According to the sentencing order signed by Judge Roger Titus, former Baltimore lawyer Stanley Needleman is to begin his year and a day prison term, as directed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, no later than 2 p.m. Feb. 27, when he is scheduled to report to either FCI Fairston, (sic—apparently Fairton in Fairton,...
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Blogs: Posts Tagged ‘ crime ’
Needleman/Morales Prison Update
BPD Officer Charged in Heroin Ring
A Baltimore City Police officer was arrested on federal heroin trafficking charges today, and a seven-count indictment was unsealed in Federal District Court. Daniel G. Redd, 41, was arrested at the Northwest Police District by fellow city officers. According to a press release from U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein’s office, four other people were also...
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British Cocaine Conspirator Gets Four Years
Sarfraz Patel, a British national who allegedly remortgaged his home to raise money for an unlikely drug deal arranged by undercover police in Baltimore, was sentenced to 48 months in prison on June 22 after a 45-minute bench conference before Federal District Court Judge William D. Quarles. Bench conferences are held in open court,...
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It Was All Liar’s Loans
My friend William Black has an excellent (if badly proofread and edited) analysis of our economic situation here at HuffPo (via Benzinga). He explains how the liar’s loans—those no-documentation, no-underwriting home mortgage “products” that took over the market in the mid-2000s—caused all the trouble. The main problem is that the industry never defined its...
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Guilty Pleas in the Berg Brothers Recycling Case
Yesterday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Adam Berg of Berg Brothers Recycling, along with the company and a co-conspirator, Jeffrey Mark Harmon, pleaded guilty to charges of bribing a government official, Robert Barry Adcock, in connection with recyclable metals delivered to Berg Brothers from the National Security Agency (NSA). Adcock, a civilian NSA...
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Operation Broken Trust?
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced a giant sweep of scammers today during a noon press conference at the Department of Justice. More than 500 people have been charged in various Ponzi schemes, mortgage frauds, securities frauds, and the like during the past three and a half months as “Operation Broken Trust” fanned out...
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Man Indicted for Murdering Federal Witness Kareem Kelly Guest
Antonio “Mack” Hall, a 30-year-old Baltimorean, was indicted Dec. 2 by a federal grand jury for murdering a federal witness, Kareem Kelly Guest, in Westport in 2009, according to a press release issued today by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland. Guest’s cooperation with a law enforcers’ investigation of a violent drug conspiracy in...
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WSJ: SEC in Talks With Banks to End Probe
The Wall Street Journal floats a story today that the Securities and Exchange Commission is “in talks” with several big banks on a possible settlement to the regulators’ investigation of banks selling doomed-to-fail collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Those are those mortgage bonds—aka “toxic assets”—that devastated the world’s economy by the end of 2008. From...
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Sentencing of Pagans Motorcycle Club President Rescheduled
David Keith Barbeito, the Maryland-based president of the Pagans Motorcycle Club, was set for sentencing Nov. 19 for his part in the club’s federal racketeering indictment filed last year in West Virginia, but U.S. District Court judge Thomas Johnston rescheduled the proceeding to Dec. 20 (see PDF, below). Barbeito’s plea agreement (see second PDF,...
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Federal Felony Prosecutions in Maryland at Historic High
The number of defendants prosecuted for federal felonies in Maryland has risen each year since 2005, to a total of 972 so far in 2010, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office issued today. That’s a 37 percent increase in five years and an 80 percent increase since 1980, according to...
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Baltimore Neighborhoods Not Among Most Dangerous, Sun Reports
Can you say, "Wow! Great News!" No?
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French Trader Gets Jail, Bank Fined Peanuts
compulsive gambling, whether considered a disease or a moral failing, just might be at the root of our trouble
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