nonprofit Talent Exposition Foundation, which works with children. They answered the door at their Pikesville home on Jan. 7 wearing robes, and referred questions for this story to Koopman. As for the now-defunct messenger service, Beverlie Woodland says “I took it over when Querida moved to California in 2004. She said ‘Mommy, please.'”

On June 16, court records say, Lewis began orchestrating nationwide drug transactions from Corona, Calif., including instructions to have her mother handle the drug money. “They need to be very careful on who was giving us money,” Beverlie Woodland told her daughter on a wiretapped call, after bank officials had spotted two counterfeit $20 bills among the deposited cash.

Lewis and a Pennsylvania woman, Inga Bacote, then traveled in a motor home to McAllen, Texas, near the Mexican border, where Lewis owned one stash house and was looking to buy another. Once in Texas, court records state, Lewis shipped marijuana to Baltimore from a Kinko’s FedEx store, where Ruben Arce let her use his employee discount to ship the drugs. Bacote and Arce are also indicted in Lewis’ case.

Back in Baltimore, on July 8 FedEx driver Robert Wilson prepared to receive an 80-pound shipment of Lewis’ marijuana at a Johns Hopkins University address, according to court documents. Wilson’s wife, Amanda Wilson, works for Hopkins as an education assistance program manager. Investigators concluded that Wilson used his wife’s business address and described him as an “active co-conspirator” in the Lewis case.

Amanda Wilson tearfully denies any knowledge of these matters in a conference call, during which her husband admits delivering “packages” to Lewis. Though Robert Wilson is not charged in the case, investigators seized $78,490 in cash from the Wilsons’ Abingdon home.

Koopman’s life has been disrupted by Lewis as well. On a second visit to Liberty Ford, he steps outside his office to speak with reporters and says he is unclear about how he got tangled up in Lewis’ affairs.

“She came in to buy a car about eight years ago,” he says, declining to explain why he posted a $50,000 bond on her behalf when she was arrested. “I never knew [Tillman] before all of this,” Koopman says. “Ms. Lewis made all the arrangements.”

Hot Contract: City bribery scandal tied to influential father and son

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Jan. 26, 2005

Mark Sapperstein owns 113 W. Hamburg St., an 8,000-square-foot commercial building in Sharp-Leadenhall. The South Baltimore property, though devoid of signs, houses Allstate Boiler Service, a company owned by Gilbert Sapperstein, Mark’s 73-year-old father.

On Jan. 7, Allstate Boiler’s bookkeeper and office manager, Ida Marie Beran, pled guilty in a bribery case involving the company’s contract with the city to provide boiler services for municipal agencies. Also pleading guilty was Cecil Thrower, a city Department of Public Works employee since 1984 who worked at the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Essex.

The case ties an established name in Baltimore’s business and political class—that of the Sapperstein family—to an ongoing criminal investigation.

In the statement of facts filed in the case, which was brought by the Office of the State Prosecutor, Beran and Thrower admitted that they conspired together to inflate invoices under Allstate Boiler’s contract with the city. While Thrower received somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000 for his part in the scheme, Beran received nothing—though her employer received “well over” $120,000 in excess payments as a result of the fraudulent bills, according to case documents.

The court record further explains that the conspiracy began in approximately 1998, at which point “Mr. Thrower was approached by the business owner who employed Ms. Beran [who] suggested to Mr. Thrower, ‘From time to time you could do something for us and perhaps we could do something [for] you.’ . . . [O]n more than one occasion, while acting at the instruction of and in concert with her employer, Ms. Beran prepared the envelopes containing cash for Thrower and provided them to other employees for delivery to Thrower.”

The case documents make no mention of Allstate Boiler or the Back River plant. Department of Public Works spokesman Robert Murrow, however, confirmed for City Paper that the city contract defrauded in the scheme has been held by Allstate for “like 20 years” to provide boiler work for any city agency that needs such services, and that the inflated bills were for work at Back River.

Allstate, which has been in business since 1965, also holds the boiler contract for the Baltimore City Public School System, according to city schools spokeswoman Vanessa Pyatt, though she says the contract is “set to expire in February.”

State prosecutor Robert Rohrbaugh confirms that, “absolutely, this is a continuing investigation,” though he could “neither confirm nor deny” that the investigation continues to focus on Allstate Boiler or the Sappersteins. Rohrbaugh’s reticence aside, the record makes clear that Allstate, not Beran, benefited from the longstanding bribery scheme.

Mark Sapperstein acknowledged to City Paper that Allstate Boiler Service is located at his property, but he declined comment about the company or the bribery scandal. Gilbert Sapperstein did not return calls for comment left at Allstate, and contact information for Beran could not be found. Thrower’s phone at his West Baltimore residence has been disconnected.

Mark Sapperstein is a major player in local real-estate circles. He’s a partner in Silo Point, a $200 million proposal to convert a derelict grain elevator in Locust Point into a residential-retail development. On Jan. 13, the Baltimore Development Corp. awarded development rights to a city-owned parcel at Calvert and Lombard streets to Mark Sapperstein and his partners, who planned to turn it into a $71 million apartment complex called Cityscape. In 2002, he and his partners constructed a $13.5 million parking garage at Calvert and Lombard. Last spring, Sapperstein purchased 200 acres on North Point in eastern Baltimore County, where he plans to build luxury single-family homes on the Bauer Farm tract, where British troops in the War of 1812 marched en route to face Baltimore militias.

Gilbert and Mark Sapperstein, through their respective companies, have been active as donors to campaigns of elected officials. Since the fall of 1999, the two, along with Mark Sapperstein’s wife and several Sapperstein companies, gave at least $33,270 to the campaign committees of various elected officials.

Of the total, $9,650 went to Mayor Martin O’Malley (D), $8,000 went to Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith (D), and $4,250 went to Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R). Nearly all of the rest went to legislators representing Baltimore City and Baltimore County. At the federal level, Gilbert Sapperstein donated $250 each to U.S. Rep. C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (D-2nd District) and the Republican National Committee. Mark Sapperstein gave $1,000 to U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and $500 each to Ruppersberger, U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D), and Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor (R-7th District). Mark Sapperstein’s wife also gave $500 to Cantor.

Gilbert Sapperstein, according to several sources familiar with the workings of the Baltimore City Board of Liquor License Commissioners, is known as a go-to guy for prospective liquor licensees looking to break into the bar business. As a secured creditor for bars that fail, he assumes control of properties and liquor licenses and thus can procure opportunities for new entrepreneurs. According to liquor board documents, for example, Sapperstein was a secured creditor in a March 2003 license transfer for Mary’s Place in West Baltimore. Often, sources say, bar owners who are indebted to Sapperstein, who has been in the poker-machine business for years, agree to keep his poker machines in their establishments.

Both Sappersteins have had run-ins with the law for gambling-related charges. Gilbert, whose Star Coin Machine Co. is housed at 113 W. Hamburg with Allstate Boiler, faced 107 gambling-related charges in state courts in the 1980s and ’90s relating to Star Coin’s poker machines, though prosecutors declined to prosecute nearly all of them. In two cases, he received probation before judgment and was fined $1,475. Mark Sapperstein was charged with four gambling-related counts in 1989, though prosecutors chose not to pursue the cases. State records indicate that Mark Sapperstein’s poker-machine company, Mark’s Vending, has been inactive for more than a decade.

In 1984, Gilbert Sapperstein faced 18 housing-code violations for properties he owned in the city, receiving probation before judgment for 16 of them while prosecutors declined to pursue the remaining two charges. In 2003, Gilbert Sapperstein was charged with 10 housing-code violations in connection with a rowhouse he owned at 3203 Fleet St., receiving probation before judgment and $170 in fines. He sold the property shortly afterward.

Last April, Gilbert Sapperstein sold one of his properties in the Hollins Market neighborhood—the former Tom Thumb/Gypsy’s Café property, which in 2000 collapsed amid ill-conceived renovations. Two of his other properties in the same Southwest Baltimore neighborhood on Carrollton Avenue—one of which housed the Club Medusa, a hipsters’ after-hours social club, in the 1990s—are for sale. In July, he sold a property at 1600 W. Baltimore St., which houses a tavern called Good Times.

Currently for sale in the 800 block of West Cross Street is the property that housed Foul Ball Bar and Grille, which is owned by 2001 Eastern Ave. LLC, one of Gilbert Sapperstein’s companies. The Fells Point address the company is named after houses the Colonial Inn (owned by the same company). In Baltimore County, Gilbert Sapperstein owns 9727 Pulaski Highway, a large restaurant currently under renovation, and 2123-25 Sparrows Point Road, a strip club and bar.

The list of Sapperstein properties—many of them with liquor licenses attached—could go on and on.

In the 1990s, Mark and Gilbert Sapperstein were named, along with dozens of other parties, in a civil Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) lawsuit brought by Donald D. Stone, a self-described surfer dude who alleged that the Sappersteins, their business partners and lawyers, and the law-enforcement bureaucracy in Maryland and Florida conspired to keep him from shedding light on their allegedly corrupt schemes. The case, which was filed separately in federal courts in Maryland and Florida, went nowhere. That outcome has not kept Stone from posting potentially libelous statements about the Sappersteins and others on the internet—though, so far, Stone says he has not been sued.

Part of Stone’s investigation into the Sappersteins focused on an Anne Arundel County deal for cell-phone towers that led to a lawsuit against Mark Sapperstein and his business partners by George and Mary Jane Chamberlain, who moved from Annapolis to New Hampshire before filing the complaint in 1999. The lawsuit, which has since been settled, alleged that Mark Sapperstein and two partners, both of whom also sat on the Anne Arundel County Economic Development Commission, stole the couple’s idea for dominating the communications-tower industry. The terms of the settlement are confidential, though the amount paid to the Chamberlains—$40,000—later leaked out. The lawsuit was filed shortly after Mark Sapperstein sold his communications-tower companies to a Florida company for $8 million in 1998.

Investigators are keeping mum about where they might be headed as they scour the books. Only time will tell whether the Sappersteins are in the clear or headed for more trouble as the case progresses.

 

Cashed Out: South Mountain Creamery’s Bank Account Seized as Part of Money-Laundering Crackdown

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Apr. 18, 2012

South Mountain Creamery, the Frederick County dairy farm and food-distribution company, is a fixture of Baltimore-area farmers markets, particularly the Waverly market on Saturdays or the one on Sundays, downtown under the Jones Falls Expressway. South Mountain co-owner Randy Sowers is now in the hot seat with the feds, because in late February, the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigations Division (IRS-CID) used a federal anti-money-laundering statute to seize the contents of a PNC bank account Sowers says was the depository of cash earned by his company’s farmers-market business.

Sowers has not been charged with a crime, and says he expects to learn soon whether or not he will be. As for getting his money back—nearly $70,000, a fraction of the nearly quarter-million dollars in cash deposits the feds say Sowers laundered between May and December last year—well, based on the experiences of others in his position, he’ll likely not see it again, at least not all of it.

Baltimore County Police officer Michael Aiosa, who has been detailed as an IRS-CID task-force member since October 2010, signed the six-page affidavit used to get the seizure warrant to empty the account, of which Sowers and his daughter-in-law, Karen Sowers, are co-signatories. The affidavit says cash deposits were broken down into increments of under $10,001 each, causing PNC to not generate required “currency transaction reports” (CTRs) that financial institutions must file with regulators when they receive or disburse more than $10,000 in a single cash transaction. Under 31 U.S.C. 5324, federal law prohibits such conduct, which is called “structuring.”

Sowers, who did not seek publicity about his predicament but spoke to a reporter after the search warrant in the court records came to City Paper’s attention, says he deposited the cash he’d made in the increments in which it had been earned. If the deposited amounts often ended up being a little under $10,001, he explained, that’s just the way it worked out and he no intention of breaking the law.

“We had no idea there was supposedly a law against it—we were just doing it the way we figured we were supposed to, making deposits every week,” Sowers explains. “We weren’t laundering money,” he adds. “We’re farmers, we struggle every day to pay bills. We don’t know what else to do. Now we just feel like putting [our cash] in a can somewhere.”

Sowers’ attorney, David Watt, says his client “probably shouldn’t have said anything” when contacted by City Paper, and declined to comment further, saying, “We don’t want to act like we’re trying to influence the goings-on” by talking with the press.

Historically, the anti-structuring statute has been used by prosecutors as an ancillary charge with other accusations of nefarious behavior, such as drug dealing or terrorism. And it still is. But over the last few years, prosecutors have started to use it more regularly as a standalone charge—an observation noted by defense attorneys that Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein confirms.

Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data center about federal court cases, reports that in fiscal year 2011 Maryland brought 14 of the nation’s 99 structuring cases, making it the top state for such prosecutions. Nationally, the numbers have been rising; the 2011 figures are up 8.8 percent from the year before and up 57.1 percent from five years ago.

Greater prosecutorial emphasis on enforcing the anti-structuring statute has resulted in a rise in money seizures, civil-forfeiture cases, and criminal charges against small businesses and the people who own them. Typical targets handle a lot of cash, and in Maryland gas stations, liquor stores, and used-car dealerships have landed in expensive trouble, losing money through seizures, criminal penalties, and legal bills.

South Mountain is not the first seasonal-produce market to find itself targeted for structuring recently. Taylor’s Produce Stand, on the Eastern Shore, was stung last year after the feds seized about $90,000 from its bank accounts. In December, pursuant to a civil-forfeiture settlement agreement after no criminal charges were filed, the stand’s owners got back about half of the seized money.

Two members of the defense bar who handle structuring cases, Gerard Martin and Steven Levin, both former Maryland assistant U.S. attorneys, say they have noticed the anti-structuring enforcement trend emerging in Maryland over the last several years.

“The emphasis is on basically seizing money, whether it is legally or illegally earned,” Levin says. “It can lead to financial ruin for business owners, and there’s a potential for abuse here by the government, where they use it basically as a means of seizing money, and I think we’ve seen that happen.”

“South Mountain Creamery!” Martin exclaims when contacted by phone. “They’re going after South Mountain Creamery! That’s an icon. That’s like going after mom and apple pie.” Then he settles in to ruminate on the general trends, saying cases typically arise because financial institutions “are required to tell the government about it” when they suspect a pattern of structured cash deposits. Then, “the government gets a search warrant and takes every nickel out of the guy’s bank account,” Martin continues, adding that “structuring is generally an indication that there is something going wrong, but the government doesn’t always find another crime,” such as drug dealing or tax evasion.

“There are a lot of legitimate reasons why a liquor store or a gas station would be depositing $9,500 in cash a day,” Martin says. “Sometimes the numbers just work out that way. But it is usually not an accident that it is happening.”

Rosenstein says that anti-structuring efforts “are an increasing area of emphasis for the Justice Department, and there has been an influx of resources” to investigate and prosecute it. Thus, he says, “I’d be disappointed if there wasn’t an uptick” in prosecutions, given the additional resources.

Post-Sept. 11 changes to banking laws, Rosenstein continues, have prompted financial institutions to report suspicious financial doings more vigilantly, and as a result, investigators and prosecutors now have “a treasure trove of information” about transactions, which provides them with “potential leads for finding criminal activities.” Structuring is often a red flag for other crime since, Rosenstein says, “typically people who go through all those lengths” to make multiple cash deposits of just under $10,000, sometimes at multiple bank branches on the same day, are trying to hide something. But, he continues, “There’s a possibility that somebody did it innocently, and we are always open to that.”

 

Sowers spoke at length about being targeted for structuring. In essence, he thinks the government used an exotic legal gimmick to suck hard-earned money out of his business just as he’s facing bills for hay and other spring-time expenses farmers incur—but he admits that, if there’s a law against what he did, “well, it looks like we did break the law,” even if he didn’t mean to.

The seizure and the resulting legal limbo as he awaits the prosecutor’s charging decision has “scared us to death,” he says. And the banking headaches that resulted from an emptied account have been never-ending, including bounced checks, mucked-up automatic withdrawals, and the resulting overdraft fees.

“It makes me look bad,” Sowers says.

Milked: Feds Nail South Mountain Creamery for Talking to City Paper

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, June 20, 2012

Randy Sowers is not the only Maryland farmer recently targeted by federal money-laundering investigators for illegally depositing cash his business earns in increments of $10,000 or less, in order to avoid triggering bank-reporting requirements. But Sowers, whose South Mountain Creamery (SMC) dairy farm in Middletown, near Frederick, is a popular fixture at Baltimore-area farmers markets, is the only one to exercise his First Amendment rights and talk to the press about it.

For that, Sowers’ lawyers say, the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO-MD) has made him pay—an assertion that U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein denies, despite an e-mail sent to Sowers’ attorney by the chief of Rosenstein’s asset forfeiture and money laundering section, Stefan Cassella, that appears to state exactly that.

As City Paper reported in April, nearly $70,000 of Sowers’ money was seized by federal law enforcers from his bank account in late February (“Cashed Out,” Mobtown Beat, Apr. 18), on suspicion that he had been illegally “structuring” deposits of cash from SMC’s farmers market business. City Paper reached Sowers by phone for the article, and he granted an interview—though his attorney, David Watt, said at the time that Sowers “probably shouldn’t have said anything,” since “we don’t want to act like we’re trying to influence the goings-on” in the case.

A day after the article was published with quotes from Sowers, the USAO-MD filed a civil-forfeiture lawsuit seeking to keep Sowers’ seized funds (The News Hole, Apr. 20). According to Watt, Cassella told him over the phone that day that he filed the lawsuit because Sowers talked to the press.

Initially, Cassella said these words were “routine in forfeiture actions to protect the agents” who investigated the case from personal liability. Watt countered that in another structuring forfeiture filed last fall against money seized from Taylors Produce Stand, an Eastern Shore farming business, no such language appeared in the settlement agreement.

“I have a hard time explaining to my client why he is being treated differently,” Watt wrote, “especially where your initial concern was that the government agents not be liable for any claims for the seizure,” an issue Watt contended was addressed in another section of the agreement.

Cassella, in what Watt and Kamenar say was the last communication from Cassella in the matter, responded with one sentence: “Mr. Taylor did not give an interview to the press.”

CP shared the relevant e-mails with Rosenstein, asking for comment, and he e-mailed that if Watt and Kamenar “had any objection to the terms of the settlement,” they “should have raised it to my attention” before signing it. He also asked if Sowers and his attorneys “dispute” that “Sowers admitted that he ‘intentionally’ kept his cash deposits under $10,000 to avoid throwing up red flags.”

Kamenar says, “We were squeezed for time” by the time Cassella, on the same day the agreement was signed, revealed why he was insisting on language that was not in the Taylor agreement. He adds that, despite Sowers’ admission that he knowingly avoided red flags by depositing less than $10,000 at a time, “there was no intent by Randy to violate the structuring laws.”

Cassella, for his part, wrote in an e-mail to Rosenstein, which the USAO-MD shared with CP, that “the point is that the Sowers settlement was routine, not a punishment for exercising his First Amendment rights.”

“That’s an absolute falsehood,” says Kamenar, insisting that “this clause is not routine—see the Taylor settlement.” Cassella’s e-mail speaks for itself, Kamenar continues, and “you can’t put lipstick on that pig.”

“We’re not done with this, yet,” Kamenar says, adding that “Randy does not shy away from asserting his rights, and we think there should be more done to expose this kind of abuse.” Kamenar says he intends to send a letter to Rosenstein, demanding that there be “corrective action” in which Cassella is “disciplined” for the way Sowers’ case was handled.

“This is just another example of government overreach,” Kamenar continues, “this heavy-handed forfeiture going after people like the Sowers, and then penalizing them for talking to the press.”