Month: May 2022

Source: United States Department of Justice News

Two brothers, each a dual-citizen of Panama and Italy, were each sentenced to 36 months in prison for laundering $28 million in a bribery and money laundering scheme involving Odebrecht S.A. (Odebrecht), a Brazil-based global construction conglomerate. The defendants were also ordered to forfeit more than $18.8 million, pay a $250,000 fine and serve two years’ supervised release.

Luis Enrique Martinelli Linares, 40, and Ricardo Enrique Martinelli Linares, 42, each pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and admitted to agreeing with others to establish offshore bank accounts in the names of shell companies to receive and disguise over $28 million in bribe proceeds from Odebrecht for the benefit of a close relative, a high-ranking public official in Panama. According to court documents, approximately $19 million of the bribes were transferred through U.S. banks. Luis Martinelli Linares also used some of the proceeds of the scheme to purchase a $1.7 million yacht and a $1.3 million condominium in the United States, and Ricardo Martinelli Linares spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in proceeds to pay personal expenses.

On Dec. 21, 2016, Odebrecht pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of New York to a criminal information charging it with conspiracy to violate the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for its involvement in the bribery and money laundering scheme. According to court documents, the scheme involved the payment of more than $700 million in bribes to government officials, public servants, political parties, and others in Panama and other countries around the world to obtain and retain business for the company.

The defendants were initially charged by criminal complaint on June 27, 2020. Pursuant to a provisional arrest request from the United States, they were arrested at el Aeropuerto Internacional la Aurora in Guatemala on July 6, 2020, as they were attempting to depart Guatemala on a private plane, and later held on extradition requests from the United States. Both defendants filed multiple challenges and appeals opposing the extradition request in Guatemalan courts before ultimately being extradited to the United States, Luis Martinelli Linares on Nov. 15, 2021, and Ricardo Martinelli Linares on Dec. 10, 2021.

On Feb. 4, 2021, Luis Martinelli Linares and Ricardo Martinelli Linares were charged with conspiracy and money laundering charges by an indictment filed in federal court in Brooklyn.

“Ricardo and Luis Martinelli Linares directed millions of dollars in bribes through U.S. banks to their own Swiss accounts in order to help Odebrecht gain corrupt influence at the highest levels of the Panamanian government,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Today’s sentences show that the Department of Justice remains committed to prosecuting individuals who enable and profit from laundering corrupt payments to foreign officials through the U.S. financial system, as well as those who attempt to spend the proceeds of corruption in the United States.”

“The Martinelli brothers used American banks to commit their selfish, greedy fraud – and now it is the American legal system serving justice with today’s sentencing, especially for the people of Panama,” said U.S. Attorney Peace. “Together, the Department of Justice, this office and our law enforcement partners stand firm against international corruption and will use all tools at our disposal to root it out.”

“The defendants laundered millions of dollars in bribes through the U.S. financial system to benefit a close relative and maintain their luxury lifestyles,” said Assistant Director Luis Quesada of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. “Today’s sentencing shows that the FBI and our law enforcement partners are committed to bringing to justice anyone who enables the corruption of public officials for personal gain.”

The FBI’s International Corruption Unit in New York is investigating this case, with the support of FBI Legal Attaché Panama. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided significant assistance in securing their arrest and extradition from Guatemala.

Trial Attorney Michael Culhane Harper of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, Trial Attorneys Barbara Levy and Michael Redmann of the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS), and Assistant U.S. Attorney Alixandra E. Smith of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York are prosecuting the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Mantell of U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York’s Civil Division is handling forfeiture matters.

Additional information about the Justice Department’s FCPA enforcement efforts can be found at www.justice.gov/criminal/fraud/fcpa.

The Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative in MLARS was formed to prosecute money launderers and forfeit the proceeds of foreign official corruption and, where appropriate, to use those recovered assets to benefit the people harmed by the corruption and abuse of office. Individuals with information about possible proceeds of foreign corruption located in or laundered through the United States should contact federal law enforcement or send an email to kleptocracy@usdoj.gov.

Source: United States Department of Justice

Thank you so much Andrea. I want to add my thanks and my welcome to our distinguished guests, members of Congress, our partners from the civil rights and law enforcement, and public health communities, and especially to the families of Heather Heyer and Khalid Jabara.

Thank you all for gathering today to commemorate the one-year anniversary of President Biden’s signing of the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act and the Jabara-Heyerd NO HATE Act.

Ensuring the rule of law and making real the promise of equal justice are the principles upon which the Department of Justice was founded. And these are the principles that are the department’s North Star.

No one in America should fear violence because of who they are. The department will not tolerate any form of terrorism, hate-based violence, or unlawful discrimination.

To live up to and to live by these principles, the Attorney General has charged us to pursue a whole of department approach to combatting hate crimes and bias-related incidents — from education and sharing best practices to grant making, to how we work to prevent, respond to, investigate and prosecute hate crimes.

As the Attorney General said, we will use every tool and legal authority at our disposal to combat hate crimes and bias-motivated extremism. And when the unimaginable happens — as it did last Saturday in Buffalo — we will bring every resource to bear to respond and to seek justice.

We are committed to drawing on the full resources of the department and the expertise across all of its components. The communities we serve deserve no less.

Earlier this week the Attorney General and I and the Associate Attorney General – as well as the leaders from the FBI, the ATF, the National Security Division, the Civil Rights Division, we all gathered with the U.S. Attorney community from across the country and we gathered to discuss the horror that happened in Buffalo and we gathered to discuss how we respond as one Department of Justice. 

The Civil Rights Division, of course, has deep expertise in investigating hate crimes and responding to these horrific incidents in tandem with our state and local partners. Sadly though, the muscle memory for these responses is now well established.

The National Security Division provides leadership on responding to domestic terrorism and is working in lock step with the Civil Rights Division when hate crimes and bias motivated extremism rear their profoundly ugly heads.

The FBI’s investigators, and victim services, and forensics experts all immediately launch in partnership with state and local and community experts.

And, of course, the Community Relation Service plays a crucial role working with our community partners as the department’s peacekeepers.

In the year since the Attorney General’s memorandum on improving our efforts to combat hate crimes and hate incidents — the department has taken a number of significant steps:

We’ve established an expediter within the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division to ensure rapid review of hate crimes incidents;

The FBI has launched a National Anti-Hate Crimes campaign including 56 FBI field offices to encourage reporting;

Every U.S. Attorney’s Office across the country has designated civil rights coordinators, in their offices, to enhance our enforcement of civil rights laws.

We have also piloted a new outreach training called the United Against Hate Effort to help improve the reporting of hate crimes by training community members and providing an opportunity for trust building between law enforcement and the communities that we serve.

The horrific events from last weekend are a stark reminder of the devastating effect and impact of hate crimes on entire communities.  

The steps that we’ve outlined today and the more to come reflect a firm belief here in the department and among this leadership team that it is our collective responsibility to do all we can to confront hate in all its forms. We are committed to doing just that.

And now, I’m pleased to introduce the Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta.

Source: United States Department of Justice

Remarks as Delivered

Good morning. Thank you all for being here, and thanks to those who are joining us remotely. Although, I’m looking around for the screens and I don’t see them. [Laughter]

In one of my first acts as Attorney General, I directed an expedited review to determine how the Department could improve its efforts to combat hate crimes and hate incidents.

Shortly thereafter – and one year ago today – President Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act and Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act in to law.

We are grateful to be joined today by members of Congress and their staff who worked on this matter.

And as well, we are very grateful and honored to be joined today by members of the Jabara and Heyer families. Thank you very much for being here.

A week after the legislation became law, I issued a memorandum to all Justice Department employees laying out steps that we would take to improve our efforts to combat hate crimes and hate incidents.

We had originally planned on hosting today’s event to provide all of you – our colleagues, partners, and stakeholders – with an update on our anti-hate efforts over the last year.

We now gather in the wake of a horrific and painful reminder of the urgency and importance of this task.

Six days ago in Buffalo, 10 people were killed, another three were injured, and an entire community was terrorized. 

The Justice Department is investigating this as a hate crime and as an act of racially motivated violent extremism.

We are deploying every resource we have to ensure accountability for this terrible attack, to pursue justice for the victims and their families, and to provide support to them and to a grieving community.

Last weekend’s attack was a painful reminder of the singular impact that hate crimes have not only on individuals, but on entire communities.

They bring immediate devastation. They inflict lasting fear.

We will use every legal tool at our disposal to investigate and combat these kinds of hate crimes and their collateral impact that they have on the communities that they hurt.

The Department-wide directive I issued last year benefited from the thoughtful input of external stakeholders and internal experts, including many of you who are here today.

It outlined four areas of focus to improve our efforts to combat unlawful acts of hate:

• Improving incident reporting;
• Increasing law enforcement training and coordination at all levels;
• Prioritizing community outreach; and
• Making better use of our civil enforcement mechanisms.

As I said at the time, each of these steps share the common goal of deterring hate crimes and hate incidents, and addressing them when they occur, supporting those victimized by them, and reducing the pernicious effects they have on our society.

These are not easy tasks.

We know that the threats we face are evolving, and that our strategies to confront them must evolve as well. 

Addressing them requires making total use of both our criminal and non-criminal resources across the entire Justice Department.

Our relevant investigating and prosecuting components – including the Civil Rights Division, U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, the National Security Division, and the FBI – are hard at work maximizing their collective skills and tools to prevent, deter, and respond to hate crimes and bias-motivated forms of extremism. 

I want to thank Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, Director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys Monty Wilkinson, Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matt Olsen, and FBI Director Christopher Wray for their leadership and for their dedication to this work.

In February of this year alone:

• The Justice Department convicted the three men who targeted and killed Ahmaud Arbery because he was a Black man jogging on a public street.
• Our prosecutors convicted an individual who, motivated by racist and xenophobic beliefs about the COVID-19 pandemic, targeted and attacked an Asian family at a supermarket in Midland, Texas.
• And a federal court sentenced a man in Tennessee for setting fire to four separate churches in that state.

These three results in one month represent just a small sample of the investigative and prosecutive efforts that the Justice Department is undertaking to confront hate crimes using our criminal enforcement mechanisms.

But we recognize that in order to address the destructive effects that hate crimes and hate incidents have on entire communities, we must make better use of our non-criminal tools as well. 

Today, I want to announce three important steps we are taking that reflect our holistic approach.

First, along with our partners at the Department of Health and Human Services, we are issuing new guidance aimed at raising awareness of hate crimes during the pandemic.

This guidance includes several steps that community-based organizations, law enforcement, government officials, and others can take to raise awareness of hate crimes and hate incidents – and how that increased awareness can be used as a tool for prevention and response.

This guidance focuses on both hate crimes and hate incidents, and was created with the input of many community-based stakeholders and public health professionals.

In just a moment, Deputy Secretary Palm will discuss this guidance further.

Second, I am pleased to announce that the Department has hired Ana Paula Noguez Mercado as our first ever fulltime Language Access Coordinator.

Ana, please stand up.  [Applause]

Thank you for joining the team.

We know that language access is a major barrier to the reporting of hate crimes and hate incidents.

Ana will join our Office for Access to Justice where she will work to improve knowledge, use, and expansion of the Department’s language access resources.

Third, I am pleased to announce that the Department is releasing $10 million in grant solicitations for new programs to address hate crimes.

$5 million of this grant funding was authorized under the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act.  These grants will support better hate crime reporting to the FBI and will fund states to establish and run reporting hotlines for victims of hate crimes

The other $5 million will go to supporting community-based approaches to preventing and addressing hate crimes. 

I want to thank Congress for providing the funding that allowed us to launch these grant programs.

And I want to thank Amy Solomon and her team at the Office of Justice Programs for administering these important grants and putting these funds to good use.  

Confronting unlawful acts of hate is a matter of moral urgency for all of us here today, and it is a charge deeply rooted in the Justice Department’s founding. 

As I have noted many times before, this Department was founded in 1870 in the aftermath of the Civil War with the first fundamental purpose to fight the white supremacist attack on Black civil rights after the Civil War.  

152 years later, the task to combat hate-fueled violence remains central to the Department’s mission.

We do this because it is our legal obligation. And we do this because it is our moral obligation. 

We do this work because we believe that all people in this country should be able to live without fear of being attacked or harassed because of where they are from, what they look like, whom they love, or how they worship.

Thank you all for being here and for your tireless work and partnership.  

In a moment, you will hear from Deputy Secretary Palm from the Department of Health and Human Services. She will be followed by our Deputy and Associate Attorneys General who will speak more specifically to the steps we have taken in the past year.

Before that, however we will play a short video featuring reflections from the family members of four people who were killed by hate crimes, but whose legacies will have an enduring impact on combating hate crimes.

Thank you to the families of Heather Heyer, Khalid Jabara, and of Matthew Shepard, and James Byrd Jr. for your important words in this video. And thanks again to those of you who are here with us today.

At the end of the event, the Attorney General returned to the podium to give closing remarks.

So, as most of you know, this event was long planned. We did not need any more reminders of the urgency of our fight against hate and racially motivated violent extremism.

Unfortunately, we are gathered today in the shadow and the wake of another horrific attack. If it’s possible to even further re-double our efforts, something like this can only cause us to do so.

We commit to using every resource of the Department of Justice to prevent these kinds of acts of hate, to hold accountable those who commit them, and to support communities that are damaged and terrorized by them.

That is our job, and thanks to you we have great partners in this effort.

I want to say today is a beautiful day and all of you are here, and we would be grateful if you would think about mingling with each other in our courtyard when you step down on the first floor.   

It’s a nice day and a nice chance for all of the supporters of anti-hate get together, see each other and talk to each other.

Thank you so much, all of you, for coming.

Source: United States Department of Justice News

A Texas physician assistant was convicted today for distributing more than 1.2 million opioid pills during his employment at two Houston-area clinics that operated as pill mills.   

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, physician assistant Charles Thompson, 76, of Houston, illegally prescribed and helped others illegally prescribe controlled substances to individuals posing as patients at West Parker Medical Clinic (West Parker) and Priority Wellness Clinic (Priority Wellness).    

Trial evidence showed that from June 2015 through July 2016, while at West Parker, Thompson helped a doctor unlawfully prescribe hydrocodone and carisoprodol, a combination of controlled substances known as the “Las Vegas Cocktail,” to thousands of individuals posing as patients. Thompson himself also issued unlawful prescriptions for carisoprodol (a muscle relaxant). So-called “runners” brought numerous people to pose as patients at West Parker and paid the clinic approximately $220 to $500 in cash for each visit that resulted in prescriptions for dangerous drugs. Throughout the scheme, West Parker made approximately $1.75 million from prescriptions, from which Thompson was paid over $208,000. A jury previously convicted James Pierre, the doctor who worked at West Parker, of unlawfully prescribing over one million opioid pills.

Court documents and trial evidence also show that Thompson helped others illegally prescribe controlled substances, including hydrocodone and oxycodone, at Priority Wellness from May to July 2017, which opened in December 2016 after West Parker closed. Trial evidence showed that Priority Wellness operated as a pill mill, in a similar manner to West Parker: runners brought people posing as patients to Priority Wellness and paid the clinic between $300 and $600, depending on whether the purported patient was getting a prescription for hydrocodone or oxycodone, almost always prescribed in combination with carisoprodol. Throughout the scheme, Priority Wellness made approximately $1.1 million and Thompson made between $700 and $900 per day in cash.

Thompson was convicted of one count of conspiracy to unlawfully distribute and dispense controlled substances and seven counts of unlawfully distributing and dispensing controlled substances in connection with his conduct at West Parker. He was convicted of one count of conspiracy to unlawfully distribute and dispense controlled substances and one count of unlawfully distributing and dispensing controlled substances in connection with his conduct at Priority Wellness. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 3 and faces up to 20 years in prison for each count of conviction. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

To date, six individuals have pleaded guilty in connection with their conduct at West Parker or Priority Wellness.

Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; U.S. Attorney Jennifer Lowery for the Southern District of Texas; and Special Agent in Charge Daniel C. Comeaux of the DEA’s Houston Division made the announcement.

DEA Houston investigated the case.

Assistant Chief Aleza Remis and Trial Attorney Maryam Adeyola of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and Trial Attorney John-Alex Romano of the Criminal Division’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section are prosecuting the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jon Muschenheim for the Southern District of Texas is handling forfeiture.