Security News: Enterprise Man Sentenced to 74 Months in Prison Following Federal Gun and Drug Convictions

Source: United States Department of Justice News

           Montgomery, Alabama – On Wednesday, June 22, 2022, Willie Frank Harvis, a 62-year-old from Enterprise, Alabama, was sentenced to 74 months in prison for possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute and being a felon in possession of multiple firearms, announced United States Attorney Sandra J. Stewart. Following his prison sentence, Harvis will be on supervised release for three years. There is no parole in the federal system.

            According to his plea agreement and other court documents, in late January 2019, the Coffee County Sheriff’s Office began to suspect that Harvis was selling drugs from his Enterprise home. After obtaining a search warrant, on February 1, 2019, law enforcement searched Harvis’s residence and found crack cocaine along with eleven firearms. Harvis has multiple felony convictions and is prohibited by federal law from possessing a firearm.

           This case was investigated by ATF, the Coffee County Sheriff’s Office, and the Enterprise Police Department, with assistance from the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency and DEA. Assistant United States Attorney Russell T. Duraski prosecuted the case.

Security News: Westminster Man and Springfield Woman Charged with Conspiring and Attempting to Commit Robbery

Source: United States Department of Justice News

The Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Vermont announced that Daniel King, 41, of Westminster, Vermont, and Jacquelyn Fougere, 29, of Springfield, Vermont, were indicted by the federal grand jury for conspiring and attempting to commit a robbery that interfered with interstate commerce on March 14, 2022. Defendant Fougere was arrested on Wednesday, June 22, 2022 and is scheduled to have her initial appearance today.  Defendant King is currently in the custody of Vermont’s Department of Corrections, and his initial appearance has not yet been scheduled.

According to court records, on March 14, 2022, King and Fougere attempted to rob a man of cash and THC cartridges by breaking into his residential trailer in Westminster, Vermont.  The victim reported to law enforcement that King was carrying a firearm when he kicked down the door to the trailer.  King also was carrying zip ties which were readied as make-shift handcuffs.  

The United States Attorney’s Office emphasizes that an indictment contains allegations only and that both defendants are presumed innocent until and unless convicted of a crime.  Both King and Fougere face a maximum sentence of 20 years of imprisonment.  The actual sentences, however, would be determined by the Court with guidance from the advisory federal sentencing guidelines.

United States Attorney Nikolas P. Kerest commended the investigatory efforts of the Vermont State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  

The prosecutor is Assistant United States Attorney Jonathan Ophardt.  Fougere’s attorney is Robert Behrens, Esq.  King has not yet retained or been appointed counsel.

Security News: Four Defendants Sentenced to More Than 60 Years Collectively in Federal Prison for Crimes Related to Child Sex Trafficking and Exploitation

Source: United States Department of Justice News

Convictions Come as a Result of Multi-State, Multi-Agency Investigation Involving Defendants in South Carolina and Arizona

FLORENCE, SOUTH CAROLINA — Four Defendants have been sentenced to federal prison for conduct related to a multi-state child sex trafficking and exploitation scheme.

Specifically, the following Defendants have been sentenced:

  • Hart William Grow, 26, of Surprise, Arizona, has been sentenced to 27 years in federal prison for child sex trafficking and the sexual exploitation of a separate minor.
  • Theodore Woolings Bye, III, 37, of Myrtle Beach, has been sentenced to 24 years in federal prison for the sexual exploitation of a minor.
  • Sanadin Mohamed Elrayes, 28, of Surfside Beach, has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for transferring obscene material – video of him having sexual intercourse with a minor.
  • Charles Joseph Spillane, 44, of Myrtle Beach, has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for transferring obscene material – video of him having sexual intercourse with a minor.

“Using the internet, these Defendants engineered and executed crimes that involved sexual acts against a child. This was vile behavior, and the children of South Carolina are safer with these predators off the streets,” said U.S. Attorney Corey F. Ellis.  “I hope the victims can move forward with their lives, and this Office’s Victim Witness Coordinator remains available to aid in this healing. I commend the excellent work of our federal, state, and local partners. However, our work is one small part of what it takes to combat sexual exploitation of children. Parents and guardians need to be vigilant and monitor their children’s online activity. This case highlights that through technology, any child, anywhere, can become a victim.”

“This case underscores the importance of online safety; these predators used the internet to help them victimize innocent children. Thankfully, they are facing justice for their despicable actions,” said Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent in Charge Ronnie Martinez, who oversees  HSI operations in North Carolina and South Carolina. “Protecting our most vulnerable populations from exploitation is one of HSI’s most important missions and we are fortunate to have great working relationships with our law enforcement partners that provide us invaluable assistance in these cases.”

“The success of this case was the result of many local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies working together,” said South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) Capt. Connie Sonnefeld, “These law enforcement officers are dedicated to fighting human trafficking in South Carolina and throughout the country.  SLED is proud to work with our law enforcement partners and prosecutors to support survivors and ensure criminals who prey on our most vulnerable are brought to justice.”

“We as a community have no greater responsibility than to protect our children and law enforcement will always stand up for those that need help,” said Myrtle Beach Police Chief Amy Prock. “This case was a partnership built on that mission and we couldn’t be more proud of the team that brought those charged and those sentenced to justice.”

Evidence presented to the Court showed that Grow, from his home in Arizona and through the internet, misrepresented to various minors across the country that he was also a minor and was interested in a relationship.  A search of Grow’s electronic devices revealed images of, or sexual conversations with, at least 23 individuals confirmed to be minors, and hundreds of other images, videos, and contacts with individuals who appeared to be minors.  Further, at least one of the social media accounts from which Grow engineered his sexual exploitation of children was registered in 2016 from an address associated with Grow, and the account has been active since that time.

In this case, Grow allegedly claimed to the first minor victim that he was a 17-year-old female named “Hannah” living in Columbia, South Carolina. After gaining her trust and collecting sexually explicit videos, Grow forced the minor victim into sex trafficking. In sexually trafficking the minor victim and aware of her, Grow initially posted images on message boards offering the minor victim up to adult males for sex in exchange for the adult males actively engaging in the production of videos of the sexual acts, and ensuring those videos were sent to Grow.

Among the first customers was Bye, who became infatuated with the minor victim and began acting as the middleman for Grow. Although Bye knew the minor victim’s age, he would make sexually explicit videos of the minor victim. He would also arrange for men to have sex with her in exchange for the men agreeing to engage in the production of sexually explicit videos to be sent to Grow. The minor victim lived with her parents in Myrtle Beach, and Grow and Bye would traffic her while her parents were away or were asleep down the hall.

Both Elrayes and Spillane responded to Bye’s internet postings and, after communicating with Bye via social media and text messages, engaged in sexually explicit conduct with the minor victim, which was filmed and sent to Grow.

Additionally, in early 2021, after Grow had trafficked the first minor victim, he began communicating with a second minor victim in the Midlands area of South Carolina. Again, Grow used a false persona to build a relationship with the second minor victim, and ultimately forced her to produce sexually explicit videos for him until shortly before his arrest in Arizona. At Grow’s direction, the videos of the second minor victim were often unknowingly and covertly filmed near her parents or other family members.

According to Court records, the Defendants used social media applications, including Snapchat, Wattpad, and Kik to communicate with the victims and with each other. 

United States District Judge Sherri A. Lydon sentenced Grow to 327 months imprisonment, to be followed by a lifetime of court-ordered supervision; Bye to 293 months imprisonment, to be followed by a lifetime of court-ordered supervision; Elrayes to 60 months imprisonment, to be followed by a three-year term of court-ordered supervision; and Spillane to 60 months imprisonment, to be followed by a three-year term of court-ordered supervision. There is no parole in the federal system. Grow and Bye will be required to register as sex offenders for life and were also ordered to pay restitution to the victims.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the U.S. Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals, who sexually exploit children, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit http://www.justice.gov/psc.

The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), SLED, the Horry County Sheriff’s Office, and the Myrtle Beach Police Department.  Assistant United States Attorneys Derek A. Shoemake and Amy Bower prosecuted the case.

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Security News: Antitrust Division Policy Director David Lawrence Delivers Keynote at Hal White Antitrust Conference

Source: United States Department of Justice News

Evaluating Antitrust’s Assumptions

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

I want to thank Eric and Bates White for the invitation to speak with you tonight. The last time I saw Eric in person was shortly before the pandemic at his wedding. I know several of the economists in the audience tonight were there as well. Eric, let me apologize in advance that my remarks tonight will not do justice to the fun we all had at that lovely event.

Tonight, we are here for a different kind of commemoration. In the fond memory of Professor Hal White, this event gives us the opportunity to think deeply about antitrust and economic policy. Professor White’s legacy includes enormous contributions to the field, not least including an approach to examining our assumptions and practices that I believe will have staying power. I am delighted to deliver this keynote in person for the first time since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, and proceed tonight in the hope that the tradition will continue in Hal’s honor for many years.

  1. Introduction

I will start with two disclaimers. First, the standard DOJ disclaimer. These are my own views and don’t necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.

Second, a disclaimer I feel I must give when addressing a room with this many PhDs: I am not an economist. My training in economics comes almost entirely at the hands of the kind members of the Antitrust Division’s Economic Analysis Group who have, over more than 10 years at the division, humored from me a lot of questions about the underlying details of their economic analyses. I am particularly indebted to our former DAAG Nancy Rose, former Economics Director Bob Majure, Jeff Wilder, and the late Wayne Dunham. One of the great things about the expert economists in EAG is their engagement with attorneys, early and often, as we work up cases together.

I first encountered Hal White as an undergraduate physics major. Like many students toiling away at statistical thermodynamics, I was confronted with the dueling challenges of both pronouncing heteroskedasticity, and testing for it. Professor White’s test was fortunately already programmed into Stata for me, so I was able to solve at least one of those. As I think those here know, the White test has traveled far beyond economics into nearly every discipline relying on statistical analysis.

There’s a terrific video on the UC San Diego website in which Professor White talks about his inspiration for pursuing that work. He said he started with the idea that “We should be more up front about the fact that we are really doing exploration of the unknown, and that if we build in assumptions to our models, they could easily be wrong, and we need ways to check them.”[1] From that starting point, he developed his least-squares paper, which led to his heteroskedasticity work and the prodigious research career that followed.

That inspiration could easily describe much of what we’re doing in antitrust policy at the Department of Justice today. When we build in assumptions, they can easily be wrong, and we need ways to check them. In too many respects, models and assumptions we have come to rely on do not fit with market realities. They fail to capture important predictors of harm to competition, and important consequences of harm to competition as well. Far too often, reliance on outdated or incorrect assumptions leads to underenforcement. I’ll get to that in a moment.

We meet tonight in a time of great challenge and great opportunity in antitrust. Corporate power has grown to levels that leave our fellow citizens concerned and confused. On a daily basis, we at the division find ourselves asked how competition law went astray, and what we can do to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement and meet our nation’s challenges.

If we are looking for evidence that our prior assumptions in antitrust have been wrong, I think the broad concern swelling up in communities all around us is compelling. There are also of course more empirical measures, like the increase in price-cost markups,[2] and the decrease in new firm formation, that speak to these issues.[3] And there are concentration measures as well, alongside a robust methodological debate.[4] But when we find ourselves in an era where lay people who hadn’t heard of antitrust ten years ago are calling for greater enforcement, I think we should listen and try to understand what is animating their concerns.

And to correct a common misconception I hear in antitrust circles, the attention to antitrust in Congress and the media are not driving popular interest in reinvigorating competition in the American economy, they are responding to it. The root cause of the popular interest in antitrust is the dissatisfaction felt by many millions of Americans with a rise in corporate power and a corresponding reduction in their economic liberty. Individual Americans feel this in subtle but important ways every day, such as when they face too few choices how to connect with their loved ones, what private data will be extracted by whom, or where to sell their labor.

But the individual’s economic liberty is a foundational premise of our capitalist democracy. That is why those words go so well together — capitalism and democracy are both premised on individual freedom, choice, and opportunity. As Thurgood Marshall said in Topco, the antitrust laws are “as important to the preservation of economic freedom and our free-enterprise system as the Bill of Rights is to the protection of our fundamental personal freedoms.”[5] Those freedoms must be protected.

  1. Correcting Erroneous Assumptions in Antitrust Policy

Tonight, in the spirit of Professor White, I will ask you to think carefully about four assumptions that have been commonly used in antitrust in recent decades, and to consider how reassessing them can help us more effectively enforce the antitrust laws.

A. Monopolies are Not Inherently Self-Correcting

The first and probably most problematic assumption has been that monopolies are inherently self-correcting, such that we should intentionally underenforce. This assumption traces most prominently to Judge Frank Easterbrook’s 1984 article on the limits of antitrust. As the argument goes, assuming monopoly is “self-destructive,” “judicial errors that tolerate baleful practices are self-correcting while erroneous condemnations are not.”[6]

The assumption that monopoly is self-correcting has been used to justify underenforcement in a wide range of circumstances, ranging from Trinko[7] to the withdrawn Section 2 report briefly issued by the Antitrust Division in 2008.[8] It even appeared as recently as the 2018 oral arguments for Ohio v. American Express, when Justice Gorsuch asked “why shouldn’t we take Judge Easterbrook’s admonition seriously, that judicial errors are a lot harder to correct than an occasional monopoly where you can hope and assume that the market will eventually correct it.”[9]

The answer to Justice Gorsuch’s question is that we should not take Judge Easterbrook’s admonition seriously because it was wrong — the assumption that markets are inherently self-correcting is not true.[10] Entry barriers are quite real, whether exclusionary, regulatory, or natural features of markets.

The first two of those barriers to entry — exclusionary and regulatory barriers — arise from the fact that monopoly rents, as it turns out, are profitable. A portion of those rents can then be spent to undermine competitors or pay off third parties, either of which create exclusionary barriers to entry. Meanwhile, regulatory barriers to entry may already exist when a monopoly is obtained, or they may be acquired by spending monopoly rents to influence regulatory and political processes. Indeed, the danger of monopoly to our political process is not a novel proposition — it was one of the core concerns animating the Sherman Act.

In addition to those barriers to entry that result from monopoly power, natural characteristics of markets may create significant entry barriers. In the modern economy, network effects are incredibly common. That has enormous benefits for society, but flips Judge Easterbrook’s analysis on its head. A robust literature explains how network effects create barriers to entry and render markets prone to tipping.[11] If anything, markets with network effects skew toward monopoly, not the other way around. If we take error cost analysis seriously, that would augur towards favoring overenforcement, not underenforcement, in these markets.

For my part, I think we should target neutral and just enforcement of the laws. That maximizes not only competition values, but the rule of law values that undergird our constitutional democracy.

B. Digital Networks are Cooperative – They are Not Built Solely by Their Owners.

Trinko incorporates a second problematic assumption — that the principal investment in a monopoly product is always made by its owner, and so we should underenforce the Sherman Act to protect those investments. 

The reason Trinko made this assumption is understandable. Trinko was about phone networks, not digital ones. It expressed concern that the incentive to build expensive, physical infrastructure would be undermined by a rule sometimes requiring monopolists to permit competitors access to that infrastructure. It applied but narrowed Aspen Skiing, involving competitors’ access to tickets on the monopolist’s ski lifts.

Writing at the time, Justice Scalia had no reason to foresee that a coming sea change in technology would undermine this logic. One thing Aspen Skiing and Trinko had in common was expensive physical infrastructure. Ironically, both cases involved tall poles with wires strung between them — in one case carrying phone calls, and in the other skiers. In both cases, the investment in that infrastructure had been borne primarily by the monopolist.

Today, many digital platforms are radically and materially different. The wires, poles, and fiber-optic cables that support incremental users are already there. The additional investment in physical infrastructure to add each marginal user of a software service over those pre-existing connections may not be zero, but it is comparatively small. In these markets, the connections from which the platform derives its value are often built by users and third parties with little incremental cost to the platform owner. In the same way that a telephone network’s value increases with each new wire the phone company strings from a pole to a home, the value of a search engine increases with each new page someone else adds to the web. The value of a social network grows with each new user who builds a profile and posts content, and each new third party that invests in pages or widgets. The value of an app store grows with each app someone else contributes to the platform.

You can see the critical difference. In many digital markets, the incremental connections that grow the value of the platform are contributed not by a monopolist owner, but by users and third parties. This has important implications for competition policy. Relative to the physical networks of Trinko, our concern with disincentivizing the monopolists’ investment shrinks, at the same time that our concern should grow that third parties may be disincentivized from investing in the platform.

We need to recognize that monopoly maintenance can be an effective and problematic strategy that entrenches dominance at the same time that it discourages innovation. Threats of exclusion, discrimination, or retaliation for competing are of greater concern when they reduce third parties’ incentives to build the platform out further. These and other forms of moat building, such as nascent competitor acquisitions, can have profoundly negative effects on the dynamism of our markets.[12]

C. Coordinated Effects are a Problem Posed by Oligopolies

The third assumption I want to highlight is embedded, like heteroskedasticity, in certain models. This is the assumption that mergers to oligopoly do not inherently create problems because coordinated effects simply do not exist.

We often find this assumption in merger simulations submitted to the department to suggest that efficiencies will measurably outweigh the harms of a transaction. I am sure this audience is familiar with the fact that, for all their complexities, merger simulations are theoretical unilateral effects calculations. On the harm side of the ledger, they only even attempt to assess one type of harm, leaving the very real problem of parallel accommodating conduct aside. Then they fold in marginal cost reductions and purport to show the merger will, on balance, lower consumer prices. Not all merging parties take this approach, but many do.

I have to say that this strikes me a little like building a plane based on a flight simulator that leaves out wind resistance. How can we purport to build an accurate simulation that does not even attempt to interact with one of the foundational forces driving the exercise? I would not get on that plane.

This assumption survives, as I understand it, because the magnitude of potential coordinated effects from a reduction in the number of competitors can be difficult to measure. We do have some post hac measurements, such as the recent paper by Miller, Sheu, and Weinberg, retrospectively assessing how coordination strategies in the beer industry were exacerbated by consolidation. Their results obtain even in the presence of marginal cost efficiencies sufficient to offset unilateral effects.[13]

Somehow, we morphed from disregarding coordinated effects because of challenges quantifying them to just assuming they do not exist. In anything but the most strident approach to intentional underenforcement, ignoring the unquantifiable invites systematic error.

All along, the law has provided a simple but effective tool for stopping consolidation before the risk of oligopolistic interdependence arises. The structural presumption set out by the Supreme Court in Philadelphia National Bank does just that.[14] Neither the agencies, nor the courts, nor the limits of models have the authority to rewrite that legal standard unilaterally. As the Supreme Court said in PNB, Congress designed the Clayton Act and the Anti-Merger Act of 1950 to “prevent undue concentration,” and therefore a merger resulting in a firm with control of undue share of a relevant market is unlawful absent rebuttal evidence.[15] In the nearly 60 years since, courts have consistently upheld the structural presumption as a sufficient basis to condemn a transaction, even standing alone. This was most recently reiterated by the Third Circuit in the Hackensack opinion earlier this year.[16]

The approach of recognizing that the risk of coordinated effects rises as the number of firms falls has also been increasingly validated as models of coordination have evolved in recent decades. For example, Simon Loertscher and Leslie Marx made a useful contribution in the Journal of Law and Economics last fall.[17] Their theoretical model shows how a reduction in the number of firms materially increases the risk of coordinated effects. Of course, no heuristic is a perfect predictor. But when a merger creates or aggravates an oligopoly market structure, both the law and sound policy demand we shift burdens to the merging parties to show that the merger does not risk substantially lessening competition.

D. Workers, and Labor Markets, are Important

I will finish with a fourth assumption that I think you are already aware no longer holds. That is the assumption that harms to competition in labor markets are not worthy of investing prosecutorial resources.

For too long, antitrust enforcers, and the antitrust community in general, paid too little attention to labor market issues. But a robust literature has been developed by Elena Praeger, Eric Posner, Ioana Marinescu, and others, demonstrating the degree of market power employers exercise over employees in many markets.[18] Workers’ wages depend on the degree to which employers compete for them — everyone who has negotiated a salary knows that. Yet in too many markets employer power suppresses worker wages.

As we review the merger guidelines, we are thinking carefully about ensuring a sufficient framework is in place to evaluate the labor market impacts of mergers. Under the Clayton Act, an unlawful risk of harm in any relevant market renders a transaction unlawful, whether downstream or upstream, and notwithstanding the size of that market relative to the price of the transaction.

  1. Conclusion

Let me stop there — there are other assumptions to think carefully about, but I promised Eric I would finish before the desert service. If it’s not clear, we are taking a hard look at the assumptions underlying antitrust practice. The division has an obligation to ensure that the tools we apply reflect the law and help us ask the right questions about modern markets. It’s hard work but it’s interesting, fun, and important. And in the spirit of my current and departed friends in EAG, it makes for collegial and enlightening discussion. It is an incredibly exciting time to be thinking about antitrust policy, and we look forward to the debates and developments to come.

 


[1] University of California San Diego, UC San Diego Economist Halbert White Talks About His Research, YouTube (Oct. 8, 2011), https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Bb4hnvMDwEA.

[2] See, e.g., American Antitrust Institute, A National Competition Policy: Unpacking the Problem of Declining Competition and Setting Priorities Moving Forward at 5–6 (Sept. 28, 2016), https://www.antitrustinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/AAINatlCompPolicy-1.pdf.

[3] See, e.g., Martin Neil Baily and Nicholas Montalbano, Why is U.S. productivity growth so slow? Possible explanations and policy responses, The Brookings Institution (Sept. 2016), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/wp22_baily-montalbano_final4.pdf.

[4] See, e.g., Matias Covarrubias, Germán Gutiérrez, and Thomas Philippon, From Good to Bad Concentration? U.S. Industries over the past 30 years, NBER Macroeconomics Annual Vol. 34 (Jun. 2019), https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~tphilipp/papers/CGP_NBER_WP.pdf.

[5] United States v. Topco Assocs., Inc., 405 U.S. 596, 610 (1972).

[6] Frank H. Easterbrook, The Limits of Antitrust, 63 Tex. L. Rev. 1, 2-3 (1984). For a more detailed history, see Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Antitrust Error Costs, Univ. Pa. Inst. for Law & Econ. Paper No. 21-32 (2022), https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3745&context=‌faculty_scholarship.

[7] Verizon Comm’ns, Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP, 540 U.S. 398, 414-15 (2004).

[8] U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Single-Firm Conduct Under Section 2 of the Sherman Act (2008), https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-firm-conduct-under-section-2-sherman-act; see also U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Justice Department Withdraws Report on Antitrust Monopoly Law (May 11, 2009), https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-withdraws-report-antitrust-monopoly-law.

[9] Transcript of Oral Argument at 18, Ohio v. Am. Express Co., 138 S. Ct. 2274 (2018) (No. 16-1454).

[10] Others have written persuasively, and in greater depth, on this topic. See Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Antitrust Error Costs, Univ. Pa. Inst. for Law & Econ. Paper No. 21-32 (2022), https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/‌viewcontent.cgi?article=3745&context=‌faculty_scholarship; Jonathan B. Baker, Taking The Error Out of “Error Costs” Analysis: What’s Wrong with Antitrust’s Right, 80 Antitrust L.J. 1 (2015).

[11] See, e.g., Filippo Lancieri & Patricia Morita Sakowski, Competition in Digital Markets: A Review of Expert Reports, 26 Stan. J.L. Bus. & Fin. 65, 75 (2021) (summarizing several recent reports on tipping effects).

[13] See Miller, Nathan H., Gloria Sheu, and Matthew C. Weinberg. 2021. “Oligopolistic Price Leadership and Mergers: The United States Beer Industry.” American Economic Review, 111 (10): 3123-59.

[14] See United States v. Phila. Nat’l Bank, 374 U.S. 321, 363 (1963).

[16] Fed. Trade Comm’n v. Hackensack Meridian Health, Inc., 30 F.4th 160, 173 (3d Cir. 2022) (“[T]he District Court needed no further evidence to find the FTC had established its prima facie case . . . .”).

[17] See Simon Loertscher & Leslie M. Marx, Coordinated Effects in Merger Review, 64 J.L. & Econ. 705 (2021).

[18] See, e.g., U.S. Dep’t of Treasury, The State of Labor Market Competition, (March 7, 2022), https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/State-of-Labor-Market-Competition-2022.pdf.

Security News: Seven Defendants Charged in Animal Fighting Venture and Illegal Gambling Operation

Source: United States Department of Justice News

CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA — A joint team of federal, state, and local law enforcement officers arrested 7 individuals on June 22, 2022, who have all been charged in federal court for their roles in a gamecock fighting venture and illegal gambling operation that operated in and around Ridgeville.

These defendants have been charged by indictment with animal fighting venture, illegal gambling operation, conspiracy to violate animal fighting venture, and false statement to a federal law enforcement officer. The following defendants have been arrested:

  • ROY MICHAEL LIMEHOUSE, 65, of Ridgeville, was charged with animal fighting venture, illegal gambling operation, and conspiracy to violate animal fighting venture.
  • ROOSEVELT CURRY, 67, of North Augusta, South Carolina, was charged with animal fighting venture, illegal gambling operation, and conspiracy to violate animal fighting venture.
  • JOEY LEVERANE BROWN, JR, a/k/a “Junior,” 41, of Warrenville, was charged with animal fighting venture, illegal gambling operation, and conspiracy to violate animal fighting venture.
  • SHANNON HUBERT BAXLEY, 49, of Barnwell, was charged with animal fighting venture, illegal gambling operation, and false statement to a federal law enforcement officer.
  • JAMES FRANKLIN ROUNDTREE, 51, of Barnwell, was charged with animal fighting venture, illegal gambling operation, and conspiracy to violate animal fighting venture.
  • JEREMEY ALLEN BESSINGER, 40, of Fairfax, was charged with animal fighting venture, illegal gambling operation, and conspiracy to violate animal fighting venture.
  • BRANDON ISAIAH MCLAUGHLIN, 24, of Gloverville, was charged with animal fighting venture and illegal gambling operation.

If they are convicted, the defendants face up to five years in prison for each count in the indictment.

Following the indictment, federal law enforcement officers placed a legal hold on the property where the illegal activity occurred. Federal law enforcement officers also seized cash and three vehicles used in relation to the animal fighting venture and illegal gambling operation. 

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of Inspector General, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), and Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office investigated this case.

USDA Office of Inspector General Special Agent Dustin McPhillips led the federal investigation. Assistant United States Attorney Chris Lietzow is prosecuting the case.

The United States Attorney stated that all charges in this indictment are merely accusations and that all defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.

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