So, in keeping with my mission, I felt it was only proper to preserve this raid.
When the raid went down, rumors began to encircle the Detroit gossip circles about what had happened and who was involved.
So, instead of listening to rumors, I just went ahead and did a deep dive.
I pulled the address of the home and found out that it was removed from the property tax rolls of the City of Dearborn and Wayne County Treasurer.
Then I found out the entire block was removed from the property tax rolls.
Then I remembered another "Elected One" who had his home raided by the FBI, where there was no published complaint at the time, but I thought I would deep dive the story, also.
Lo and behold, there were no property tax rolls for the entire street with the Wayne County Register of Deeds, nor were there any records with its respective city.
Then, it dawned on me, there could only be one connection in dealing with computer files.
FBI ran up on some real estate fraud and I bet it had something to do with the Detroit Land Bank Authority as Donna Shalala is all over Detroit.
I am going to stop there because there are some Meanies out there who like to do mean things, like ruining my day to foil their sad little plots, when I could be writing another salacious chapter of my epic romance.
A late-night FBI raid in Dearborn involves a national security issue, but it's not about a planned terrorist attack or explosives or anyone locally, the Free Press has learned.
According to a source familiar with the operation , the Thursday raid at a house in Dearborn appears to have nothing to do with metro Detroit or the young adult male who lives in house that was raided.
That person was not in the home at the time of the raid and no charges are imminent, the source said, noting it is not clear whether that person has been detained by authorities.
According to multiple sources, the FBI in Detroit is working with the FBI in another state about a national security issue.
For ex-FBI chief Andy Arena, who was the former head of terrorism operations in Detroit, national security means one of two things:
"It tells me it's either a terrorism case, or B, an espionage spying case," Arena said, noting if it were an explosives case, the raid would have involved bomb-sniffing dogs and nearby neighbors would have been evacuated.
Neither of those things happened, which, for Arena, suggests they went looking for the following:
"They likely went in there looking for people or records or computers, cell phones, iPhones, those types of things," Arena said.
"What they're doing now is they are looking at what they took from there — the people, the evidence — and they're trying to decipher it. 'Where does it fit?' "
Arena said he understands why the FBI is being tight-lipped about the operation.
"Obviously, the public wants to know what's going on, but the last thing law enforcement wants to do is mess up an ongoing investigation," Arena said.
Mary Laundroche, director of public information for the City of Dearborn, issued this statement:
"The city is directing inquiries to the FBI, as it is their investigation. We have been told that there is no danger to our community."
The operation wrapped up just before midnight Thursday at the home on the 7200 block of Jonathon Street.
Detroit's FBI spokesperson Tim Wiley declined to comment on specifics of the operation, stating only:
"FBI personnel (were) on scene conducting a law enforcement operation.
There is no threat to public safety."
On Friday, the home appeared no different from neighboring residences.
There was a football in the driveway and flower pots near the front door, but nobody answered.
A neighbor who declined to give her name said she saw law enforcement officers Thursday evening surrounding the house and removing boxes.
But she didn't see anyone taken into custody.
The woman first saw the officers there at about 5:30 p.m., and they didn't leave until about midnight.
She said she used to live in an upper unit at the residence, and that the people who live there are a man with two children. Recently, the man's father had come to visit.
The woman declined to give more details on the neighbors but said it's a safe, quiet neighborhood.
More details about the raid were expected to be released sometime today, though the FBI has indicated new information may not be forthcoming until this weekend.
It is called fraud and I would not blame, directly blame, the City of Detroit, Wayne County, the State of Michigan, neither do I fault the U.S. Government because they all got duped by a set of nefarious actors, engaging in personal inurement of public office, with the support of those wonderful NGOs and whatever the hell a Quasi-governmental organization is, to execute complex fraud schemes, where there is a home, in each stratefied sector of public service, sophisticated machinations of privatization.
It is fraud.
They stole the children, the land and the votes, yet, "The Elected Ones" have no qualms ignoring this fact as they stuff their pockets full of NGO money while taking fashion show selfies for their political campaign Facebook page.
They even stole the property taxes.
I have previously published how the City of Detroit contracts with Wayne County to collect delinquent property taxes, but as soon as the batch of collection for the delinquent property tax amounts gets sent over to Wayne County Property Tax Division, the property tax record with the City of Detroit mysteriously becomes omitted from the city record, but never notifies Wayne County Treasurer.
During this window, the properties are then processed through a quiet title action, which wipes the taxes.
The properties then, never go to public auction, and are processed, without any chain of command, to the Detroit Land Bank Authority.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the property tax assessments are arbitrary and capricious as the city does not have any licensed or certified property tax assessors.
In short, the property taxes for this segment of properties is just fraud to ensure the homeowner will lose a property in high demand of private investors.
Below, The State of Michigan signed into law, special property tax legislation, that would place a 50% special tax reversion to an "authority" specified in the Michigan Land Bank Fast Track Authority, to use the money to pay back loans made by the authority.
Well, if you do not know, the Detroit Land Bank Authority, which has no affiliation nor association with the Michigan Land Bank Fast Track Authority, as stated in multiple documents, local news reports, and many other media, journalistic recordkeeping, including the Michgian Land Bank Fast Track Authority, itself, just so happens to get to capture 50% of special assessment property taxes.
Did you also know that the Detroit Land Bank Authority also levies its own taxes, that do not exist?
Now, how is it a quasi-governmental-entity, which has violated its own Articles of Creation, sealed by the State of Michigan, by failing to incorporate, able to open a bank account to cash the checks the State of Michigan deposits into a financial institution of the Detroit Land Bank Authority?
Well, if you did not know, the Detroit Land Bank Authority has no bank accounts because it never incorporated, which takes us to the next logical line of questioning - How did the Detroit Land Bank Authority get to take out loans?
Yes, that is correct. The Detroit Land Bank Authority took out loans, federal loans, from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program 2, then got the boon of the 50% special property tax kickback to payback the loan, but instead of paying back the loans, they did another quiet title on the properties to wipe the loans from the books.
So, in essence, you cannot blame the "government", you are going to have to blame specific actors in public office and others in the public light of an authority for allowing this to happen, then allowing nothing to be done about the fraud.
They stole the children's legacies, and no one cares, not even "The Elected Ones".
The city overtaxed homeowners for years. Those who couldn’t pay are still feeling the pain.
Detroit’s housing crisis is the work of its own government
DETROIT — Jennine Spencer had always wanted to own the house next door. When she was a little girl, the owner kept the beautiful Victorian immaculate. So when it went into mortgage foreclosure in 2010 and two years later came up for sale for just $1,500, she dipped into her modest savings and paid cash.
The house had sat vacant as the recession rolled through Detroit, and scrappers had stripped it down to the doorknobs. It had no furnace, no water heater — even the sinks and toilets were gone. Spencer had to spend $10,000 just to make it habitable. And the house came with another problem, bigger than missing appliances: The previous owner had left $16,000 in unpaid city property taxes, a debt that Spencer now owed.
The debt quickly proved too much for her. She was making about $20,000 a year running a hair salon she owned nearby and was putting her two daughters through college. Her parents were getting older, and she had to care for them, too. She fell behind on tax payments only months after she’d bought the house, and soon went into tax foreclosure. She arrived home one day in October 2012 to find a speculator sniffing around the property. The house had been put up for auction.
In 2012, Jennine Spencer bought the house next door to where she grew up, then lost it to tax foreclosure. She bought it back again, but had to fight to keep current on inflated tax bills.
After the financial crisis, mortgage foreclosures claimed 65,000 of Detroit’s homes. But the city has faced an even bigger problem with tax foreclosures, which have claimed nearly 73,000 more homes and created a second-wave housing crisis that has no parallel in other American cities. Tens of thousands of Detroit’s foreclosed buildings have succumbed to blight. And a majority of the 673,000 people in the city, once a bastion of black working-class homeownership, now rent instead of own.
In many ways, government policy has contributed to this crisis. Detroit levies the highest property tax rate of any large city in the country, around 3.8 percent (the national average is just 1.5 percent).
When tax bills go unpaid, the city turns them over to Wayne County for collection. The county can charge homeowners up to 18 percent interest plus penalty fees, and they have just two and a half years to pay off the debt before the county confiscates and sells their property in a public auction.
Thousands of properties, many of them still occupied, end up in the tax foreclosure auction each year.
Spencer’s house sold for a $3,600 bid in 2012. But she was determined to stay in the house and to figure out a way to buy it back from the new owner. Within a few months she succeeded, but she found herself still struggling to pay the taxes on the house. She eventually faced foreclosure twice more, in 2015 and 2016. Each year, she has barely scraped together the money to keep her home out of the auction. All in all, she’s paid the Wayne County treasurer a total of $9,484 to keep her home, a third of that in interest and fees.
“I’ve had to struggle and fight so hard to stay in my home,” she said, sitting in the front room of her house this fall. “Every day it’s a battle.”
But she says she could have afforded to pay the city on time — if her tax bills had been fair.
The year she bought back the house, for $7,665, her tax bill was almost $2,400. The city assessor had set the value of her property at around $56,000. In other words, the city said her home was worth roughly seven times what she paid for it, and her resulting tax bill was seven times what it should have been.
Indeed, Spencer’s taxes, and those of tens of thousands of other Detroit homeowners, were not just high. For years, they were illegal. Each year a startling number of homeowners have fallen behind on those inflated taxes, receiving bills and eventually foreclosure notices from Wayne County.
The county knows taxes were too high, but nevertheless it keeps taking people’s money, and their homes. Many advocates are scratching their heads trying to understand why the government isn’t doing more to correct the injustice. But there’s evidence that it simply can’t afford to.
Property in Detroit was already cheap compared to other large cities, but the recession pushed home values into free fall. By 2009, the median sale price of residential property had plunged 86 percent, to $9,500. Michigan law says that loss in value should have led to a proportional drop in property assessments, which are used to determine property taxes. But Detroit’s assessors, already understaffed and underresourced, were barely functional as the city’s own finances imploded. They kept assessing homeowners at levels for some imaginary market, even as the government slashed services and Detroit headed toward municipal bankruptcy.
A recent analysis by Chicago-Kent College of Law professor Bernadette Atuahene and Detroit-area urban economist Tim Hodge estimates that at least 55 percent of homes in the city were assessed beyond the legal limit between 2009 and 2015. In the worst year, 2010, as many as 85 percent of homes may have been overassessed.
The result was an unnecessary financial strain on both longtime and new homeowners in a period when many could least afford it. By 2010, the city had lost more than 200,000 jobs, and thousands of residents had fallen into poverty. Many of the city’s homeowners were now struggling to make ends meet. Tax bills fell behind more urgent concerns like dealing with home repairs and keeping utilities on.
Mayor Mike Duggan, who took office in 2014 and was re-elected last month, has conceded that inflated taxes led to a higher rate of tax delinquency and that some foreclosures could have been avoided if taxes had been fair. In 2014, the city began a three-year effort to correct tax bills going forward by reassessing every parcel individually, something Detroit hadn’t done in decades. As a result, more than half of this year’s tax bills have been reduced. Some have been cut by more than 50 percent.
In a 2015 press conference on the reassessment effort, Duggan said Detroit’s property tax collection rate was improving as a result. “When we assessed people honestly, a lot more people started paying their taxes,” the mayor told reporters, “which is going to mean a significant reduction in foreclosures.”
Even so, an independent report to the State Tax Commission noted that Detroit’s 2017 residential assessments were well outside industry standards for accuracy and said the city still had a lot of work to do to bring its assessments into line. (Duggan declined an interview request, and a city spokesperson said in an email that the city’s assessments are now set through “fair and thorough processes.”)
Figuring out just who was overtaxed, and by how much, would require retroactively calculating assessments as of past market conditions, something the mayor hasn’t signaled he would consider. And while assessments are generally much more fair than they used to be, tens of thousands of homeowners have already paid well beyond what they should have owed, and many lost their homes because they couldn’t keep up. This year’s 6,000 foreclosures, for example, are the result of owners failing to pay taxes levied in 2014, when an estimated 83 percent of Detroit’s homes were illegally assessed.
Michele Oberholtzer, who heads up the tax-foreclosure counseling unit at a Detroit nonprofit called the United Community Housing Coalition, likens the foreclosure of overtaxed homes to the use of false evidence to convict a suspected criminal. “It was known that this wasn’t done properly,” she said. “It’s a form of theft. It’s taking private property from people without compensation on the basis of something false.”
Wayne County’s treasurer, Eric Sabree, has acknowledged that his office is still collecting taxes that were unfairly assessed. But he says he has no jurisdiction over assessments (which are done by the city) and argues that state law does not allow him to alter the foreclosure process, even when the foreclosures are based on inflated tax bills.
Housing advocates point out that the treasurer’s office has for years exercised wide discretion over which properties are seized and which are not. They also say that local officials should lobby the state, as they have in the past, to allow the county to provide more relief. A pending lawsuit from the Michigan ACLU demands that the county halt foreclosures “until proper and lawful taxes are assessed.”
So far, though, the treasurer has said the county is doing nothing wrong and won’t consider taking these actions.
But Wayne County has one big incentive to keep collecting all the delinquent property taxes it can: According to fiscal data provided by the county executive’s office, it depends on delinquent tax revenue to balance its budget.
Tax-foreclosed homes often sit vacant, which makes them susceptible to blight. (Mark Betancourt for VICE News)
Wayne County is in charge of foreclosures in Detroit because it owns the city’s uncollected tax debt. Every year, some proportion of Detroit’s property owners fail to pay their property tax bills on time. Michigan law allows the city to sell those uncollected taxes to the county treasurer to make up the shortfall. The county treasurer then tries to collect the back taxes from property owners and sells their properties at auction if they fail to pay.
Through this process, the county is able to make a surplus — essentially a profit — from the interest and penalties collected from delinquent property owners and from some auction sales. The county can then transfer that surplus money to its general fund for use elsewhere in its budget.
This is no small amount of money. According to Wayne County financial documents, since the current foreclosure process was implemented, in 2002, the county has transferred more than half a billion dollars in surplus delinquent tax collections to its general fund. Most of that was made from properties in Detroit. And that money has been not just helpful to Wayne County, but vital.
“We have a nostril above water,” said Wayne County Commissioner Tim Killeen, whose District 1 includes the far eastern edge of Detroit. Out of a $1.45 billion budget, the county is only $30 million from running a deficit. “If a canoe goes by,” Killeen said, “the wake will put us under.”
Like the City of Detroit, the county has struggled to stay afloat since the recession. But the wave of tax delinquency that came with the downturn — made worse by the city’s inflated assessments — became a lifeline for the county budget.
If delinquent tax transfers over the past three years hadn’t exceeded expectations, data provided in early November by the county executive’s office shows, the county would be running a $21 million deficit right now.
County officials vowed in 2015 to stop relying on surplus delinquent tax revenue to balance their budget. But documents show that the county’s bottom line has changed little since then, and that it still plans to lean on surplus transfers through at least the next two years. In fact, if delinquent tax earnings don’t continue to surpass expectations, the county may be facing a small deficit in 2019.
That would seem to give the county little short-term incentive to halt foreclosures or forgive debt owed on Detroit’s inflated taxes. The county declined repeated requests to make officials who oversee financial matters, including Sabree, available for comment.
While the county commission doesn’t control the treasurer’s office or how it handles tax delinquency, Killeen is looking for ways to help end the squeeze on low-income homeowners. But he also offered a realistic assessment of the situation: Resolving the tax foreclosure crisis would mean closing the fiscal gap some other way. “I do not like the idea of making money off people’s misery,” Killeen said.
“However, what is the alternative?”
There has been some progress in addressing Detroit’s tax foreclosure problem. The number of foreclosed owner-occupied properties has gone down by 88 percent in the last two years to 786 in 2017, a fact both the city and county governments tout as evidence of their resolve to end the crisis.
The city has long offered an exemption on property taxes for homeowners living below the poverty line, and recently it has tried harder to publicize this program and to streamline the application process. For its part, the county has pushed delinquent taxpayers to get onto payment plans, which allow them to avoid foreclosure as long as they can keep current on city taxes and make monthly payments on back taxes to the county treasurer. And in 2014, Mayor Duggan successfully lobbied for reduced interest on tax payment plans and more time for homeowners to pay off their debts (about one-quarter of those who sign up for plans now get these concessions).
But there’s a catch: The payment plans may be only delaying foreclosures, rather than preventing them. An analysis of tax delinquency data conducted with Loveland Technologies, a Detroit-based property mapping and data company that has extensively studied the tax foreclosure crisis, shows that the collective debt of the city’s single-family homes remains largely unchanged since last year.
So despite the two governments’ efforts, homeowners aren’t necessarily making real progress in reducing what they owe. And according to the data, a similar number of single-family homes — around 39,000 — were more than two years delinquent on taxes this fall compared to a year earlier.
The Wayne County Treasurer’s office declined to disclose how many homeowners are failing to stay on their payment plans. Oberholtzer, the housing counselor, believes the default rate is high.
“People bought one or two or even three years just by getting on the plan,” she said. “A lot of those people have been or will be kicked off of those payment plans, and they’ll owe more than ever.” She warned that a new wave of foreclosures could be on the way.
Oberholtzer is already beginning to see some of the 23,000 Detroit homeowners who received foreclosure notices this fall trickling into her office, asking for help. They’re delinquent on taxes levied two years before the city’s reassessment was completed, so they still could lose their homes over illegally inflated bills.
This year, for the first time, Jennine Spencer is square with Wayne County and current on her city taxes. That’s partly thanks to the income-based exemption she now receives, which allows her to pay the city just $134 a year for garbage collection. But the exemption did nothing to erase what she owed Wayne County on the earlier inflated tax bills she failed to pay, and clearing those debts required a painful sacrifice.
This past May, Spencer made the choice to close her hair salon business. She’d been siphoning funds from the business to pay down her property tax debt and couldn’t afford to keep both the business and her home.
It was a tough loss. She’d not only made a living from her work there but also offered free haircuts to the homeless and to kids heading back to school. “I did a lot of community service out of that salon,” she said. “Now I can’t offer that service.” She now works part time at a salon in Roseville, a 20-minute drive outside the city.
But, she says, the sacrifice was worthwhile. It’s more important to remain in the community she grew up in, where she’s become an organizer and an advocate, and where she can take care of her mom, who lives next door.
She says she was raised to value these things, and to meet her financial responsibilities, at any cost. “I had to make it happen,” she says. “Because if I didn’t, I would fail. And I was not a failure.”
Mark Betancourt is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C.
Research and analysis of tax foreclosure data was provided by Loveland Technologies. Historical sales and assessment data and analysis were provided by ATTOM Data Solutions and Data Driven Detroit.
7 countries involved in disrupting drug money flow for terror regime
FEB 01 (WASHINGTON) - The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) today announced significant enforcement activity including arrests targeting Lebanese Hizballah’s External Security Organization Business Affairs Component (BAC), which is involved in international criminal activities such as drug trafficking and drug proceed money laundering. These proceeds are used to purchase weapons for Hizballah for its activities in Syria. This ongoing investigation spans the globe and involves numerous international law enforcement agencies in seven countries, and once again highlights the dangerous global nexus between drug trafficking and terrorism.
This effort is part of DEA’s Project Cassandra, which targets a global Hizballah network responsible for the movement of large quantities of cocaine in the United States and Europe. This global network, referred to by law enforcement as the Lebanese Hizballah External Security Organization Business Affairs Component (BAC), was founded by deceased Hizballah Senior Leader Imad Mughniyah and currently operates under the control of Abdallah Safieddine and recent U.S.-designated Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) Adham Tabaja. Members of the Hizballah BAC have established business relationships with South American drug cartels, such as La Oficina de Envigado, responsible for supplying large quantities of cocaine to the European and United States drug markets. Further, the Hizballah BAC continues to launder significant drug proceeds as part of a trade based money laundering scheme known as the Black Market Peso Exchange.
“These drug trafficking and money laundering schemes utilized by the Business Affairs Component provide a revenue and weapons stream for an international terrorist organization responsible for devastating terror attacks around the world,” said DEA Acting Deputy Administrator Jack Riley. “DEA and our international partners are relentless in our commitment to disrupt any attempt by terrorists and terrorist organizations to leverage the drug trade against our nations. DEA and our partners will continue to dismantle networks who exploit the nexus between drugs and terror using all available law enforcement mechanisms.”
Beginning in February 2015, based on DEA investigative leads, European authorities initiated an operation targeting the network’s criminal activities in that region. Since then, law enforcement authorities, closely supported by DEA, have uncovered an intricate network of money couriers who collect and transport millions of euros in drug proceeds from Europe to the Middle East. The currency is then paid in Colombia to drug traffickers using the Hawala disbursement system. A large portion of the drug proceeds was found to transit through Lebanon, and a significant percentage of these proceeds are benefitting terrorist organizations, namely Hizballah.
This investigation is a result of leads developed during the investigation into the Lebanese Canadian Bank.
The combination of aggressive international law enforcement investigations and Treasury’s ongoing sanctions (see below) pressure shows the scope of the global commitment to diminish the ability of Hizballah and its financial supporters to move funds worldwide.
Enforcement Action
With DEA and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) working closely with foreign counterparts in France, Germany, Italy and Belgium, authorities arrested top leaders of the European cell of this Lebanese Hizballah External Security Organization BAC last week. The most significant arrest was of the U.S.-designated SDGT Mohamad Noureddine, a Lebanese money launderer who has worked directly with Hizballah’s financial apparatus to transfer Hizballah funds via his Lebanon-based company Trade Point International S.A.R.L. and maintained direct ties to Hizballah commercial and terrorist elements in both Lebanon and Iraq.
The CPB National Targeting Center partnered with DEA and international counterparts such as Europol in this investigation. CBP’s continued cooperation with the DEA , and European law enforcement counterparts is a vital component in dismantling complex global drug trafficking and money laundering networks as well as enhancing the security of the United States border.
U.S. Treasury Sanctions
Separately, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced sanctions last week targeted Hizballah’s financial support network by designating Hizballah-affiliated money launderers Noureddine and Hamdi Zaher El Dine, as well as Trade Point International S.A.R.L, a company owned or controlled by Noureddine, pursuant to Executive Order 13224. This order targets terrorists and those providing support to terrorists or acts of terrorism. Noureddine and El Dine were designated for providing financial services to or in support of Hizballah, a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. Trade Point International S.A.R.L. was designated for being owned or controlled by Noureddine. As a result of Treasury’s action, all assets of the designated individuals or entities that are located in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons are frozen, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them.
As part of its designation, Adam J. Szubin, Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, stated that, “Hizballah needs individuals like Mohamad Noureddine and Hamdi Zaher El Dine to launder criminal proceeds for use in terrorism and political destabilization. We will continue to target this vulnerability, and expose and disrupt such enablers of terrorism wherever we find them.”
Participating offices and agencies:
DEA Philadelphia, DEA Miami, DEA Newark, DEA New York, DEA Special Operations Division, DEA Bilateral Investigative Unit, DEA country offices in Europe, as well as Bogota and Cartagena
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
U.S. Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)
U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)
EUROPOL
EUROJUST
Having previously recognized the bottom up pattern of investigation, I recalled a previous post on the targets of child welfare smaller programs by the FBI.
I have been pontificating on the use of child welfare funding going into political campaigns for the tenure of my blog.
As always, I had to analyze the original documents.
The FEC issued a letter calling for disavowment of using funds from a third party to fund a politcal campaign.
She probably charged food for campaign events to the USDA program.
Looking at her campaign committee funding for the 2016 cycle, below, she did not raise very much money, but did nake an odd contribution herself, in the FEC filing, below.
I will bet anything she was what I like to call a prop candidate.
The DNC is notarious for this type of surrogate action.
They pick someone out the blue who they know will be fully complicit to whatever the party tells them to do because they will be elevated to the ranks of a community queen, finally achieving being chosen to go to the promised land of a better financial lifestyle.
In order to be recognized and blessed by the party, you must first demonstrate that you can raise money.
I call it distraction of the pretty shiney trinkets because all I found was a facebook page for the campaign, making this a low budget hustle.
This woman did not have the financial acumen to raise money.
She was used as a patsy.
Then, as she is busy studying her DNC talking points, like a good little girl, the operatives come out the cyber woodwork and set up money laundering operations because they know the FEC is ill-equipped to do very much.
I wonder how much they raised behind her back and not even report.
All I am saying is that there is more to this story than just ripping off sandwiches from the kids.
Shaun Brown, Democratic Candidate for the U.S. House
of Representatives, Virginia, District 2, 2012
A federal grand jury has indicted Democratic congressional candidate Shaun Brown on charges of fraud and theft of government property.
The indictment alleges that Brown and others with JOBS Community Outreach Development Corp. filed fraudulent claims with the Summer Food Service Program in 2012, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said.
Brown, meanwhile, has gone to court herself, accusing the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the state Department of Health and several officials of discriminating against her and the organization she co-founded with her mother, Jenever Brown, which ran the summer feeding program for children.
“This is about making sure there are no hungry children in Hampton Roads,” she said.
Brown ran for Congress in 2016, losing to Rep. Scott Taylor, R-Virginia Beach, by nearly 23 percentage points.
She is again seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2018 race.
The indictment says that Brown directed JOBS staff to inflate the number of children actually fed and to falsify documents in order to obtain additional money, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
She has been charged with wire fraud and theft of government property, and faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison if convicted.
“We will vigorously defend. She maintains her innocence,” said her attorney, Jimmy Ellenson.
He said there’s been “a longstanding dispute between her and the feds about this whole thing,” adding that the timing of the criminal complaint seems unusual, given Brown’s own recent lawsuit.
“And why would they do this right before Christmas?” he asked.
In the lawsuit, which she filed without a lawyer, Brown says she and her mother filed a civil rights complaint against USDA alleging the agency’s summer food program discriminated against them.
The lawsuit says the USDA, state health department and five officials unlawfully delayed payments, and falsified reimbursements and claims for reimbursements.
Brown alleged that USDA officials in 2016 derailed JOBS’ efforts to secure financing to “satisfy its prior financial commitments for 2012, outstanding bills from the summer of 2012 and $625,000 to purchase” a restaurant that the company hoped to use as a central kitchen for its summer feeding programs. Her lawsuit says that calls from state health officials to a funding group and to her supplier upset agreements JOBS hoped to arrange. It adds that the state’s designation of JOBS as a “high risk auditee” after 2012 cut it out of the summer program. The lawsuit says the state has falsely claimed JOBS was involved in fraud.
The suit seeks $10 million in damages.
Brown asked the U.S. District Court in Alexandria to appoint an attorney for her, but Judge Liam O’Grady denied the request, saying that the exceptional circumstances that allow judges to do so in civil lawsuits did not exist in her case.
Her campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission show she’s raised $713,491 as of the end of October, all but $2,750 of which came from her. She said most of that was in the form of stock in her company. The FEC report shows she has no cash on hand in her campaign account.
The reason this is of such significance is because these corporations lobby, and financially contribute to political campaigns, and launder money through child welfare nonprofit organizations that traffic tiny humans, as they invest in social impact bonds.
How each CEO is connected in this model, only time will tell.
The battlefield of global intelligence is the war now preserved in the databases of history for all to participate, in real time.
Detroit — Several previously undisclosed Metro Detroit public officials and politicians drew scrutiny from federal agents during a public corruption investigation that started in Macomb County and spread to Wayne County and Detroit, according to federal court records obtained by The Detroit News.
The records, for the first time, publicly mention former Macomb County Public Works Commissioner Anthony Marrocco in a criminal investigation that has led to charges against his former right-hand man, Dino Bucci.
Federal wiretap documents filed in federal court contain a list of “target subjects” that includes several public officials. Among them: Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon, Wayne County Circuit Judge Vonda Evans, two former state representatives and Detroit City Councilman Gabe Leland.
FBI agents were investigating conspiracy to distribute marijuana, bribery, extortion and other crimes in connection with Detroit towing mogul Gasper Fiore or others, according to court records obtained by The News. The records included an application to continue wiretapping Fiore’s cellphone.
Of the public officials named in the filing, only former Detroit deputy police chief Celia Washington has been charged with a crime in connection with the investigation. Napoleon and others reached Tuesday by The News said they were unaware they had been named in the filing.
The names were included in a federal court filing that reflects the broader scope of a years-long investigation that has led to charges against 18 people so far. The filing, which was temporarily unsealed in federal court, gives a rare snapshot of an early stage of a high-profile investigation involving Fiore, a multimillionaire businessman who built a towing empire in Metro Detroit by securing lucrative contracts with municipalities and the federal government.
One court filing by Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Bullotta from 2016 said there was probable cause that the target subjects “are engaged in the payment and receipt of bribes and corrupt payments.”
“Certain sensitive investigative documents were inadvertently filed on the public docket by a non-governmental attorney,” acting U.S. Attorney Daniel Lemisch told The News in a statement Tuesday.
“There’s a reason why such documents are filed under seal. They may contain allegations against individuals, including public officials, that never rise to the level of criminality. It’s unfair to impugn the character of anyone, especially a public official, with an investigative document that the public official never gets to contest in open court. That’s the reason why these documents should be, and now are, back under seal.”
I am so sorry but that is just hilarious. "Oops. My bad." "Spoof!"
The ongoing corruption investigation has led to 13 convictions so far. The court filings were temporarily unsealed days after Fiore struck a plea deal last week with prosecutors, admitting he bribed former Clinton Township Trustee Dean Reynolds.
The government filing indicates FBI agents started wiretapping people in 2014. By summer 2016, agents were tapping Fiore’s phone.
Using phone records, agents analyzed which public officials and other people were in communication with Fiore’s phone. After realizing Fiore was in contact with several public officials, FBI agents started scrutinizing whether any were involved in wrongdoing.
Those named listed as “target subjects” in the filing included:
■Leland, a Detroit city councilman who was re-elected in November to his second, four-year term on Detroit’s City Council. Leland, 35, first took office in January 2014 and formerly served six years in the state House.
■Napoleon, a former Detroit police chief who has been Wayne County sheriff since 2009. He ran for Detroit mayor in 2013.
■Evans, a Wayne County judge who presided over high-profile trials, including the murder case against Grosse Pointe Park businessman Robert Bashara.
■Brian Banks, a Harper Woods Democrat who resigned from the state House in early February and pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of making false statements of financial condition to try to obtain a $7,500 personal loan. He was sentenced to one day in jail.
■Alberta Tinsley-Talabi, a Detroit Democrat. In 2015, The Detroit News reported that the former Detroit City councilwoman was under investigation in connection with a Detroit pension scandal that led to the conviction of her former chief of staff, George Stanton. She left the state House last year amid term limits.
■Assad Turfe, who is chief assistant to Wayne County Executive Warren Evans.
■Romel Casab, former owner of the Packard Plant, who was convicted last year in a separate medical marijuana investigation.
■Jennifer Marie Fiore, daughter of Gasper Fiore and Leland’s former girlfriend. She is an attorney who is an executive with several Fiore-owned companies. In a lawsuit filed in August, Detroit officials alleged Jennifer Fiore, along with her mother, Joan Fiore, Gasper’s ex-wife, her sister Jessica Lucas, Boulevard & Trumbull Towing and other Fiore-related companies, committed “fraud, tax evasion and other crimes against the City of Detroit and its residents.” The city later dropped the lawsuit.
■Michael Irvin Lucas, who worked at B&G Towing in Detroit. He’s married to Jessica Lucas, a daughter of Gasper Fiore.
■Paul Ott, a former Detroit police attorney who owns Gene’s Towing in Detroit.
■Shane Anders, owner of Area Towing and Recovery in Taylor.
■Morris Joseph, a Detroit police officer. He was sued in May, with Gasper Fiore as a co-defendant, and accused of improperly towing an owner’s cars, although a federal judge found the plaintiff’s civil rights hadn’t been violated.
■Louay Hussein, whose brother Hussein Hussein owns MetroTech Collision in Detroit. Detroit officials said in a Sept. 11 federal court filing — which was later withdrawn — that Louay Hussein was supposed to provide Detroit police with information about an alleged stolen vehicle ring involving cops, a towing company and a collision firm. Hussein Hussein “was criminally charged for his involvement in the theft of a stolen motor vehicle,” said the complaint. Louay Hussein offered to provide Detroit police “information on similar crimes involving other individuals in exchange for leniency with respect to his brother,” said the filing. The city agreed to the deal and the charges against Hussein Hussein “were either dropped or reduced,” according to the court filing. In 2016, Louay Hussein purchased an interest in Nationwide Towing, the city said, adding the company since 2010 has been associated with Gasper Fiore, whom the city said engaged in “fraudulent and criminal conduct.”
Bullotta, the federal prosecutor, listed each name in a request to continue tapping Fiore’s phone.
Last year, agents sought permission from a federal judge to keep tapping Fiore’s phone in search of evidence of various crimes, including extortion, honest services mail and wire fraud, and conspiracy to distribute marijuana, according to the filing.
The wiretap application that names the public officials is among evidence the government shared with lawyers representing people charged so far, including Washington, the former Detroit police official who was indicted on federal conspiracy and bribery charges in October.
According to the indictment, Washington, 57, of Detroit, pocketed bribes in exchange for helping Gasper Fiore grab a bigger piece of a Detroit towing industry that totaled more than $2 million a year.
Her lawyer, Arnold Reed, filed a copy of the wiretap application Friday among several motions to dismiss charges against Washington.
The wiretap application was filed despite a protective order that is supposed to shield sensitive documents from the public in the early stages of the prosecution. By Tuesday afternoon, the filings were resealed.
In one document, FBI Special Agent Robert Beeckman, who helped prosecute former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, describes the ongoing investigation.
“Evidence has been gathered showing that crimes involving corruption have been committed by some of the target subjects, including Tinsley-Talabi, Napoleon and Casab,” the agent wrote. “However, those investigations have been pending for months or years and the evidence so far has not been sufficient to bring federal charges.”
Federal agents were tapping multiple phones during the investigation. Marrocco’s name emerged in 2014 while agents tapped the phones of at least three people, including engineering contractor Paulin Modi of Troy, according to court records.
Modi has struck a plea deal after being accused of bribing a Washington Township public official.
The court filing names Marrocco as one person communicating with Modi and two other phones.
Marrocco has not been charged with a crime.
Earlier this year, Macomb County Public Works Commissioner Candice Miller said a federal grand jury was investigating her office during Marrocco’s tenure and had subpoenaed testimony from about a dozen public employees.
FBI agents were asking questions about Marrocco, who lost to Miller in the November 2016 election; Bucci, his former deputy; and millions of dollars in payments to an unnamed county contractor, Miller said.
Public officials named in the court filings had a mix of reactions.
In a statement posted on Evans' Facebook page, her attorney Todd Russell Perkins defended her integrity.
"It is an unfortunate event that Judge Evans' image could be besmirched as a result of knowing an individual who is being investigated," Perkins wrote. "In the sentiment of our Acting US Attorney, Daniel Lemisch, it is wrong to draw the implication of any wrongdoing against those who are mentioned during the course of an investigation. To do so denies an individual due process and the simple freedom to lawfully associate with one another.
He continued: "It is a sad day when a public servant must field questions about her integrity as there are conclusions drawn against her. Please don't do that. Trust the system, and trust that Judge Evans is a servant for the people by the people and that her service to the people is without reproach."
Reached Tuesday, Napoleon said he was unaware of any of the activities described in the filing.
Napoleon said there has never been a hint of impropriety during his law-enforcement career, including stints as Detroit police chief and county sheriff.
Fiore was a county vendor and the two occasionally would talk about questions or issues related to the towing contract, Napoleon said in a statement Tuesday.
“As sheriff, I am required to answer those questions and attempt to resolve those issues when they are brought to my attention,” Napoleon said. “I have never attempted to influence the awarding or implementation of a towing contract. Any suggestion to the contrary is so ridiculous as to deserve no further comment.”
Napoleon said after Fiore was indicted in May, he was removed from the county’s towing rotation.
Leland was unaware that his name was included in the list until being contacted by The News.
“This is the first that Councilman Leland has heard about this and, as I understand it, he has not been contacted by anyone,” said Leland’s spokesman, Daniel Cherrin.
According to the filing, Beeckman wrote that Fiore claimed Detroit Police Chief James Craig had “briefed Gabe Leland about the towing case, and Leland has briefed the Fiore family about it.”
In an interview Tuesday, Craig insisted he never told Leland anything about the investigation. He said he contacted the FBI after a meeting last year with the Detroit city councilman.
“He said he wanted to meet with me for the purpose of discussing something unrelated to towing, but once he gets into the meeting with me, he starts asking about the towing investigation,” Craig told The News. “It’s not my investigation, so I didn’t have anything to give him. I never felt comfortable with him, so I made sure to have a witness in the room with me during this meeting.
“I was not comfortable with Leland’s questions, and I immediately contacted the FBI as soon as he left the room and told them he was asking me questions about the towing investigation.”
Turfe said Tuesday he was unaware and had not been contacted by authorities.
“I have not been contacted and wouldn’t expect to be,” he said in a statement provided to The News.
Banks said Tuesday said he had no knowledge of the investigation and directed The News to his attorney, Ben Gonek, who could not be reached for comment.
A late-night FBI raid in Dearborn involves a national security issue, but it's not about a planned terrorist attack or explosives or anyone locally, the Free Press has learned.
