#Top Manhattan Immigration Attorney

[mightyflamethrower]

Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills. And worse still, why would federal authorities be ordered to release repeat violent felons who have gone on to commit horrendous crimes against American citizens?

Equally perplexing to most Americans is borrowing $1 trillion every 90 days and paying 5-5.5% interest on the near $36 trillion in ballooning national debt. Serving that debt at current interest exceeds the size of the annual defense budget and may soon top $1 trillion in interest costs, or more than 13% of the budget.

Why would the United States suspend military aid to Israel as it tries to destroy the Hamas architects of the October 7 massacres? Why would it lift sanctions on a terrorist Iran? Why would it suppress Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attack on the Jewish homeland? Why would it prevent Israel from stockpiling key munitions as it prepares to deal with the existential threats posed by Hezbollah?

Why would the Biden administration cancel key pipeline projects and put vast swaths of federal lands rich in oil and gas off limits to production, even as it further drains the strategic petroleum reserve? Why not pump rather than drain our own oil from strategic stockpiles?

Why would the Biden White House’s counsel’s office meet with Nathan Wade, the former paramour chief prosecutor in the Fani Willis Fulton County prosecution of Donald Trump? Why would the third-ranking prosecutor in the Biden Justice Department step down to lead Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan prosecution of Donald Trump? Why would the Biden Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland select Jack Smith as a special prosecutor of Donald Trump—given his past failures as a special counsel and known political biases?

Nihilism only explains so much. A better explanation is that the Biden administration and its handlers knew that there was a good chance that most of their policies would prove unpopular and might even jeopardize Biden’s reelection.

But they also were confident the changes were of such magnitude that the United States would either become—in the infamous phrase of Barack Obama—“fundamentally transformed” or force the next Republican administration to adopt such tough medicine that it would prove untenable politically and the malady would still prove mostly impossible to undo.

After all, how would a Trump administration deal with 10 million illegal aliens who entered the US without audit or legality? Where are they? How would they be found and deported? How many court suits in blue-jurisdictions before blue judges would have to be overcome?

The country has become accultured to a nonexistent border. And so, the left assumes, it would be expensive and difficult to finish the wall, to stop catch and release, to insist refugee status must be obtained before entry, and to deport what is likely now 20-30 million illegal aliens in toto. In other words, the Biden administration may sigh, “Our work is done. Whatever you think about our illegal methods, we forever changed the idea of immigration and the demographics of the country.”

All presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—have run deficits and vastly increased the debt since the Bill Clinton-Newt Gingrich compromises that resulted in a temporary period of balanced budgets. But in the case of Biden, there was no need to keep up the multitrillion-dollar deficits, especially as interest rates on the national debt tripled and the service costs now approach $1 trillion per year.

Biden, after all, inherited a recovering economy, flush with post-COVID-19 lockdown stimulatory dollars, pent-up consumer demand, and ossified supply chains. And then he stupidly poured gasoline on the explosive mix by dousing the country with even more federal spending. Now we have the worst of both worlds: high interest rates and nearly $36 trillion to service.

But in the leftist mind, it was worth it, given that left-wing constituencies received vast expansions of entitlements that will be hard to prune back. And unprecedentedly vast debt at levels like our current burden of 123% of annual GDP prove unsustainable. And the historic correctives are brutal: 1) major cuts in entitlements and redistributive spending programs; 2) tax hikes at a time when state, local, federal, and gas, sales, and property taxes—and other “fees”—already take over half the income of most middle-class Americans; 3) hyper-inflation to pay back what is owed with cheap funny money, with the added leftist fillip that those who have dollars lose wealth and those who don’t gain greater access to them; 4) renunciation of debt. We already saw in the Obama era that liberal bureaucrats and courts often reversed the orders of creditors in bankruptcy hearings. When debt becomes unsustainable, historically arise cries of “Why should the poor suffer more when the rich already have enough money and don’t really need to be paid back?”; and 5) efforts to “confiscate” private wealth by giving, in exchange, government “credits.” For example, there have already been floated ideas that 401Ks could be absorbed into the insolvent Social Security system for credit in government benefits.

Most Americans poll strong support for Israel. They oppose the Biden effort to triangulate by revisiting the old Obama nihilist agendas of emboldening the Iranian/Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthis axis to play off against our traditional allies of Israel and the more moderate Arab regimes.

By failing to prosecute nine months of domestic violence committed by pro-Hamas lawbreakers, by allowing leftist campuses to normalize anti-Semitism and pro-terrorist advocacy, and by destroying the once close alliance of Israel and the United States, the left feels it will be almost impossible to go back to the pre-Obama/Biden years. Their legacy, they hope, is a mendicant Israel utterly dependent on U.S. largess—a condition itself predicated on essentially destroying the idea of a secure Jewish state within its present borders.

The Biden administration sought to curb oil and gas production—save for brief periods before the midterm and reelection campaigns, when it drained the strategic petroleum reserve. The point was to acculturate the public to high gasoline prices, to make inefficient solar/wind/EVs projects competitive against artificially costly fossil fuels, and to institutionalize policies that will make it difficult to reopen closed fields, to reboot federal oilfield leasing, and to dismantle costly subsidies for inefficient green fuels.

That Americans paid hundreds of billions of dollars more for their fuels under Biden, that the auto industry is stuck with vast inventories of money-losing electric vehicles that the public does not want, and that the entire economy has been shackled by counterproductive green mandates were considered worth the cost of alienating the public.

The left knows that neither Alvin Bragg, E. Jean Carroll, Letitia James, Jack Smith, nor Fani Willis would have gone to court against Donald Trump if he was either a leftist or had bowed out of the 2024 presidential race. They know no one has been tried on such pseudo-charges, and no one will again be so charged after Trump. And they accept that no republic can long survive if the opposition party seeks to remove the names of its political opponents from the ballot.

But they also know that the left has now established a valuable precedent: oppose woke progressivism, and one will either become bankrupted by indictments or land before a blue-city jury eager to nullify evidence to ensure the accused is jailed and broke.

So the left believes that its new lawfare was well worth the destruction of the entire tradition of equality under the law: 1) Donald Trump has lost a half-billion dollars in fines and legal fees; 2) a court-bound Donald Trump was robbed of weeks of valuable campaign time; 3) Donald Trump can be forever now libeled as a “convicted felon”; and 4) the left has played chicken with the American Constitution and believes it has won, given conservatives would never enter into a destructive cycle of tit-for-tat.

The Biden years did the country great damage and rendered Biden himself one of the most unpopular incumbent presidents in American history. But his agendas may have fundamentally changed the country for decades, if not longer—and will require tough remedies that may be almost as unpopular as the wreckage they wrought.

[bllsbailey]

N.Y. AG Letitia James Holds Press Conference With Gov. Hochul: 'We Are Prepared To Fight Back'

In a contentious post-election press conference on Wednesday, Democrat New York Governor Kathy Hochul and state Attorney General Letitia James continued to portray President-elect Donald Trump as an evil adversary.

A disgruntled Hochul declared that she has established a “Empire State Freedom Initiative” in order to get ready to combat “policy and regulatory threats” from the incoming Trump administration.

Even though the governor claimed that she is now prepared to work with the new President-elect, Hochul still spent most of her time speaking about preparing herself for possible political and legal warfare, ironically, the same kind of “lawfare” that Trump himself has faced in New York from those who wished to see him lose the election.

“You try to harm New Yorkers or roll back their rights, I will fight you every step of the way,” Hochul told reporters.

She further mentioned possible disagreements with Trump and his administration about illegal immigration, labor, LGBTQ+ matters, abortion, and environmental policies.

James, who has worked tirelessly to put Trump behind bars, also noted that her office has now been “getting ready” for a possible second Trump presidency.

“I am ready to do everything in my power to ensure our state and nation do not go backwards,” James said in a statement. “Together with Governor Hochul, our partners in state and local government, and my colleague attorneys general from throughout the nation, we will work each and every day to defend Americans, no matter what this new administration throws at us. We are ready to fight back again.”

The Democrat attorney general’s attendance at the news conference was eye-opening and demonstrated that the two top Democrat leaders in New York are getting ready to engage Trump in a combative, warlike manner.

After accusing Trump of misrepresenting his net worth by billions of dollars to obtain better loan and insurance terms, James was awarded a $454 million civil fraud judgment against the business mogul.

However, Trump has appealed the ruling.

“I am NOT fearful of Donald Trump. I have not been fearful of Donald Trump,” James asserted to reporters.

Trump won both the national electoral and popular vote, and he did better in blue New York than he did in 2020. Hochul viewed Trump’s victory as a funeral.

“New Yorkers WILL persevere over the next four years!” she voiced.

Trump’s allies in New York denounced Hochul’s press conference as immature, inappropriate and detrimental to New Yorkers.

“Hochul is out of her mind,” said state Republican Party chairman Ed Cox. “This does not help New Yorkers. It’s dumb and bizarre.”

Additionally, the House GOP Conference chairwoman, Representative Elise Stefanik, made remarks as well.

“President Trump performed better in New York than any Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan. Kathy Hochul has the worst approval ratings for any New York governor in history.” “One of the many reasons why Trump over-performed in New York and across the country was Tish James’ desperate witch hunt and weaponization of the NY AG’s office and the Manhattan district attorney to illegally target Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ political opponents. And he soundly defeated them at the ballot box across the country. I was proud to lead the effort in New York State to fight back against their illegal lawfare,” she added.

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[glorialawnyc]

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[slapshot-to-the-heart]

Flatbush & Atlantic: part i

Quick note: This is taking place in the 2020-21 season, as if the Islanders still play at Barclays; I know they won’t in actuality. In the story, I’m also going to be taking some liberties with what the duties of a team’s general counsel and legal team would actually be in charge of. My understanding, as a pre-law student, is that it’s more on the corporate angle, dealing with contracts and stuff — in addition to that, Cass will also be dealing with some more immigration and employment law as well. 

part i

October 1

“Adiós, mamá. Hablamos pronto. Te amo.” Cassidy hung up, breathing out a tense sigh and rubbing her temples with the heels of her hands. Talking to her mom usually helped to calm her down, bring her back to Earth, but for whatever reason it wasn’t taking. She took a brief glance at the casebook open on her dinged-up Ikea desk. Federal Indian Law. She liked the class, genuinely, but her day had started off bad and gotten worse pretty damn quickly. First she was out of her favorite tea, then her advisor cancelled their meeting, then it started raining as she walked back to her MTA stop, so she had missed the train. Another came fifteen minutes later, but the damage was already done. The only bright spot in the day, aside from calling her mom, had been the cute guy at the Polish deli down the street who had put extra peppers on her Philly cheesesteak. She unwrapped the sandwich, taking a moody bite out of the end. A caramelized onion dropped to the floor. Sighing, she leaned down to pick it up, hurtling it in the direction of the trashcan but only half-looking to see if it reached its target destination. Despite the name, Cass had never had a cheesesteak before she moved to New York, and it wasn’t even because she wasn’t a sandwich person. No, Cass loved a good sandwich, but between her proclivity towards a good BLT and her mom’s homemade Mexican food, she just hadn’t gotten around to it. 

Her laptop dinged with an email notification. What now? She swiped over to the mail page, taking another bite as she read the subject line. Experiential learning requirement - unmet. Her brow furrowed. Unmet? Clicking it open, she scanned the email, clearly something automated from the registrar’s office. Yet to complete Columbia’s experiential learning requirement...We suggest you connect with professors...You have until October 8 to submit...Cassidy never finished her sandwich. “Oh my God,” she muttered to herself, feeling her cheeks heat up. “How could you do this? How could you be so stupid, Cass?” She was normally so on top of everything, never missed a date, never forgot an assignment, so how could she have missed one of the only things left to do to graduate? Her law school required all of the graduates to complete some sort of experiential learning requirement — some kind of externship, clinic, summer associate position, anything to get them “out in the real world.” That’s when it hit her. She had coached her high school’s mock trial team the summer after her first year, and interned at the Hartford County DA’s the summer after. But they paid her. Her school had a weird ‘double-dip’ policy, where you weren’t allowed to take a position for class credit and get paid at the same time. It was a confusing rule, convoluted and bizarre and probably a little bit elitist, but it was a rule. As if the day couldn’t get any worse, and then somehow it did. 

Turning to her laptop, she started searching for just about anything that could possibly help her. The school’s website, the Manhattan District Attorney’s, state offices, NGOs, federal prosecutors, anyone that might have a lead. Frantically dragging over her resumé and throwing together a cover letter that probably (hopefully) looked way more interesting than it actually was, Cassidy fired off email after email after email. Two hours later, she had sent off some twenty-odd applications, hoping that at least one or two would end up panning out. Glancing at her watch, she let out an exasperated breath. 12:22 A.M. Her classes didn’t start until nine, but it took almost an hour and a subway connection to get to Columbia, and she had to eat and shower before. So, really, it meant getting up at about seven. She needed to go to bed. 

Stomach reeling and feeling more resigned than anything, Cass haphazardly brushed her teeth, flossed — it didn’t matter how tired she was, she’d never forget to floss — and clambered into bed, wearing a faded, way-too-big Rangers t-shirt. I’ll be okay. She took a deep breath. It’ll be okay. It has to be. Cassidy Cabrera Shaw was tough as nails and stubborn as hell, and she wasn’t going to let everything she had worked so hard for fall apart so easily. 

Whenever Cass was nervous, or anxious, or afraid, she was never able to sleep well. She ended up waking up at ten past six, sitting in her bed for fifteen minutes praying that she’d fall back asleep, and finally accepting her fate that sleep just wasn’t going to come. Rolling over, she grabbed her phone from where she had left it charging on the nightstand. Nightstand was maybe a generous term for it; technically, it was a wooden milk crate that she had spray painted white when she and the other girls had moved into the apartment two years prior. She had a little bit of money set aside from college, but every penny possible was going towards tuition and those ungodly-expensive books that she had to buy every semester. The mattress and frame were from Ikea, and Cass had brought some things like bedding and a desk from her old room. The rest of it — rugs, lighting, and decorations like her six-inch ceramic peacock (his name was Charles) had come from a combination of Goodwill runs and senior citizen yard sales. 

Wincing as she did so, Cass pulled up her email, bracing herself for the inevitable barrage of rejection. After scrolling past ten or so automated “no longer hiring” and “position has been filled” messages, one caught her eye. She had sent a few emails to professors of hers, not expecting to hear anything back for a few days. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but there certainly were advantages of going to school in a city as massive as New York. All of her professors knew someone and had some kind of connection from their own education, or days in the practice, or childhood summer trips to the Hamptons with someone who just so happened to be a judge on the Second Circuit Court — that last one was last year’s employment law professor. One particular subject line caught her eye. Thought you might be interested, Professor Murakami had written. David, as he preferred to be called, was her Sports Law professor from last year. She didn’t go into the class expecting to enjoy it all that much, if she was being honest. She had gotten a crappy registration time and most other classes were filled, so it had started out as a placeholder and nothing more. Over the semester, though, it had quickly become one of her favorites, combining pieces of everything else she had studied into one cohesive course. Cass also wasn’t in a position to be turning down any potential offers, so she opened the email and started reading. 

I got your email, Cassidy, and think I might be able to help. Okay, so far, so good. I happen to have a contact in the counsel’s office of one of the professional sports teams in the city. That’s exactly what Cass was talking about — where do these people meet each other? Is there some kind of exclusive speakeasy you’re given the password to as soon as you’re admitted to the state bar? Chris Cohen works for the Islanders, and I remember you talking about how interested in hockey you are. Okay, true, but the Islanders? She had practically been born with a Ranger’s jersey on. Beggars can’t be choosers, she thought. I gave him a heads-up that I’d likely be sending a promising candidate his way, so just let me know if this sounds like something you’d be interested in and I’ll send along your contact information. 

Cass couldn’t respond fast enough. Yes, please! 

---

Wednesdays were her ‘easy’ days, if you could say that. She had Environmental Law and Human Rights back-to-back, but anything after noon was pretty much fair game. That being said, it certainly didn’t mean that she was any less stressed. There were at least a hundred pages to read before class the next day, she had a sample essay due for bar prep, and her mind was still racing about the email. Grabbing a gyro from the cart outside of her last class of the day, Cass stress-ate with one hand while continually refreshing her inbox with the other.  Food wasn’t allowed in the library, so she ate the last few bites right outside the doors, throwing away the wrapper and squeezing past the hordes of clearly overwhelmed first-years running to get to class on time. 

Popping her Airpods out of their case and into her ears, Cass briskly made her way up the stairs to the third floor, crossing her fingers that her usual spot, a big blue chair over by the research desk, was open. She was in luck, pulling out a water bottle and laptop and getting to work on editing. Four hours later, she had reached some semblance of satisfaction with her work, shutting off her computer and making her way to the subway. There was about half an hour before she had to transfer to the line that would take her to the apartment; squeezing into one of the last free seats, she tugged out a textbook and a highlighter. Why her professor insisted on assigning the entire text of the United Nations charter was a mystery to her, but she’d rather jump off a cliff than be cold called on without an answer. Transferring at Grand Concourse took about ten minutes — it was rush hour, so the first train to come was entirely full — and another twenty or so minutes later, she was letting herself into her shared East Bronx apartment. 

Hanging up her denim jacket by the door and toeing off her sneakers, Cass let out a not-so-subtle exasperated sigh. 

“One of those days?” Alicia piped in from the kitchen. Alicia also lived in the apartment, one of the four sorority sisters-turned-roommates who had made the move from Connecticut down to New York after graduation. Cass padded into the kitchen, where she was greeted by Alicia in front of a skillet and rice cooker, intensely sautéeing some vegetables.

“You have no idea,” Cass said, hugging her from behind. “Whatcha making?” There were obviously some nights when not everyone was home — most often either Cass or Ryanne, who was in med school — but they always tried to have a few nights a week where someone would cook a meal for the whole house. 

“Japchae, it’s my mom’s recipe,” she replied. “I called her and asked how much sesame oil to use, and she just said ‘until it tastes right.’ Like, I love you, Mom, but that doesn’t really help my cause, does it?”

Cass snorted. “Oh for sure, it’s the same way with me. Do you remember the first time I made tamales down here?” Cass had grown up eating and making tamales with her mom and abuela, but she had never been allowed to really take the reins. She had the recipe, though, so the first night after they were moved in, she ventured down to the closest bodega, bought the ingredients, and decided to try her hand making them from scratch. The recipe, however, left out the key piece of exactly how much water to use for steaming — Cass didn’t know, and her mom had always just eyeballed it. So she had ended up putting in way too little and setting the stove way too hot, and to make a long story short, ended up setting off the fire alarm. The one saving grace was the extremely attractive police office that came to double-check the false alarm, but even he couldn’t wipe the mortified expression off of her face. 

“How could I forget?” Alicia responded with a grin. “Go put your shit down, it’ll be ready in a few.”

Cass playfully rolled her eyes, heading towards her room in the back. “Yes, mother.” Their apartment was a three bedroom; while obviously it would have been amazing for everyone to have their own, it was still New York City and none of them were exactly rolling in the dough. Cassidy and Ryanne were obviously still students, and while Alicia and Stella had actual jobs  — Stella worked international business down by Wall Street and Alicia did something with satellites in Queens — none of them were exactly inclined to set out on their own just yet. So Stella and Alicia shared a room, and she and Ryanne had their own. She shrugged off her jacket, slinging her backpack onto the bed before chugging the rest of her water bottle and checking her phone. Two new emails. A 20% off coupon to Lush, and one from Chris Cohen. Chris Cohen? It took her a minute to remember, but when she did, she couldn’t read it fast enough.

Honestly, Cass didn’t read the whole thing, but got enough information to know that she had an interview Friday afternoon at the office in Brooklyn, that Chris  — he had said to call him Chris — said she came with a stellar recommendation from Professor Murakami (an old law school buddy, figures) and that there was no way in hell she was going to fuck this up. She wouldn’t let herself. 

---

Cass was lucky her Thursdays were so packed; if she had any extra time to stress over her impending interview, she would have, but she couldn’t. She had two ‘free’ hours in between classes, but after she had scarfed down lunch (Alicia had, mercifully, made plenty of leftovers) it was the only stretch she had to hit the gym. Coupled with the time it took to walk there, change, and shower after, there really wasn’t much in the way of downtime. After classes was her bar prep group, and the day was so exhausting that it was pretty much all she could manage to take the train home, microwave dinosaur chicken nuggets, and stumble into bed. After flossing. 

---

If Cassidy lived in any other city, she would have felt wildly out of place on her morning commute. Who shows up to school wearing a suit? She wasn’t an absolute masochist, so her heels were in her bag. But for once in her life she didn’t feel so out of place among the presumably-highbrow, presumably-making-six-figures crowd surrounding her. The suit had been her first big purchase for herself  — she had scraped by without one in college, but invested as soon as she had a little saved up from her summer job at a boutique in town. Her mother had always told her that it was the woman who made the clothes, rather than the other way around, and Cass always did what her mom said. 

Samaira, one of her friends and another editor on the Columbia Law Review, caught up to her as they both left the twice-weekly morning meeting. “You seem kind of jumpy, Cass. What’s up?”

Cassidy wrung her hands and shrugged her shoulders. “I told you that I missed the internship requirement thing, right?” Samaira nodded. “Well, I have an internship in,” she paused to look at her watch, “two hours, and I’m so nervous I’m going to mess this up. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I don’t get it. There’s not time to look for something else, there’s no alternative, and I don’t know what to do if my own stupidity and forgetfulness is the only thing standing in between me and something I’ve worked so fucking hard for—”

Samaira cut her off. “I’m going to stop you there. That’s bull, Cass, and you know it. You are the furthest thing from a disappointment. You’re one of the kindest, sharpest, and most creative people I know, and you’re not going to let something as petty as a deadline stand in your way. Time gets away from all of us sometimes, and it’s nothing to beat yourself up over. I want you to be confident and have faith in yourself, because you deserve it, but if you don’t, it’s okay. I get it. I believe in you enough for the both of us.” She squeezed Cass’ hand. 

She managed a watery smile. “Thanks, Samaira.”

“Any time,” she replied easily. “I’ve got to run to class now, but I want to hear how it went the second you get out, okay?”

“I will.”

Samaira rolled her eyes. “I mean it. You’re going to crush this, Cass. Love you!” She added, waving goodbye as she turned the corner.

There was half an hour before Cass needed to head over to the interview, and before she knew it her feet had taken her to her favorite spot on the north side of Central Park. Grabbing a bagel, she thankfully found the bench empty. After finishing the bagel — she would have preferred cheese, but they were out, so cinnamon raisin it was — and the better part of her Hozier-dominated acoustic playlist, it was time to catch the train. She jumped on with barely a second to spare, grabbing a strap and trying to avoid bumping into anyone. 

A seat opened up about halfway to Brooklyn, and Cass took the opportunity to unceremoniously tug off her much more practical flats and switch into the much more professional ankle-strap heels that had been stuffed in her backpack all day. For a fleeting moment, she was worried what everyone around her would think; she was, after all, technically changing on public transportation. A man got on at the next stop who was dressed head-to-toe in neon orange while carrying a Pomeranian in his purse. Nobody batted an eye. She got over herself pretty quickly.

Getting off at the Barclays Center station, Cass pulled out her phone, opening up the camera to give herself a quick once-over. As much as she hated it, first impressions really were everything. Lipstick? Not smudged. Hair? Minimal flyaways. Teeth? No spinach to be seen. Triple-checking that she had the time right, Cass walked through the doors of the office building, Islanders logo emblazoned on the wall behind the secretary’s desk. 

“Hi,” she said tentatively, catching his attention. “I have an interview with Chris Cohen at 2?” 

The secretary nodded, smiling warmly at her. “No problem. I’m Josh, you can have a seat over there,” he nodded to the small waiting area off to the side, “and I’ll call you when he’s ready for you to be sent up.”

Cass didn’t wait for more than five minutes before Josh gave her the go-ahead, and she was soon headed up the elevator to Chris’ office. “Fourth door on the left. It should have his name on it,” Josh had added. 

She raised her fist, knocking quickly on the frosted glass. It swung open a second later, a kind-looking man with glasses and salt-and-pepper hair answering. “You must be Cassidy. I’m Chris Cohen, so nice to meet you. Come right in,” he said, ushering her through the room, where several other associates sat at desks, and into his office. 

“David’s always good at keeping an eye out for me in his courses, and I was happy he passed you along,” Chris said, pulling out her resumé. “And you’re a 3L, correct?” She nodded. “Good. So let’s dive right into it. What courses and work experience do you have that you feel best position you for success in this position?” Much though Cass was loath to admit it, if there was anything she was good at, it was talking herself up. There was a reason her high school superlative was “Most Likely to be Able to Talk Their Way Out of a Ticket.” She launched into a well-rehearsed response, making sure to lace in her love for hockey once or twice. If nothing else, it would hopefully at least get her some brownie points. He had a few questions about her resumé, asked about her work on the law review, a few hypotheticals about contract law. She was batting a thousand until he asked the dreaded final question. “Do you have any questions for me?” 

Cass was wracking her brain, trying to come up with some intelligent-sounding thing to ask, but nothing came. “Uh—” she started, but was saved by the bell. Or, rather, saved by a frantic door opening and a panicked-sounding Mat Barzal bursting into the room. “Chris, I’ve got a problem.”

[deniscollins]

Steve Bannon Is Charged With Fraud in We Build the Wall Campaign

What would advise to Brian Kolfage, who lost both his legs and one of his arms during his service in Iraq, and created We Build the Wall as a GoFundMe page in December 2018, which was an immediate success, raising nearly $17 million in its first week online, but wanted to raise much more from donors: (1) Promise potential donors that he would not take a penny in salary or compensation and that all of the money he raised would be used “in the execution of our mission and purpose,” and then pay Kolfage $350,000 secretly from the donations for his personal expenses (and keep about $1 million for yourself too), or (2) find some other way to pay him? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser and an architect of his 2016 general election campaign, was charged on Thursday with defrauding donors to a private fund-raising effort called We Build the Wall, which was intended to bolster the president’s signature initiative along the Mexican border.

Mr. Bannon, working with a wounded Air Force veteran and a Florida venture capitalist, conspired to cheat hundreds of thousands of donors by falsely promising that their money had been set aside for new sections of wall, according to a federal indictment unsealed in Manhattan.

The fund-raising effort collected more than $25 million, and prosecutors said Mr. Bannon used nearly $1 million of it for personal expenses.

Despite the populist aura he tries to project, Mr. Bannon is known to enjoy the high life, and he was arrested at 7:15 a.m. on a $35 million, 150-foot yacht belonging to one of his business associates, the fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, law enforcement officials said.

Working with the Coast Guard, special agents from the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan and federal postal inspectors boarded the yacht off Westbrook, Conn., the officials said. Mr. Bannon, 66, was on deck, drinking coffee and reading a book, when the raid occurred.

The criminal charges, filed a week before Mr. Trump was to accept the Republican nomination for a second term, marked a stark turn of fortune for the flamboyant political strategist. Mr. Bannon first came to prominence when he was in charge of the right-wing media outlet Breitbart, where he had aligned himself with the alt-right, a loose network of groups and people who promote white identity.

As chief strategist, Mr. Bannon was one of the most powerful figures in the White House early in the Trump administration, but he stepped down in August 2017 after frequently clashing with other aides.

With the indictment, Mr. Bannon became the seventh Trump associate to have been charged with federal crimes, a list that includes Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s onetime lawyer and fixer.

The 24-page indictment, unsealed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, is by far the most politically sensitive case that Audrey Strauss, the acting United States attorney in Manhattan, has handled since she assumed her job after her predecessor, Geoffrey S. Berman, was fired in June by Mr. Trump.

At a brief arraignment on Thursday, Mr. Bannon, sunburned and his hair unbrushed, pleaded not guilty to charges of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. The government agreed to release him from custody on a $5 million bond.

Walking to his car after being freed, Mr. Bannon said, “This entire fiasco is to stop people who want to build the wall.”

Shortly after the charges were announced, Mr. Trump had sought to distance himself from Mr. Bannon and the fund-raising initiative, though the president also expressed sympathy for his former adviser.

“I feel very badly,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I haven’t been dealing with him for a very long period of time.”

The president said he knew nothing about the multimillion-dollar We Build the Wall campaign but quickly contradicted himself.

“I don’t like that project,” Mr. Trump said. “I thought it was being done for showboating reasons.” He called paying for the border wall privately “inappropriate.”

One of Mr. Trump’s sons, Donald Jr., publicly promoted the We Build the Wall effort at an event in 2019, calling it “private enterprise at its finest.”

Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement on Thursday that he had no involvement with the effort beyond praising it at that one event.

A White House official said that President Trump did not know Mr. Bannon would be arrested, and that he was told by aides after it happened.

Attorney General William P. Barr was briefed on the investigation several months ago, according to a Justice Department official, and the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan gave him notice that the indictment would be unsealed on Thursday.

According to the authorities, Mr. Bannon hatched the plot to defraud the donors with three other men: Brian Kolfage, a 38-year-old Air Force veteran and triple amputee from Miramar Beach, Fla.; Andrew Badolato, 56, a venture capitalist from Sarasota, Fla.; and Timothy Shea, 49, of Castle Rock, Colo.

Mr. Kolfage and Mr. Badolato were arrested in Florida on Thursday, and Mr. Shea, who prosecutors said funneled money for the group through a shell company he owned, was arrested in Denver.

Mr. Kolfage, who lost both his legs and one of his arms during his service in Iraq, created We Build the Wall as a GoFundMe page in December 2018. It was an immediate success, raising nearly $17 million in its first week online, prosecutors said.

To persuade potential donors to contribute to the effort, prosecutors said, Mr. Kolfage promised them that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that all of the money he raised would be used “in the execution of our mission and purpose.” According to the indictment, Mr. Bannon described We Build the Wall as a “volunteer organization.”

But all of that was false, prosecutors said. Instead, they claimed, Mr. Kolfage secretly took more than $350,000 in donations and spent it on home renovations, boat payments, a luxury S.U.V., a golf cart, jewelry and cosmetic surgery.

Mr. Bannon, working through an unnamed nonprofit organization, received more than $1 million from We Build the Wall, prosecutors said, some of which he used to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal expenses.

Mr. Bannon and three others are accused in a scheme to use funds raised for construction to pay for personal expenses.

Court papers suggested that prosecutors were in possession of several text messages between the men, including one in which Mr. Kolfage told Mr. Badolato that the payment scheme was “confidential” and should be kept on a “need to know” basis.

Mr. Kolfage initially pitched We Build the Wall as a way to sidestep the considerable legal and political obstacles to erecting Mr. Trump’s long-sought barrier. While the group has drawn approval from some top Homeland Security and Border Patrol officials, it has also prompted a backlash over its connections to Mr. Trump’s associates and its construction methods.

The federal government has built parts of the wall well within the American side of the border on federally owned land. But the sections built with private funds — slightly less than five miles in all, according to We Build the Wall’s website — have been erected along the riverbank of the Rio Grande in New Mexico and Texas.

Environmental groups have challenged those portions, citing potential harm. When experts recently said that sections along the river could fall into the river, even Mr. Trump criticized the project.

It remained unclear precisely when the yearlong investigation into the alleged scheme began. But last year, a bank informed Mr. Bannon that federal prosecutors had subpoenaed records related to We Build the Wall, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Prosecutors said that despite the effort’s early success, there were questions almost instantly “about Mr. Kolfage’s background” and the viability of his promises to use the money he had raised to actually build Mr. Trump’s wall.

Because of these concerns, prosecutors said, GoFundMe warned Mr. Kolfage that if he did not find a “legitimate nonprofit organization” to handle the money, it would return it to the donors. Mr. Kolfage claimed that the group had determined that only $800,000 of the funds needed to be given back.

“No rules were broken,” he said in an interview last year.

As the problems with donors mounted, Mr. Kolfage said he would establish a board of advisers and incorporate the group as We Build the Wall Inc.

Mr. Kolfage enlisted Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, to serve on the board. Mr. Kobach, a longtime Trump supporter and a prominent immigration hard-liner, was not named in the indictment.

Mr. Kolfage also brought in Mr. Bannon, who had joined Mr. Trump’s campaign as chief executive in August 2016 and later became the White House’s chief strategist.

Several times, prosecutors said, Mr. Kolfage falsely assured his donors that every dime they gave him would go to the wall.

“It’s not possible to steal the money,” he said at one point, according to the indictment. “We have an advisory committee.”

When special agents from the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office and postal inspectors boarded Mr. Guo’s yacht, the Lady May, in Long Island Sound, they searched the vessel and seized Mr. Bannon’s cellphone, officials said.

The investigators also conducted other searches in Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Missouri and Virginia, including at the homes of all of the defendants, the officials said.

Mr. Guo, a real-estate magnate, has been in exile since 2014 after fleeing China in anticipation of corruption and rape allegations by its government.

While living abroad — sometimes at a palatial apartment overlooking Central Park in Manhattan — he forged relationships with China hard-liners like Mr. Bannon and bought a membership to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Almost immediately after leaving the White House, Mr. Bannon struck up lucrative financial ties to Mr. Guo that began with a $150,000 loan, according to a memo written in May 2019 and obtained by The New York Times.

The GoFundMe page through which Mr. Bannon and his co-defendants raised money is now inactive. On Wednesday, less than 24 hours before their arrests, Mr. Kolfage made an appearance on Mr. Bannon’s podcast and explained the deactivation as an example of how tech companies censor conservative speech online.

When Mr. Bannon asked how people could continue giving money to the wall campaign, Mr. Kolfage responded by directing potential donors to his personal website, as well as another specifically for wall funding.

“How do people get access to We Build the Wall?” Mr. Bannon said.

“Don’t go to GoFundMe anymore,” Mr. Kolfage replied. “Screw them. Go straight to our website.”

[tandygoff-blog]

The denizens of the colonies tried

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[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Sun Myung Moon was found guilty of US tax fraud and sent to Danbury prison in 1984

Guilty Father: Moon did not pay his taxes

TIME    May 31, 1982

Soon after Sun Myung Moon opened an account at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1973, the Korean evangelist came by to make a deposit accompanied by two women carrying large purses stuffed with an assortment of bills. It took clerks an hour to count the currency, which totaled $100,000. A Chase banker recalled the women saying that the money came from street sales of flowers by members of Moon’s Unification Church. The Moonies, who refer to their leader as “Father,” and who regard him as a manifestation of God, were zealous collectors of funds, and deposits to his Chase accounts were frequent—perhaps too frequent. In a New York City federal court last week, a jury of ten women and two men decided, after four days of deliberation, that Moon was guilty of conspiring to avoid taxes on $162,000 in personal income for the years 1973 through 1975. He faces up to 14 years in prison, $25,000 in fines and a possible deportation hearing by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Moon, 62, was convicted of failing to report as personal income $112,000 of interest on $1.6 million in his Chase accounts, as well as $50,000 worth of stock in Tong Il Enterprises, a profit-making import company that Moon controlled. Convicted with him was his top financial aide, Takeru Kamiyama, 40, who was charged with helping the evangelist prepare false tax returns to conceal the income, attempting to block the subsequent Government investigation by submitting phony backdated documents, and lying to a grand jury.

Throughout the trial, which lasted more than six weeks, the evangelist’s attorney, Charles Stillman, insisted that the cash and stocks, although held by Moon, actually belonged to his Unification Church and were therefore not subject to taxation. 

One key witness for the prosecution was Michael Warder, 35, a former church executive who now works for the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. He testified that on several occasions Kamiyama had turned down his requests to use funds from the Chase accounts for church purposes with the explanation that the bank deposits were “Father’s money . . . not accessible.”

Moon accepted the verdict impassively, but officials of his church denounced the judgment as “unjustified persecution.” The evangelist’s attorneys plan to appeal the conviction.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100323055426/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,925417,00.html

________________________________________

Walter Martin and Ravi Zacharias:

“Clearly Moon was convicted of evading taxes on $112,000 in personal income derived from interest on $1.6 million he had deposited for the church. He also received another $50,000 in unreported stocks for the taxable years 1973–1976. 

Rev. Moon’s accountant, Takeru Kamiyama, was sentenced for conspiracy to file false tax returns, lying before a grand jury, and obstructing justice.

In contrast to Moon’s claim that it was the church’s funds, the testimony showed he personally purchased $1,500 gold watches, stock, and paid tuition for his children’s education from the accounts. 

Rev. Moon was not persecuted by the IRS: he and his accountant evaded personal taxes and lied to the grand jury, which places them under the same laws as any other American citizen. It is noteworthy that Moon could have received a fourteen-year sentence, so his eighteen-month sentence shows the mercy of the jurors, not persecution.”

from “Kingdom of the Cults,” Chapter 12: The Unification Church

________________________________________

Nansook Hong: “The [tax] trial began on April 1, 1982. … 

Father [Sun Myung Moon] demonstrated contempt for civil law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash collected from true believers…

There was no question inside the church that the Reverend Moon used his religious tax exemption as a tool for financial gain in the business world. … No matter what the lawyers said in court, no one internally disputed that the Reverend Moon commingled church and business funds. No one had any problem with it. How often had I heard church advisers discuss funneling church funds into his business enterprises and political causes because his religious, business, and political goals are the same: world dominance for the Unification Church. It was U.S. tax laws that were wrong, not Sun Myung Moon. Man’s law was secondary to the Messiah’s mission.”

from “In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Family”

________________________________________

Moon is sentenced to 18-month term

By Arnold H. Lubasch

New York Times   July 17, 1982

... Mr. Moon, who would be eligible for parole after serving one-third of the sentence, was also fined the maximum of $25,000 plus the costs of prosecution. And he could face deportation proceedings.

The maximum sentence for Mr. Moon could have been five years for conspiracy and three years on each of three tax charges involved in his failure to report $150,000 in income from bank accounts and securities.

“I have treated him as I would treat anyone else,” Judge Goettel said. He also expressed his “sincere belief that the jury treated the case that way.

”The judge imposed a six-month sentence and a $5,000 fine on a codefendant, Takeru Kamiyama, one of Mr. Moon’s top aides. Mr. Kamiyama was convicted of the conspiracy charge, of assisting in the tax fraud and of lying to the grand jury. ...

Jo Ann Harris and Martin Flumenbaum, the chief prosecutors, urged the judge to treat Mr. Moon the same as “any high-ranking business executive” convicted of having used his organization to avoid personal income taxes.

In the crowded courtroom, filled with somber supporters of Mr. Moon, Judge Goettel declared that “general deterrence” called for a prison term. He said it would be unfair to free someone who could afford top lawyers when “poor people who get caught” go to jail for relatively minor crimes.

If Mr. Moon received a suspended sentence, the judge went on, millions of people would believe that “the rich and the powerful go free.”

Judge Goettel said he had received “several thousand letters” in Mr. Moon’s behalf, some from scientists, political leaders and officials of other churches expressing “fear that freedom of religion was being threatened.”

Judge Discounts Fears

“I think these fears are totally unwarranted in this case,” he continued, saying the letters indicated a misunderstanding of the issues. He added, “It is the crime that dictates the sentence more than anything else.”

The case was not limited to tax-fraud charges involving the failure to report income from bank accounts and securities, Judge Goettel said. He stressed that Mr. Moon had also been convicted of a conspiracy involving false documents, perjured testimony and obstruction of justice.

If the failure to report the income had been the only charge, a suspended sentence could be appropriate for Mr. Moon under the circumstances, the judge said. He suggested that the “the cover-up scheme” was more serious than the original offense.

Full story: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/17/nyregion/moon-is-sentenced-to-18-month-term.html

________________________________________

Newsweek   August 6, 1984

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, 64, checked into his residence for the next 18 months – the federal prison in Danbury, Conn. – to find that he not only had 50 room mates but a new job as well. The convicted tax evader and leader of the Unification Church (which claims more than 2 million followers worldwide) was bunked in the facility’s low-security “camp” area and promptly assigned to KP duty. “He’s doing menial kitchen work, like loading dishwashers, mopping floors and washing tables,” says warden Dennis Luther, who explained that the new inmate’s employment options were limited because he doesn’t speak English. “I’m not worried about conversions,” added the warden. “We don’t allow inmates to be coerced into anything by anybody, whether they’re Protestant, Catholic or whatever.”

________________________________________

New York Times   July 5, 1985  

Sun Myung Moon’s scheduled full release from Federal custody is August 20.

On July 4, Mr. Moon reported to Phoenix House, a halfway house in Brooklyn involved in treating drug abuse, where he is to spend nights, except for possible single-night and weekend passes, for the next 46 days as a condition of his release. During the day, Mr. Moon, who is 65 years old, will be free to resume his church duties. ...

Mose Durst said, “We feel liberated from the burden of the unjust imprisonment of an innocent man of God. We are sorrowful because our nation, which we love and honor and who celebrates her 209th anniversary this very day, still finds it so difficult to put her most profound ideals into practice.”

Full story: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/05/nyregion/moon-released-after-11-months-in-a-us-prison.html

________________________________________

When we heard how Father [Sun Myung Moon] was keeping church money in his name, the USA Headquarters warned him that in the USA the government often used the tax laws to imprison enemies that hadn’t broken any other laws. USA Headquarters advised Father not to put the money in his name, and explained the safe and proper way to bank the funds.

Father asked if what he was doing was illegal. The answer was: No, it’s not illegal, but can be twisted by the government to persecute Father and the church. Father decided to keep the money in his name.

USA Headquarters hired accounting consultants to advise the church about how to handle the funds. They told Father the same thing as our Headquarters staff had. Father’s response was the same, is it illegal. The answer was the same, “No, but…” Father decided to keep the money in his name.

At the time I didn’t know about this, so when I was asked to do Father’s taxes, I told him that he needed to have it done professionally, because in the USA, tax laws are used to put people in prison when there was no other way to imprison people. The answer came back, via David Kim, that it cost too much to do it professionally. (At the time I thought that the cost was for the accountant. Later I realized that it was to save about $5,000 dollars in taxes.) I still wouldn’t do it, so Joe Tully was recruited.  

My opinion is that David Kim was advising Father and that Father was taking his advice. At the time David Kim was Father’s chief advisor in the USA. After David Kim’s advice proved faulty he was put out to pasture doing minor missions and finally sent to UTS.

My experience has been that Father trusted early followers who had proven their loyalty more than younger members, especially when the older members were Korean.

I believe that Father was afraid that the money would somehow be stolen by someone if it was in the name of the Church rather than his name. This has happened in Korea.

________________________________________

Takeru Kamiyama was also jailed for his part in the crime.

At one point Kamiyama got in trouble with Moon and was exiled to Japan to lecture Divine Principle. … Kamiyama got getting dangerously close to full insurrection by pushing his version of DP – “Our Course” onto all his department staff.

Next, he was exiled to Pantanal and I’m sure that wasn’t a walk in the park, either. I suspect Kamiyama has been raked over the coals. Interestingly, he is featured in that piece on Pantanal on the Catholic site, “The Tablet” December 16, 2000:

“They gave me an aerial photo of the place, without my asking, and showed me their accounts, again without my asking. The relevance of this is that the Moonies have been accused of money laundering, drug-trafficking and arms-trading. Such allegations may be a hysterical over-reaction. On the other hand, what on earth are the Moonies doing with huge tracts of land in the middle of nowhere?

All the money for this project comes from voluntary donations, said Takeru Kamiyama, who is in charge of Puerto Leda, and he showed me the list of offerings for that year, mostly in the range of $5,000 dollars and some more than $50,000 dollars. The total came to more than $1 million. Will it be enough for what he wants to do here? When I need more I can ask for more; that is not a problem. He told me it all came from Japanese Moonie missionaries or church leaders. That’s strange, I said, how do missionaries come to earn so much money to donate in a single year to a single project? He said they asked their wives and children to contribute, and some had businesses, and of course they all had their salaries. So the church pays them salaries, which they pay back in the form of donations, he said.

The land at Puerto Leda amounts to 80,000 hectares, but of course the aerial photo only showed the immediate vicinity of the river, where the Moonies (13 Japanese, only one of whom spoke Spanish) were now constructing a living base…

… From the outside balcony, my hosts pointed out some crocodiles swimming in the river, black dots from where we were. It was all very impressive, this taming of the wilderness, and the Moonies were beginning to relax. I understand that Reverend Moon has been imprisoned in the United States, I ventured. He knows all about that, said Mr Sano of his colleague, Mr Kamiyama. He was in prison with him.

How interesting, I said. You must be very close to Reverend Moon. Were you his only colleague to be imprisoned with him? Yes, he said, and before I came here I was president of the Church in Japan.

I was impressed. You are obviously a very important person in the movement, I said. (Later a Moonie pastor from Guyana confirmed to me that Mr Kamiyama was one of the most senior Church members in the world, but now taking a much more humble position. …)

I asked many questions about that fascinating moment in the Reverend Moon’s history. It was one of six imprisonments, they told me, in various countries, and the excuse for this pure political persecution, they told me, had been that Mr Kamiyama had brought $2 million into the United States and opened an account in the name of Reverend Moon. I should have put in the name of the Church. It was a small mistake, he said. As a result Reverend Moon was accused of evading $7,000 in taxes. Mr Kamiyama confided: I don’t like politicians. They are very complicated. They change their minds very quickly.”

I heard about that directly from Tom Boutte, the USA UC controller, who was privy to the affair. He told me that Kamiyama rejected Neil Salonen’s advice to open the account in the church’s name to avoid legal problems later. Kamiyama insisted Japanese members would be happier sending money “to Father”. Boutte said in his view, Kamiyama had no respect for American law and custom, and that’s why Moon ended up in Danbury prison. I believe it. And I further believe Moon knew it, too. He was mighty pissed off with Kamiyama.

________________________________________

Frederick Sontag from “Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church” (1977)

“As this book went to the publisher, these fears were confirmed by the arrest of the church’s leaders in Korea on charges of income-tax evasion.” (page 199)

________________________________________

Guilty Moon. Law firm was paid $100,000 up front and $50,000 a month to obtain a presidential pardon for Moon. It failed.

Sun Myung Moon was scammed several times in Korea in the 1950s and 60s

The Korean Government raided the Il-hwa Ginseng Company for tax evasion in February, 1977

Where did Moon get all that money from?

Moon extracted $500 million from Japanese female members

A huge FFWPU scam in Japan is revealed

FFWPU / UC of Japan used members for profit, not religious purposes

$80 million: 4,200 female Japanese followers allegedly deposited as much as $25,000 each in the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito in Uruguay.

400 Japanese men and women were flown to the US. “Each person took, I think, about $2,000,” Soejima said.

I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills to smuggle into the US

[sciencespies]

The True History Behind Martin Scorsese's 'The Irishman'

https://sciencespies.com/history/the-true-history-behind-martin-scorseses-the-irishman/

The True History Behind Martin Scorsese's 'The Irishman'

Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman provides a decades-spanning look at one man’s relationship to organized crime, organized labor, and the truth—however slippery that concept may be. That man, Frank Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro, was a union official and mob associate whose story intersects with labor organizer Jimmy Hoffa, the Mafia, and the Kennedys. The film, Scorsese’s first to stream exclusively on Netflix, is adapted from the 2004 Sheeran biography I Heard You Paint Houses by writer Charles Brandt, in which Sheeran claims that he killed Hoffa, amongst other figures. Hoffa’s sudden disappearance in 1975 still looms large as one of America’s longest-standing unsolved mysteries.

Sheeran’s stories are seductive—he was friends with Hoffa (Al Pacino), and he was an associate of Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), a mob figure who indeed had ties to both Hoffa and other high-level mafia families. And while many Hoffa scholars think Sheeran’s claims are bogus, and that Scorsese—and Robert De Niro, who has wanted to adapt the book for years—got the story wrong, the film’s portrait of how organized crime became interwoven with the labor movement and the highest levels of government in the 20th century carries many elements of truth.

As a guide to that era, here’s a primer that can either provide you with some key background information before sitting down to watch The Irishman or to fill in the gaps after viewing. The movie, which leaves theaters next week and will be available on Netflix starting Wednesday, November 27, runs more than three hours, so you have a lot of historical ground to cover.

Who was Jimmy Hoffa and was he really the most famous man in America?

James Hoffa, mostly known by the media as Jimmy, was a labor organizer even in his early career—at 14, he dropped out of school to work full time, and as a teenager he organized fellow grocery store workers to challenge unfair treatment by managers and to advocate for higher wages. He joined the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters in 1932 when he was still a teen, and by 1957 was elected president of the union, which at that point represented nearly one million truck drivers and warehouse workers. At one point in The Irishman, a voiceover from De Niro’s Sheeran asserts that Hoffa, in the 1950s and ’60s, was more famous than Elvis or the Beatles. That’s not an exaggeration—in a time when nearly one-third of American workers belonged to a union, Hoffa was the movement’s most famous face and de facto voice. On July 30, 1975, Hoffa set out for a lunch meeting at a local restaurant, and when he hadn’t returned home by the next morning, his wife Josephine called police. No trace of Hoffa was seen after that day, and he was declared legally dead in 1982. While some thought he was murdered by mafia associates, others thought it might be rivals within the Teamsters, and another line of inquiry attempted to discover whether or not Hoffa, afraid for his life, vanished of his own accord.

James R. Hoffa at the Teamster’s Union Convention

(Photo by Robert W. Kelley/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)

What did the Teamsters have to do with the Mafia?

In the mid-20th century, the Teamsters’ pension fund grew in size as membershipswelled. Many mafia families used this fund as a piggy bank, taking out off-the-books loans they’d use to fund the construction of casinos in Las Vegas (the mechanics of this story are detailed in Casino, another Scorsese film). “The problem with the loans to the Mob-controlled projects”, explained the National Museum of Organized Crime & Law Enforcement in a 2015 blog post, “was that many of them were not repaid promptly (or at all), and the corrupting influence facilitated ‘the skim’—the tax-free diversion of casino cash, delivered in suitcases to Midwestern mobsters.” Some of this cash made its way back to Hoffa and other union officials. At lower levels, mob enforcers would ensure unions won prime building, trucking, and transport contracts, keeping the flow of money steady. They would also pitch-in to help fix elections, either within the union itself or in city governments, ensuring key positions were held by union-friendly (and mob-friendly) candidates.

Who, then, was Frank Sheeran?

Many historians of the FBI, labor unions, and organized crime cast aspersions on Frank Sheeran’s stories that he killed Hoffa, or that he killed infamous “Crazy Joe Gallo” in Manhattan’s Little Italy in 1972. Writer and mafia historian Bill Tonelli, writing in Slate, exhaustively argues that Sheeran’s claims are mere fantasy: “Not a single person I spoke with who knew Sheeran from Philly—and I interviewed cops and criminals and prosecutors and reporters—could remember even a suspicion that he had ever killed anyone.”

But some of what Frank Sheeran says to Brandt in I Heard You Paint Houses is true—he was a close associate of mafia boss Russell Bufalino, and through Bufalino he did come to be well-acquainted with Jimmy Hoffa.

An Irish-Catholic WWII veteran, Sheeran, a truck driver by trade, began doing small jobs for Bufalino and the even higher-up Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel). As a non-Italian, he wasn’t eligible for full-fledged membership in the Cosa Nostra, but he was considered a trusted associate and friend by Bufalino. In I Heard You Paint Houses, Sheeran, who died in 2003, alleges that through Bufalino he became Hoffa’s right-hand man, tasked with protecting him on trips and even performing assassinations as necessary.

Russell Bufalino, of Kingston, Pennsylvania appears before the legislative watch dog committee during hearings in the Capitol on the Apalachin, New York, crime congress.

(Getty Images)

What role did Bufalino play in the Mafia hierarchy? Why was he important to the Hoffa story?

Born in Sicily in 1902, Russell Bufalino immigrated to the United States as a child. His family settled in Buffalo, New York, and after moving as a young adult to Northeastern Pennsylvania, Bufalino, by the mid-1960s, was the country’s most important mafia figure not based in a major city. His crew controlled Rust Belt communities like Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, Pennsylvania, and desolate stretches of highway that were useful to the mob because of both coal mining and long-haul trucking. Bufalino’s cousin, Bill (Ray Romano), meanwhile was Jimmy Hoffa’s personal attorney.

While never as notorious or prominent in the news as peers like Carlo Gambino or Joe Bonano, Bufalino was nonetheless a central figure in mid-century organized crime, and in the early 1970s was reportedly the interim head of the notorious Genovese family. As early as 1964, Bufalino was on law enforcement’s radar—a Senate subcommittee on organized crime called him “one of the most ruthless and powerful leaders of the Mafia in the United States.” In 1978 he was sentenced to four years in federal prison on an extortion charge, and was later sent back for an additional decade after a hitman he hired became a government informant. By all accounts, Bufalino and Sheeran remained close until the former’s release from prison in 1989, with Sheeran, convicted in the late 1970s of labor racketeering, continuing to act as Bufalino’s bodyguard and caretaker behind bars.

How did the Kennedys get involved in this story?

John F. Kennedy’s relationship with the mafia is probably second only to his relationship with Marilyn Monroe in terms of public fascination. While little direct evidence connects Kennedy patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. to the bootlegging industry of the Prohibition age, he was a shrewd Wall Street investor and, later, Hollywood power player—he made several films in the 1920s with star Gloria Swanson (who also happened to be his mistress). At various points Kennedy served as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and he used this political capital to help the careers of his sons. In The Dark Side of Camelot, journalist Seymour Hersh alleges that Kennedy also leveraged his influence with the Chicago mafia to secure JFK’s victory over Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960. Scorsese’s film presents these connections as fact, even bringing up the persistent—but still unsubstantiated—suggestion that JFK’s assassination was a mafia hit.

Robert Kennedy speaks with labor leader Jimmy Hoffa. Kennedy was chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee and investigated Hoffa’s ties to organized crime.

(Getty Images)

Where did Hoffa come into conflict with the Kennedy administration?

As soon as JFK installed his brother Robert as attorney general in 1961, Jimmy Hoffa shot to the top of the younger Kennedy’s personal Most Wanted list. A one-man anti-mob crusader, Kennedy and his team, Ronald L. Goldfarb outlines in 2002’s Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes, accused Hoffa of being little better than a mafia boss himself. He was charged at various points with bribery, fraud, and, most crucially, misuse of the pension fund, all while he tried to expand the Teamsters by bringing airline workers into the union.

According to Kennedy, Hoffa used the fund to make loans to organized crime figures across the country. More than political adversaries, the two men seemed to genuinely dislike each other. After a dinner with Hoffa, Kennedy reflected on the other man’s character: “On my way home I thought of how often Hoffa had said he was tough; that he destroyed employers, hated policemen, and broke those who stood in his way…When a grown man sat for an evening and talked continuously about his toughness, I could only conclude that he was a bully hiding behind a facade.” Kennedy, in this instance, prevailed—Hoffa was finally convicted of both fraud and bribery in 1964, and sentenced to 13 years in federal prison, though he got out in five thanks to a commutation by President Richard Nixon.

Facing the Senate Labor Rackets Committee for the fourth consecutive day, teamster boss James R. Hoffa testified today that he does not recall talking with racketeer Johnny Dio about the founding of seven phony teamster locals in New York. Council Robert Kennedy and Senator John F. Kennedy are seen in the background.

(Getty Images)

After his release from prison, Hoffa, still beloved by many in the Teamsters, attempted to take back his former position as head of the union. This is where most people believe he went wrong; many in the mafia believed Hoffa’s lust for power made him an unreliable associate. The initial investigations into his disappearance made it clear that Hoffa’s work was tied to the mystery: “Mr. Hoffa owes his fate, whatever it may be”, wrote the New York Times in 1975, “to his increasingly persistent efforts to restore his lapsed influence over the 2.2‐million member union that he built, almost single handedly, into one of the most potent economic and political forces in America.”

So if not Sheeran, who actually killed Jimmy Hoffa?

While not considered by contemporary law enforcement to be a primary suspect in Hoffa’s disappearance, Sheeran’s name did appear on the FBI’s initial list of suspects, but his relationship with Hoffa—and with Bufalino—means that he can’t be ruled out of having some connection to the crime, even if he didn’t pull the trigger himself.

In Hoffa lore, another name comes up regularly—Chuckie O’Brien, another of Hoffa’s longtime friends and aides. In 2004, the FBI matched Hoffa’s DNA to a hairbrush found in O’Brien’s car, though O’Brien’s stepson, lawyer Jack Goldsmith, vehemently denies O’Brien’s involvement. Most law enforcement sources agree that whoever actually killed Hoffa, the particulars Scorsese presents in The Irishman aren’t far off—Hoffa was killed after a meeting in a Detroit house, and his remains were either buried or cremated shortly thereafter.

More recently, in 2017, James Buccellato, a criminology professor at Northern Arizona University, reflected on some of the outlying ideas: “The craziest theory that I’ve ever heard was that he was actually, this was a while back, but that he was actually still alive and that he as being kept somewhere alive by the Mafia; sort of an ‘Elvis is still alive’ kind of theory.”

For his part, when pressed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Scorsese suggested that the truth of Hoffa’s disappearance is perhaps the least compelling part of the story: “What would happen if we knew exactly how the JFK assassination was worked out? What does it do? It gives us a couple of good articles, a couple of movies and people talking about [it] at dinner parties. The point is, it’s not about the facts. It’s the world [the characters are] in, the way they behave. It’s about [a character] stuck in a certain situation. You’re obligated to behave a certain way and you realize you may have made a mistake.”

#History

[johnnicelli]

Top Tips: Finding An Immigration Attorney In Manhattan

Finding the right immigration attorney in Manhattan, New York, can be a crucial step towards achieving your immigration goals. With the diverse array of legal professionals available, it's essential to know how to identify the best fit for your needs. In this guide, we'll provide you with top tips on finding the perfect immigration attorney in Manhattan to guide you through the intricate maze of immigration laws and procedures. Read our full blog - https://www.behance.net/gallery/193943981/Top-Tips-Finding-An-Immigration-Attorney-In-Manhattan

[berniesrevolution]

On June 26, few people outside New York’s 14th Congressional District knew who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was. But by the next day, when news spread that she’d toppled her opponent, 10-term Representative Joseph Crowley, in the Democratic congressional primary, she was a national celebrity. She appeared on CNN, Meet the Press, PBS’s Firing Line, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, and MSNBC as the fresh face of a revived American left. Her lip color of choice—Stila Stay All Day Liquid Lipstick in Beso—sold out in several stores.

When she appeared a few weeks later at a rally near Wall Street’s Charging Bull statue in Lower Manhattan to endorse Zephyr Teachout, who was seeking the Democratic nomination to become New York’s next attorney general, a large crowd cheered—many of them clearly there to catch a glimpse of Ocasio-Cortez, not the candidate she was supporting.

Photographers—paparazzi?—shouted out, “Alex! Alexandria! Over here!” An “I Love NYC” tour bus pulled up alongside the statue. “Hey, I know her! That’s her!” yelled a guy in a baseball cap, standing and pointing from the bus’s top deck. Dozens of tourists began frantically snapping photos of the young woman whose face, if not name, they recognized—or assumed they did. Ocasio-Cortez waved, flashed a toothy grin, and shouted, “Vote for Zephyr Teachout in September!” Then she was hustled away by a staffer, to a chorus of disappointed groans. “Sorry, guys,” she said, sounding genuinely regretful. “I gotta go!”

Since the hectic days following her primary win, Ocasio-Cortez has only gained momentum. In November, she will face her Republican opponent, Anthony Pappas, in the general election. She’s expected to win, which would make her the youngest woman in Congress come January. Still, in spite of her star power, her staff and volunteers stress that Ocasio-Cortez is part of a movement in which no individual deserves sole credit. They emphasize building community and sharing power as the keys to an effective progressive movement.

Crucially, these supporters insist that the movement’s work does not end with an election. Alexandra Rojas, 23, a founding member of Brand New Congress and the executive director of Justice Democrats—two groups that supported Ocasio-Cortez—told me that the candidates her organization endorses know that it’s “not just about one election, but building a movement and helping one another.” Jeff Latzer, a campaign volunteer, praised Ocasio-Cortez’s skill in reaching out to the grassroots: “Alexandria is the perfect combination of an extremely grounded person who did not set out to get involved in politics, but just has this amazing ability to communicate issues for people on a level they can relate to.” Or as Naureen Akhter, Ocasio-Cortez’s 31-year-old director of organizing, put it: “It might sound corny, but she really does feel like one of us.”

Barring any last-minute surprises, Ocasio-Cortez won’t be the plucky wunderkind of the insurgent left much longer; she’ll be a sitting member of Congress instead. Given the pressures she’ll face from Republicans and establishment Democrats, it’s worth asking how she will square her democratic-socialist ideals with the politics of Washington. But it will also be hard for the grassroots groups that helped drive her candidacy to keep from being eclipsed in the political spotlight when the candidate herself is so extraordinary. That’s why members of the movement that got her elected must figure out how to support Ocasio-Cortez in achieving their progressive policy aims—while also holding her accountable for doing so.

Ocasio-Cortez’s life has changed dramatically since the primary. Forget free time, or even the luxury of scheduling interviews well in advance: It took three canceled meetings over the course of the summer before Jeff Latzer, my contact on her campaign, was able to slot me in. On the morning of our interview, he asked me to change the location and push back the time by an hour, because “she tries really hard not to be late.” And when we finally convened, Ocasio-Cortez was, in fact, 15 minutes late—though profusely apologetic about it—and arrived looking chic but tired, her hair pulled back tightly beneath wire-framed glasses.

Ocasio-Cortez’s demeanor was as warm as when I’d met her before the primary, if slightly more guarded. Over the past three months, she’d campaigned hard for several candidates, with mixed results. She stumped for Abdul El-Sayed (running for the governor’s seat in Michigan), Fayrouz Saad and Rashida Tlaib (for congressional seats in Michigan), Cori Bush (in Missouri), Kaniela Ing (in Hawaii), and Brent Welder and James Thompson (in Kansas). Tlaib and Thompson won, and Tlaib is now poised to become the first Muslim woman in Congress. Together, she and Ocasio-Cortez will also represent the Democratic Socialists of America on the federal level.

But before she heads south, Ocasio-Cortez says she wants to “get back to the basics” of working with the people in her district, which spans parts of two New York City boroughs: Queens and the Bronx. Before June, she points out, the only power structure in both places was “the machine.” That’s why she and her team are focused on building relationships with progressive community groups and leaders in her district. “People who were ‘just’ organizers two months ago are now very formidable community figures,” she explains, and “we’ve been keeping our ear to the ground.” Jake DeGroot, the 32-year-old deputy operations director for the campaign, told me they are corralling “people already doing organizing work: tenants, bodegas, food-cart workers. We want to [show] them this campaign is here to hear from them and promote their interests.”

Two key organizations to emerge from the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, have been crucial to Ocasio-Cortez’s success. Brand New Congress, which recruited her to run, requires its candidates to reject money from corporate PACs and lobbyists. Justice Democrats advocates for a federal jobs guarantee, single-payer health care, and the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). The groups share many of the same principles but employ different strategies.

While much of their energy comes from Bernie Sanders supporters with previous campaign experience, they are also attracting young people just getting involved in politics as well as people who supported Hillary Clinton but believe the Democratic Party should move more to the left. Ocasio-Cortez tells me she plans to join the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Medicare for All Caucus, and “quite a few others.” In addition to her well-known talking points—single-payer health care, climate justice, criminal-justice reform, immigrant justice, rejecting corporate money, and taking on the fossil-fuel lobby—“we’re starting to see a little more of a galvanized anti-war movement [in the House], and folks like Barbara Lee have really led the way on that.”

(Continue Reading)

[jcsurge]

Bankruptcy Lawyers SEO

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[undergroundalbania]

FBI surveillance photograph of Alex Rudaj, outside Jimbo’s Bar in Astoria, Queens on April 15, 2003

The Rudaj Organization was the name given the Albanian mafia in the New York City metro area, so named for the man accused of being its kingpin, Alex Rudaj of Yorktown, New York. The Rudaj Organization, called “The Corporation” by its members, was started in 1993 in Westchester and spread to the Bronxand Queens. Prosecutors say the Albanian gang was headed by Alex Rudaj and an Italiannamed Nardino Colotti who had ties to the late Gambino soldier Skinny Phil LoscalzoAlex Rudaj (also known as Allie Boy, Uncle Rudaj, Xhaxhai,) of Yorktown, New York is the alleged boss of the Albanian mafia’s Rudaj Organization, based in the New York City metro area. Rudaj is an ethnic Albanian from Ulcinj, Montenegro who immigrated to the United States in 1987. Federal prosecutors said Rudaj was the triggerman in a 1996 shooting of another organized crime figure after a high-speed chase in the Bronx. Rudaj hung out the sunroof of a car and fired at Guy Peduto as he fled in another car. They also described an incident where Rudaj showed up with 20 thugs to get late mob boss John Gotti’s table at Rao’s, the legendary and exclusive East Harlem Italian restaurant. On Friday, June 16, 2006, Alex Rudaj, 38, was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison for racketeering, extortion and gambling offenses.

Nardino Colotti (born 1963) of the Bronx, New York, is an Italian American protégé of the late Gambino soldier Phil (Skinny Phil) Loscalzo and co-leader of the Albanian Mafia Rudaj Organization. In addition to gambling dens in Queens the Rudaj Organization ran gambling operations in Mount Vernon and Port Chester. Nardino Colotti’s group had a gambling joint on Adee Street in Port Chester and forced bar owners in Mount Vernon to install their illegal gambling machines. In one instance, Colotti’s group tried to force Salvatore Misale, the owner of Puerto Roja in Mount Vernon, to hand over his bar to the Corporation. Misale went to authorities in 2003 after he endured a beating at a Bronx cafe over his refusal to hand over the keys to the bar. Lamaj and Misale sliced his ear off and then beat and cursed at him. On October 26, 2004, the FBI and Manhattan U.S. Attorney David Kelley announced the arrest of the group’s alleged boss, Alex Rudaj, and 21 other reputed mob members charged in the indictment. Kelley’s office said it believes the indictment is the first federal racketeering case in the United States against an alleged organized crime enterprise run by Albanians. Kelly neglected to mention a smaller Albanian-Italian drug smuggling operation indicted by federal authorities in Brooklyn since 1981, from which known crime associate was also charged but only received 2 years at sentencing. Several of the defendants indicted in the case are not Albanian - the organization has soldiers that are Greek, Arab and Italian - but most of the defendants in the case were either native Albanians or first-generation Albanian-Americans.

During a bail hearing for one of the two dozen people arrested in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Treanor said that the Albanian mob had taken over the operations of the Lucchese family in Astoria, Queens. Rudaj lead an attack in August 2001 on two Greek associates of the Lucchese crime family who ran a gambling racket inside a Greek social club called Soccer Fever at 26-80 30th St. in Queens. On August 3, 2001 Rudaj and at least six other men entered the club with guns, beating one of the men in the head with a pistol and chasing others out of the neighborhood by threatening to destroy the building.

Gambino leader Arnold Squitieri had had enough and wanted a talk with these rogue mobsters. The “sit down” took place at a gas station in a rest area near the New Jersey turnpike. Twenty armed Gambino mobsters accompanied Squitieri. Alex Rudaj on the other hand had only managed to bring six members of his crew. According to undercover FBI agent Joaquin Garcia, who infiltrated the Gambino crime family during this period, Squitieri told Rudaj that the fun was over and that they should stop expanding their operations. The Albanians and Gambinos then pulled out their weapons. Knowing they were outnumbered, the Albanians threatened to blow up the gas station with all of them in it. This ended the discussion, and both groups pulled back.

By 2006 all of the main players involved in this “sit down” were in prison. Rudaj and then personal driver and bodyguard Lumaj including all members of Sixth Family had been picked off the street in October 2004 and charged with a variety of racketeering and gambling charges. After a trial Rudaj and his main lieutenants were all found guilty. In 2006 Rudaj, at that time 38 years old, was sentenced to 27 years in prison. His rival Arnold Squitieri was convicted in an unrelated racketeering case and was sent to prison for seven years.

“What we have here might be considered a sixth crime family,” after the five Mafia organizations — Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese — said Fred Snelling, head of the FBI’s criminal division in New York.

To date, over 20 members of the Rudaj organization have been charged with various crimes. Six of its top leaders, including Alex Rudaj himself, have been convicted. Ten more have pleaded guilty.

[shirlleycoyle]

We Built a Database of Over 500 iPhones Cops Have Tried to Unlock

With research support from Izzie Ramirez.

Law enforcement around the country have had varying degrees of success in trying to access evidence from locked iPhones seized from criminal suspects, Motherboard has learned as part of the most comprehensive analysis yet of iPhone search warrants.

Though some law enforcement agencies have accessed evidence on iPhones in the last year, many officials were unable to do so, adding nuance to the debate over whether the Department of Justice should continue its attempts to force Apple to create some form of backdoor in its products that law enforcement agencies could use to more reliably unlock devices.

The analysis found that federal authorities including the FBI, DEA, and DHS have extracted evidence from iPhones in crimes ranging from drug trafficking, to fraud, to child exploitation.

The data adds specifics to the so-called Going Dark debate, a phenomenon where law enforcement agencies say they are unable to access evidence stored on phones or read peoples' encrypted messages even if they have a warrant to do so. Apple and privacy experts say that having encryption enabled on phones and messaging services by default makes everyone safer, and that building a backdoor would make encrypted technology inherently weaker.

In the absence of a backdoor, forensic companies which focus on unlocking or extracting data from iPhones continue to offer their tools, with the price of such tools decreasing dramatically in recent years to tens of thousands of dollars.

"I think efforts like this are important to try to help the public and policy makers understand what is going on," Jim Baker, former general counsel of the FBI and now director of national security and cybersecurity at thinktank the R Street Institute, told Motherboard in a phone call.

Baker was the FBI's head lawyer during the San Bernardino case, where the Department of Justice tried to legally compel Apple to introduce a flaw into a version of its operating system to make it easier for law enforcement to unlock an iPhone. He has since said that public safety officials have to learn to live with encryption because the alternative of introducing a backdoor creates more vulnerabilities in devices that everybody uses.

For all the public bluster on both sides of the Going Dark issue, neither tells the full story. On one side, the Department of Justice has repeatedly advocated for a new method of access, perhaps where Apple would retain encryption keys for devices that law enforcement could then use themselves. When the Department of Justice discusses the issue publicly, they almost never mention that tools do exist which can unlock iPhones in some circumstances, including the latest models. On the other, an overwhelming number of technologists and the tech giants themselves say that creating a backdoor would further expose users to hackers and other threats.

But this debate is most often discussed with anecdotes and not data, and never data that is publicly available, until now. Motherboard collected and analyzed over 500 iPhone search warrants and related documents filed throughout 2019 to build a database of cases in which law enforcement attempted to get information from an iPhone.

One of the top level findings of Motherboard's dataset is that many law enforcement agencies and officials can not reliably access data stored on iPhones. Whether that's due to a device having too strong a passcode, the phone being damaged, an unlocking capability not being available at that specific point in time, or a particular agency not having access to advanced forensic technology itself, Motherboard found many cases where investigators were not able to extract data from iPhones, at least according to the search warrants.

But in some cases officials were able to obtain data from a variety of devices, including some of the latest models of iPhones offered at the time. Multiple federal agencies and local police departments have access to tools from companies such as Grayshift and Cellebrite, which can, depending on a variety of factors, unlock and obtain data from iPhones.

When state authorities couldn't access an iPhone in a child exploitation case, an official from Homeland Security Investigations, part of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), filed for a warrant on their behalf to use more advanced techniques. When a Border Patrol official couldn't get into an iPhone, the agency sent the device to a Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory (RCFL), an FBI-controlled facility with access to phone cracking technology, for extraction.

A screenshot of a section of Motherboard's database. Image: Motherboard

Most of all, the records compiled by Motherboard show that the capability to unlock iPhones is a fluid issue, with an ebb and flow of law enforcement sometimes being able to access devices and others not. The data solidifies that some law enforcement officials do have trouble accessing data stored on iPhones. But ultimately, our findings lead experts to circle back to the fundamental policy question: should law enforcement have guaranteed access to iPhones, with the trade-offs in iPhone security that come with that?

"That there are a number of variables involved here does not sound unique to the context of encrypted devices. Law enforcement does not operate in a perfect world," Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told Motherboard in an email. "Entropy happens. Witnesses can be difficult to locate and reluctant to speak to investigators. Memories and bruises fade over time; other physical evidence may be damaged or incomplete. Different agencies have different budgets, and when it comes to digital forensics, they don't all have equal access to specialized personnel and equipment."

"Law enforcement has never been guaranteed that its job will be quick and easy and efficient," she added. "I do not believe law enforcement deserves some guaranteed-reliable means of accessing data on phones."

An FBI spokesperson wrote in an email, "There is a wide disparity of capabilities that exists across the American law enforcement landscape. We must restore and maintain the constitutional balance regarding lawful access to evidence in order to ensure the continued ability of our local and state law enforcement agencies to protect their citizens by investigating local crime and to collect evidence while respecting the privacy of law-abiding citizens. Local, state and federal law enforcement each must be able to exercise their intended mission to protect the American public. Those unique law enforcement jurisdictions should continue to be prescribed by the Constitution, courts and our elected officials, not based upon what a particular industry, company or individual believes is most appropriate." (Lawmakers previously asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to answer questions about the issue, calling the Bureau's Going Dark narrative "highly questionable" after Motherboard revealed that some local police had bought modern iPhone unlocking tools).

Government departments have their own datasets on encrypted devices. FBI Director Christopher Wray repeatedly said that the FBI was unable to gain access to the content of 7,775 devices during the 2017 fiscal year. But The Washington Post found the Bureau grossly inflated those statistics, with the correct number being between 1,000 and 2,000. In February USA Today reported that the Manhattan District Attorney's Office is unable to access 2,500 devices in its possession. Neither the FBI or Manhattan District Attorney's Office datasets are available to the public.

Do you have access to data on unlocking cellphones? Do you know anything else about it? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on+44 20 8133 5190 , Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

"This was something that frustrated me tremendously when I was in the government," Baker said. "It was very hard to get good data that we could rely on to make a strong case about how bad the problem was."

Baker said one reason it was difficult to obtain good data was due to how some law enforcement officials don't even bother to go through the process of obtaining a warrant and trying to unlock a phone because they already know that the device is encrypted and they likely won't get any useful information.

"How do you count that?" when there is no search warrant or application available, Baker asked.

To be clear, the data compiled by Motherboard has several limitations that are vital to keep in mind. It does not include every iPhone-related case in 2019: PACER, the court records system Motherboard used to construct the database, is focused on federal warrants, so the data does not include many other cases of local police departments applying for warrants to unlock iPhones that exist. Although Motherboard did create a relatively large dataset, we likely did not obtain every iPhone unlocking case from PACER, due to inconsistencies and variations in how law enforcement officials name such cases, meaning some are filed under obscure titles making them harder to discover.

Sometimes court records can be missing details for no disclosed reason. In some cases, the sheet laying out what specific information investigators obtained was blank or vague. Officials can also make mistakes in their filings. And although in some cases a court docket says the search warrant has been "executed"—that is, acted upon—there is some inconsistency in whether that means whether an investigator was actually able to unlock an iPhone or not. One warrant the ATF executed in an escaped prisoner case said the agency "Attempted forensic examination;" another one the DEA executed said that "Brute force process was attempted." In some cases, suspects provided consent for their device to be searched, but officials sought a warrant in case this consent was later revoked. Law enforcement being locked out of phones is also not limited to Apple's iPhones; law enforcement can have issues with some Android devices as well.

With those caveats, the dataset still presents a snapshot of the Going Dark issue. Out of 516 analyzed cases, 295 were marked as executed. Officials from the FBI, DEA, DHS, Homeland Security and Investigations, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were able to extract data from iPhones in investigations ranging from arson, to child exploitation, to drug trafficking. And investigators executed warrants against modern iPhones, not just older models.

A screenshot of a case where investigators were unable to access an iPhone. Image: Screenshot

In some cases, investigators obtained photos, text messages, call records, browsing data, cookies, and location data from seized iPhones. Some executed search warrants explicitly mention the type of extraction performed, such as so-called "Logical" or "Advanced Logical" extraction. The latter is a term with a meaning that varies between different phone data extraction companies, but generally it relates to creating a device backup as iTunes does normally and obtaining some more data on top of that, Vladimir Katalov, the CEO of iOS forensics firm Elcomsoft, told Motherboard. Katalov said those backups can contain the sorts of pieces of data that investigators obtained, and is available to all models of iPhone.

"The other methods (such as full system extraction) are much more complex to use; they cannot be implemented as [a] 'one button' solution. But return much more data (including conversations in secure messengers such as Telegram, Signal, Wickr etc, not available in backups)," Katalov said.

In one case Motherboard analyzed involving an iPhone, an FBI official wrote they obtained "full extraction," and another from the ATF mentioned the agency obtained "App Data." Obtaining a full system extraction sometimes requires unlocking and jailbreaking, essentially hacking, the device. Forbes previously reported on one case where the FBI explicitly said it unlocked an iPhone 11 Pro Max, one of Apple's most recent and secure iPhones at the time of writing, with a GrayKey, the phone cracking product sold by Grayshift.

Apple told Motherboard that the company has responded to over 127,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement agencies over the past 7 years, and that the number of requests has increased over 100%, which Apple says indicates the information the company provides is useful. iPhones often backup certain pieces of data to iCloud, which law enforcement can then access via legal requests to Apple.

In prepared testimony for a December 2019 hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Erik Neuenschwander, Apple's director of user privacy, wrote "Given the pace of innovation and the growth of data in recent years, we understand that one of the biggest challenges facing law enforcement is a lack of clear information about what data are available, where they are stored, and how they can be obtained. That is why we publish a comprehensive law enforcement guide that provides this information, and our team has trained law enforcement officers in the United States and around the world on these processes. We will continue to increase our training offerings in the future, including by deploying online training to reach smaller law enforcement departments."

A screenshot of a case where investigators sent iPhones to a specialist FBI lab for data extraction. Image: Screenshot

The current dynamic is that forensic companies find the right vulnerabilities to unlock iPhones, Apple reacts with its own improvements, and then the firms look for other workarounds.

Motherboard previously reported on one flashpoint in the ever-evolving combat between Apple and unlocking firms. In 2018, former Apple engineer Braden Thomas, who went on to work at Grayshift, emailed Grayshift customers warning of an upcoming feature addition to iOS called "USB Restricted Mode." Although the tweak wouldn't defeat the company's GrayKey product entirely, it could mean that law enforcement would need to try and unlock iPhones within a week of them being last unlocked. In future iOS versions Apple made the restrictions on communicating with iPhones over USB stronger too.

Multiple security experts said that Apple will likely make it even harder to unlock its iPhones. That circular dynamic may not be sustainable.

"I think it's going to get harder and harder to find these kinds of unlocking flaws, because Apple does control the entire stack," Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former Facebook chief security officer, told Motherboard. Apple designs and implements everything from the hardware to the operating system itself, which gives it a tighter ecosystem and allows it to push security updates to phones more easily. Android devices, on the other hand, end up having large variations in the security of devices from different manufacturers, which may have their own vulnerabilities or may have difficulty distributing security and Android operating system updates to phones quickly. This means Apple can more easily make sweeping design changes to its phones to thwart any attacks.

A source who works for a company that makes phone hacking tools for governments said that "definitely local access is getting harder due to USB lockdown and similar features." Motherboard granted the source anonymity to speak more openly about sensitive techniques.

Grayshift's CEO David Miles and Cellebrite's press contact did not respond to a request for comment.

"It is the world we are in today, and so have to deal with it."

Apple's improvement of the security of its devices is not purely a technical discussion. It leads directly into the DOJ's demands for another approach.

"I think a couple more hardware revisions of understanding the ways that these unlocks are happening and [Apple is] going to make it extremely difficult. Which then will bring this debate back," Stamos said. Rather than relying on cases that have not been wholly persuasive, such as those involving the locked phone of an already dead terrorist, law enforcement may have stronger anecdotes to draw from if iPhones become even harder to unlock, Stamos said. In the latest attempt in January, Attorney General William Barr called on Apple to help unlock two iPhones belonging to a terrorist who attacked a Naval base.

In the December hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham told representatives of tech giants, including Apple's Neuenschwander, "My advice to you is to get on with it, because this time next year, if we haven’t found a way that you can live with, we will impose our will on you." (Graham, along with Senator Richard Blumenthal, recently introduced a bill called the EARN IT Act that is designed to combat online child sexual exploitation, but may have ramifications for end-to-end messaging encryption.)

The fundamentals of that debate—what trade-offs is society willing to make around whether officials cannot unlock some iPhones and gather evidence, but every user's general cybersecurity is improved—will likely remain the same.

"Right now, there is no known mechanism to do what DOJ wants to do without introducing substantial cybersecurity risk into the system beyond that which already exists, which is also substantial," Baker, the former FBI general counsel, said. "It makes the cybersecurity posture of the United States even worse." Instead, public safety officials need to rethink not only their approach to encryption, but how they investigate crimes too, Baker added.

"There will be costs in certain types of investigations, but encryption is something that can protect everybody and shouldn't be undermined," Baker said.

He added, "It is the world we are in today, and so have to deal with it."

You can find the database here, and the related documents here.

We Built a Database of Over 500 iPhones Cops Have Tried to Unlock syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[quincehat2-blog]

NYC Public Advocate Debate: 5 Big Takeaways - New York City, NY Patch

NEW YORK — The seven top contenders for public advocate squared off in their second televised debate Wednesday night, less than a week ahead of a little-known special election for a job with little power beyond the bully pulpit.

The debate lineup comprised just a fraction of the giant field of candidates for the city's No. 2 elected office. It included state Assemblyman Michael Blake, Assemblyman Ron Kim, City Councilman Rafael Espinal, Councilman Jumaane Williams, former Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, the activist and journalist Nomiki Konst, and former Obama administration staffer Dawn Smalls.

They're among more than a dozen candidates vying to fill state Attorney General Letitia James's former job in the Feb. 26 nonpartisan election.

While the public advocate is first in line to succeed the mayor, the post comes with little authority under the City Charter. The person who holds it can introduce legislation to the City Council, hold public hearings and conduct inquiries into city agencies. But the gig has also proven a stepping stone to higher offices.

The seven debaters qualified to appear at Borough of Manhattan Community College based on their campaign fundraising, spending and endorsements. The face-off featured some rhetorical jabs and granular disagreements, but also plenty of common ground among the so-called "leading candidates."

Here are five big takeaways from the debate to consider before casting your ballot.

Councilman In The Crosshairs

The candidates onstage largely had their bullseyes on Williams, suggesting he is the frontrunner in the race. The Brooklyn Democrat was the most frequent target during a round in which the debaters were allowed to grill one opponent.

He took pointed questions from Mark-Viverito, Konst and Smalls about accusations of sexual harassment against his allies; donations he's allegedly taken from the real estate industry; and his purported status as an "outsider" candidate.

Williams defended his history of activism and tenant organizing and noted that he won New York City in his unsuccessful statewide primary challenge last year to Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul.

"I have the figurative and literal scars of putting my body on the line and raising issues that nobody else would," he said. "When people told me I couldn't get it done, we got it done."

As for the harssment allegations, Williams said he has addressed them whenever he had "some kind of executive control."

Supporting Small Businesses, Not Amazon

All the debaters except Smalls had criticized the deal to bring Amazon to Long Island City, which the online retail colossus abruptly abandoned last week. Much of the opponents' ire was focused on the nearly $3 billion in tax breaks and grants offered to the company for its plan to create at least 25,000 jobs.

With the deal dead, the candidates were asked how else New York should attract jobs and revenue. After an extended discussion and some sniping, there was something of a consensus: The government should support small businesses instead of giant corporations.

"They are the backbone of our neighborhoods, they are the backbone of our communities and they are the main job creators," Mark-Viverito said.

Kim also took the opportunity to tout his new proposal for an interstate compact that would bar New York from using tailor-made subsidies to lure big companies.

Voting Rights For Immigrants

Offering driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants is a priority for Democratic lawmakers and immigrant-rights activists. But six of the debating candidates wanted to go further by giving them voting rights.

The City Council has reportedly considered allowing both documented and undocumented immigrants to cast ballots. But Mark-Viverito said advocates asked the Council to consider stopping a push to expand voting rights after President Donald Trump took office when she was the chamber's leader.

Smalls did not take a position on the voting rights issue, saying she had to examine it before doing so.

Housing Over Homeless Shelters

Several candidates used a question about supporting or fighting homeless shelters to slam landlords and the real estate industry. But there was general agreement that shelters should be equitably sprinkled throughout the city, not concentrated in certain communities.

"I agree that every community has an obligation to host homeless shelters, and that the goal of housing homeless is to make sure that people can stay within their communities," Smalls said.

Many candidates said the city must do more to prevent tenants from becoming homeless in the first place — including the addition of more affordable housing.

"I don't believe that building more homeless shelters is going to solve the situation," Espinal said.

Not Sold On De Blasio For President

Like many other New Yorkers, the candidates weren't enthusiastic about the idea of Mayor Bill de Blasio running for president.

Most of them agreed that the second-term Democrat had only two real qualifications for the job: He's a U.S. citizen who's older than 35. Some argued de Blasio hasn't done enough to tackle pressing local issues — such as the city's segregated schools, crumbling public housing and ailing public transit — to justify higher ambitions.

"If it's not his pet project, then he's not focused on it, and that's a disservice to the city of New York," Mark-Viverito said.

Smalls was a bit kinder, saying the mayor was "more than welcome" to join the already crowded presidential field but that he "would not be my candidate for president."

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Source: https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nyc-public-advocate-debate-5-big-takeaways