The underlying case looks to be a pretty straight developing country "referral fees" / kickback type case.
One issue is how long these cases take to resolve. This was a whistleblower blowing the whistle.
Basic deal was Watson (who ran Northstar) a property developer signed a deal to kick back referral fees to an entity that did literally no work (Villanova Trust) created by a brother of the two amazon employees (Nelson and Kirschner) who were the transaction managers for 9 data center lease deals. The kickback deal was signed after these two Amazon employees met with Watson (the Vendor).
Amazon then did $400M in deals with Watson, who then kicked back $5M to the trust in "commissions". Then amazon discovered deleted files indicating the employees were entitled to "shares" in these projects from Watson of something like an additional $16M.
Others in the mix at developer also did some kind of land flip thing. One example was property that they bought for $20M, then sold to Amazon for $116M. In one case there was something like a $20M increase in price on property that was sold to Amazon the day that it was bought?! So they were frontrunning things. Watson was pissed, and wanted a cut, so recorded a meeting with the folks doing the flip scam. But that backfired because the folks doing the flip scam knew about the leasing scam and said, hey, if you don't back off we'll blow lid on your lease scam - claiming "that's FBI". They did end up compromising on kicking back $5M to Watson from the flip scam.
Anyways, all allegations, and thousands of pages so I've no doubt got some parts wrong, but it makes for interesting reading!
My question - it seems to take a long time to get these white color criminal types into jail.
In the linked post, there is a lot of complaining that the FBI messed up the guys career, but man, this court case - why would you hire a guy like this into a position of trust?
Note these allegations are contested. “My only hope in defending myself against its false allegations is that the process will be fair and impartial.” Mr. Nelson said per a WSJ article.
He may be guilty as hell but the fact of the matter is that doesn't mean the FBI can just take his stuff, it doesn't matter how guilty you look until you are convicted you are innocent, and the fact that it has been 20 months and there still haven't been any charges brought is ridiculous. Their money was taken before they were convicted and now they are not receiving a speedy and fair trial.
It is unconstitutional and wrong, it also sets a precedent, how long before the FBI finds out someone politically unpopular is being "investigated" another nice thing is that once they take your money good luck affording lawyers fees. Ultimately I was watching a trial steam once and there was a defence lawyer stated that the purpose of a defense lawyer isn't to make sure their client gets off it is too make sure their clients rights are protected and the state plays by the rules. I don't care how guilty someone is they are innocent until proven otherwise.
That said, hard to believe they have no idea WHY it was seized.
And in white collar crimes, the case lengths are unnecessarily long and the money is often hard to recover. They should work on both those issues longer term.
After Amazon wins it's lawsuits these folks will be filing various bankruptcy claims and the money will have been distributed all over the place (some to lawyers, some not) over the 5-10 years it takes to fight these out.
Yeah, sorry, no. You don't get to come after somebody and tell them "you know why". And even if they did know why in general terms (which is a claim you haven't proven), it's still impossible to defend legally without knowing in detail not only the facts being alleged, but the legal theory under which you are accused.
Courts have gotten WAY, WAY too willing to seal things. In a healthy, functioning system, it should be damned near impossible to seal anything a court is supposed to consider. In fact, I'd be perfectly happy to make it totally impossible. Ignoring the intrinsic injustice, courts are supposed to be public, and proceeding in secret undermines their legitimacy.
Anyhow, generalities aside, the idea of sealing anything material to a complaint against access by the defendant is just plain unacceptable. That's true for both civil and criminal cases.
If they did commit a crime they should be punished - after it has been proven.
Also, they didn't just seize the property allegedly acquired through illegal means, they also seized the entire family's unrelated savings (from prior/unrelated jobs). It was hardly some kind of crime family/syndicate situation that needed immediate law enforcement action to prevent further harm.
Might be a bit much to say... but I know some historic figures who would of raised arms over such a thing even existing. I have not heard a case where it even makes legal sense to do so.
I agree, until they have proof, they shouldn't be allowed to "freeze" things more than a month or two and certainly not prevent people from getting enough to pay for a decent lawyer. CAF is a joke and should require a conviction. Texas is a big abuser of it as well. The law (who are the only ones who have the legal permission to do violence to you, essentially legal abusers) finds loopholes like this and really latches on. Their primary directive is to follow the constitution, they all take an oath but evidently don't care about that oath or keep it in mind when doing this stuff.
Civil rights and civil liberties must be fought for, repeatedly. Those in power will only do what is constitutionally required of them when they are forced to do so.
I fail to understand how such a thing like civil asset forfeiture can even exist in a 'wah-wah-freedom' country like the USA. You are presumed guilty if the state wills it, your assets seized and good luck finding money to hire an attorney to contest the charges.
If this was 1775, Americans would be launching a revolutionary war against such tyranny. Citizens have gotten real soft these days.
Drugs are bad m'kay... Seriously the recent spate congress from the drug war. But apparently it was also used a lot in prohibition. But it is a vile, unconstitutional practice.
> He may be guilty as hell but the fact of the matter is that doesn't mean the FBI can just take his stuff, it doesn't matter how guilty you look until you are convicted you are innocent, and the fact that it has been 20 months and there still haven't been any charges brought is ridiculous. Their money was taken before they were convicted and now they are not receiving a speedy and fair trial.
I'm against civil forfeiture, but the problem here is easy to see. If you come at someone and say "we think you got $large_amount via illegal means, but go ahead and do whatever you want with it until the court proceedings are finished", the money is going to be spent or stashed in nearly every case where the person is guilty. It would make it difficult to ever recover money for the victims of crime.
Easy. Restitution or jail. And I mean, jail until restitution is complete.
If you laundered the money to hide it, and only retained 50% of the value in that transaction, that is your your problem. You knew what you were doing and you messed up.
Yes they abuse the civil laws of the USA to blackmail and bully citizens. Cops really do know no bounds and it is legalized violence. Remember violence isn't just physical it can be mental and emotional as well, and they are really good at it. Humans don't react well to not having power over their destiny and in these things unless you have an army of lawyers to begin with then they have complete control to legally abuse you mentally/emotionally to try to wear you down to get a conviction whether you're guilty or not. If they can't do that with lack of evidence, they will simply take everything you have in civil court and leave you a pauper as a warning to the next person who dares to defy them.
>It is unconstitutional and wrong, it also sets a precedent, how long before the FBI finds out someone politically unpopular is being "investigated" another nice thing is that once they take your money good luck affording lawyers fees.
The differentiating case in this matter seems to be this.
>The story begins around 2017. Amazon Web Services was opening new data centers in Northern Virginia at a rapid clip to handle the growing needs of its customers, including the *Central Intelligence Agency* and other branches of the U.S. government.
Having had a TS and dealing with government, my intuition is that there is something more involved here concerning the 3 letter agencies. Generally, things like this are usually settled as a lawsuit.
They have a transcript of a recorded conversation between two parties to the alleged fraud (not including the person in the linked Medium article) who are communicating their concern that this what they're doing is "federal, FBI-type stuff", so they seem to be well aware that they were doing something wrong.
It's baffling that they not only would have recorded this conversation, but then kept it around for the FBI to find and enter into record. Unless, of course, the person who recorded it did so intentionally and offered it to the FBI in exchange for something.
The guy recording was mad because two folks were doing a land flip scam and front-running him and hadn't cut him in.
But they turned out to know about the lease scam that he had going with these two amazon employees. So basically he was trying to catch them out on their flip scam and was trying to record for that.
Full disclosure, Nelson and his wife are apparently claiming al the allegations are false? So it's all allegations despite the insane paper trail.
The unfortunate part, assuming the allegations are shown to be true in any meaningful capacity, is that those that support civil forfeiture might say, "see, this is a case of the forfeiture system working as its suppose to work... depriving criminals of their ill-gotten gains."
Of course, the real argument they're trying to avoid having to make with the forfeiture "hack" is: due process of law is not required for just legal outcomes and may be an impediment to a just legal outcome. Of course that line of thought, and the successful practice of civil forfeiture to such an aim, requires a purity of virtue, morality, and rationality of law enforcement officers and prosecutors that no thoughtful observer would think it achievable. That's the whole reason due process of law and the rights of accused exist: you simply cannot trust any one person or group to find a just outcome on their own... and even then our due process is often not enough to accomplish real justice.
That is kind of the basic ugly fact of the US system. If you want rights, you need to support others that you don't like having those same rights.
There have been several times where they ACLU has stepped in on behalf of the KKK to garuntee their rights to protest/rally. Its ugly, but taking the rights away from one group because you disagree with them is a very slippery slope.
> The unfortunate part, assuming the allegations are shown to be true in any meaningful capacity, is that those that support civil forfeiture might say, "see, this is a case of the forfeiture system working as its suppose to work... depriving criminals of their ill-gotten gains."
Bernie Madoff is their shining example of this, and routinely paraded by the authorities.
I can't even with all the whinging about forfeiture. I read back through the Geekwire coverage and filings after reading the original article. The victim narrative by the defendants in this case has been pretty selective with the facts.
Here are the facts from the filings: the Nelsons got caught laundering more than $2M of the $11M in kickbacks they took. This $2M works its way through accounts and entities controlled by Nelson and Kirschner's lawyers, Kirschner's brother, and Amy Sterner Nelson's father. It then moves into and out of 8 bank accounts owned by the Nelsons, as well as two other smaller accounts owned by the Kirschers and Johnny Lim (who looks like just a conduit to launder $1MM to the Nelsons and Kirschners).
The US government seizes $658K from 9 accounts, each of which received funds laundered through the Nelson scheme. Only one of the accounts had a seized balance that was greater than the amount of kickback money laundered into it (Nelson Citi #7373, $25K seized versus $12K of kickbacks transferred).
Overall, $2.3M of kickback money was transfered into the accounts the government seized. Given the government seized $658K, the Nelsons were able to spend or move elsewhere nearly $1.7M of the kickback money.
From other posts, Amy Sterner Nelson's story was that there was no money. There was money, and the government has the receipts. There was at least $2M of kickback money transfered into their accounts, and $1.7M of that wasn't seized. Almost all of that $2M moves through a company controlled by James Sterner, Amy Sterner Nelson's father. I think I'm most baffled why you would move money around like this and not expect to get caught. I wonder what this all looks like through the IRS lens.
It's never hard to follow the money, but it does take a little time:
> Basic deal was Watson (who ran Northstar) a property developer signed a deal to kick back referral fees to an entity that did literally no work (Villanova Trust) created by a brother of the two amazon employees (Nelson and Kirschner) who were the transaction managers for 9 data center lease deals. The kickback deal was signed after these two Amazon employees met with Watson (the Vendor).
The statement above is but one of many in your post that are very definitive as to what occurred.
No "alleged to" or any other equivocation on the verbs. This is all stated like these are indisputable findings of fact.
There's nothing shameful in pointing this out.
Having a statement buried elsewhere in a largish post doesn't fix the carelessness.
When you get pulled over by a cop and the cop pulls the cash out of your wallet and says "you know I can keep this, right?", that's what we're talking about, not whatever you are droning on about.
But she wasn't charged with anything? I don't understand why the feds have to destroy her business and take all the family funds. Usually it's a tactic to make the children suffer, so the parents suffer more. The feds don't really care at all about who they destroy or who is a thrown under the bus including children. Not their problem.
> But she wasn't charged with anything? I don't understand why the feds have to destroy her business and take all the family funds.
Wasn't the "business" a shell company used to launder money from flip scams, and aren't those "family funds" the millions in ill-gotten gains from those scams?
I love how someone caught in a corruption scandal scamming his employer out of a few millions spins this with an emotional tale led with a GoFundMe link.
I think this is shifting blame, the father could have avoided any harm to his children by not engaging in dozens of multi million dollar felony frauds. Or by simply keeping his assets which are tainted with stolen money totally fire-walled from his wife's. As soon as they intermingled accounts there is no sense of 'which dollar was honest and used to invest in his wife's business', everything is tainted.
Nelson wasn't even working at AWS when the Northstar deal got approved and no evidence was actually submitted in any court against him. This article is about someone who probably has clean hands in all of this but got dragnetted by the FBI and Amazon for being part of the approval process before he left the company.
I thought he was at the dinner where they came up with the kickback deal, and then had withdrawal privilege's on the trust where the funds went according to the complaint. Didn't he and the other TM set up two new corps (I think Nelsons was call AllCore or similar) while they were at Amazon to help get the funds funneled back?
One issue is how long these cases take to resolve. This was a whistleblower blowing the whistle.
Basic deal was Watson (who ran Northstar) a property developer signed a deal to kick back referral fees to an entity that did literally no work (Villanova Trust) created by a brother of the two amazon employees (Nelson and Kirschner) who were the transaction managers for 9 data center lease deals. The kickback deal was signed after these two Amazon employees met with Watson (the Vendor).
Amazon then did $400M in deals with Watson, who then kicked back $5M to the trust in "commissions". Then amazon discovered deleted files indicating the employees were entitled to "shares" in these projects from Watson of something like an additional $16M.
Others in the mix at developer also did some kind of land flip thing. One example was property that they bought for $20M, then sold to Amazon for $116M. In one case there was something like a $20M increase in price on property that was sold to Amazon the day that it was bought?! So they were frontrunning things. Watson was pissed, and wanted a cut, so recorded a meeting with the folks doing the flip scam. But that backfired because the folks doing the flip scam knew about the leasing scam and said, hey, if you don't back off we'll blow lid on your lease scam - claiming "that's FBI". They did end up compromising on kicking back $5M to Watson from the flip scam.
Anyways, all allegations, and thousands of pages so I've no doubt got some parts wrong, but it makes for interesting reading!
My question - it seems to take a long time to get these white color criminal types into jail.
In the linked post, there is a lot of complaining that the FBI messed up the guys career, but man, this court case - why would you hire a guy like this into a position of trust?
Note these allegations are contested. “My only hope in defending myself against its false allegations is that the process will be fair and impartial.” Mr. Nelson said per a WSJ article.