Judicial Reports: LexPress: Queens President Accused

By Jesse Sunenblick
Posted: 05-11-07 

The Queens Borough President is accused of overstepping her bounds, a federal insider trading case falls through, and a Brooklyn contigent takes a final swing at waylaying the Atlantic Yards development, among other news.

 
GUACHY'S TRAGEDY LIVES ON
After charges were reduced from manslaughter to third-degree assault for a boy whose open-handed “slap box” punch resulted in the death of a 13-year-old Queens teen, the stricken child’s family has cried foul. Lourdes Cepeda, the mother of Guarionex “Guachy” Montas, and other Dominican leaders claims that Queens Borough President Helen Marshall inappropriately influenced court proceedings. Marshall was present at two courtroom proceedings, and the alleged perpetrator was released into her care, spending the night at her house. See The Queens Chronicle for details. Dominican activists from the Latino Officers Association claim a sordid political subplot: that Marshall chose to support the African American accused over the Dominican victim, maybe because of a grudge with Dominican Councilman Hiram Monserrate, who represents the district where Guachy died.

 
THE SOUND OF ONE SQUAWK CLAPPING
In an apparent blow to the government’s beefed-up prosecutions of insider trading, a federal jury in Brooklyn acquitted the six so-called “squawk box” defendants of securities fraud. As reported in The New York Times, two stockbrokers were accused of creating a kickback scheme in which they permitted a group of four day traders at the A.B. Watley Group to listen to and to trade on confidential information about customer trades that was broadcast over an interoffice intercom, or squawk box. The jury deadlocked on the charge of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and a mistrial was declared. The decision was surprising because the government had obtained 10 guilty pleas in the case, and because John J. Amore, the government’s primary witness and formerly the chief executive of A.B. Watley, pleaded guilty to mail fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud in 2004. According to the Times, when asked how the squawk box revenue helped the firm, Mr. Amore said, “It took an insolvent firm and brought it to life.”

 

WHAT? A DRUG COMPANY MADE FALSE STATEMENTS?!
The latest machination of the Bristol-Meyers Squibb antitrust investigation took place yesterday, when the drug giant admitted to making false statements to the government, a move that could end a federal investigation of the drug maker’s efforts to preserve a monopoly for the anti-clotting cash cow, Plavix. The New York Times has the story. Federal Southern District Judge Sidney H. Stein is expected to issue a ruling this year about the validity of the Plavix patent, which BMS tried to protect by secretly paying off another company that had developed a generic copy. The admission of guilt could add up to a file of up to $1 million — paltry in comparison to what the drug giant might have paid had it been convicted of antitrust allegations.

 
PUBLIC BENEFIT/PRIVATE BUILDINGS
The Brooklyn Paper gives us the lone coverage of a long awaited legal challenge yesterday to Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development plan. Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden opened the hearing by asking state lawyers to explain how the project has sufficient “public benefit” to justify the condemnation and confiscation of privately owned buildings. “Can you tell me how a professional sports [facility] is a public use?” Justice Madden asked Philip Karmel, a lawyer for the Empire State Development Corporation. The “public benefit” angle is the focus of a lawsuit filed last month by a coalition of 26 civic groups. It argues that the ESDC had no right to call Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development a “civic project” that should invalidate local land-use laws that would have restricted the project’s scale. “We believe that going to a ballgame is a recreational activity, and having a ball team is a civic event,” Karmel said.

SO YOU WANNA BE A GANSTA?
Also in The New York Times: after 26 years a mob wannabe’s conviction for the murder of a record store owner was vacated by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Guy J. Mangano, Jr., who ordered a new trial on second-degree murder charges. Carmine Carini has long alleged that he played no role in the shooting, although he never implicated the two likely suspects: his mafia assassin cousins Vincent and Eddie. The turnabout comes after turncoats Salvatore Mangiavillano and Frank Smith admitted that Vincent, who is long dead, had come clean about the murder. “The people still certainly believe in his guilt,” said assistant district attorney, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, whose office has made Carini a deal: plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter, which carries a sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years, and he will be allowed to leave prison almost immediately.

Posted by Jesse on May 11, 2007 12:32 AM to Judicial Reports