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Brazil’s Odebrecht Continues Corrupting the Judicial Process to Evade Restitution

29 Oct

Norberto Odebrecht was founded in Brazil in 1944, and gradually expanded to become an international civil engineering giant. Then, in 2016, it signed a global leniency agreement in Brazil and pled guilty in the U.S. federal court to systemic bribery committed between 2001-16 and paid billions in criminal fines. In 2006, Odebrecht had institutionalized their bribing operations by running them through a new Division of Structured Operations. During the years investigated, Odebrecht had paid around $788 million in verified bribes to secure more than 100 large-scale projects across 12 countries, including the 2016 Olympic Games projects in Brazil, pipelines, and transit.

A year after Odebrecht pled guilty, in 2017, a civil lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York by claiming to be securities defrauded investor Washington State Investment Board (WSIB) over its $100 million loss in bonds. It faced an obstacle in 2020, when Judge Paul G. Gardephe dismissed a part of WSIB’s initial complaint because WSIB had not provided details on which financial statements were distorted by bribe amounts. In 2021, a second major civil lawsuit that had been brought by investor DoubleLine was obstructed by the granting of an order shielding Odebrecht’s communications from private investigators, seemingly to protect active foreign investigations. Then, in a 2023, amended complaint, WSIB fixed the glitch that previously derailed them by linking $280 million in bribes to specific distorted corporate assets: this finally convinced Judge Gardephe to lift his discovery stay and to allow WSIB to demand corporate records. Then, WSIB attempted to ask for a summary judgement based on the criminal finding of fraud, but Magistrate Judge Barbara Moses rejected this idea and asked them to litigate the case anew civilly. While the court had allowed litigants to begin asking for discovery years earlier, Odebrecht had not been complying with these requests, and in September 2026, it attempted to formally block all discovery by claiming Brazil’s Supreme Court had dismissed their leniency agreement due to prosecutorial misconduct.

In the latest development in WSIB v. Odebrecht S.A., Judge Moses ruled against Odebrecht, arguing Brazilian squabbles cannot be employed to prevent American civil discovery. The court is now deciding if the parties will proceed by Odebrecht actually opening themselves to discovery scrutiny, or if they will begin settlement negotiations.

It has been a decade since Odebrecht confessed and opened their files to Brazilian prosecutors, and yet after a decade of attempts from investors to be compensated they have not been able to begin a case because the “details” of how Odebrecht was defrauding them is hidden in he files Odebrecht is refusing to turn over. Without access to the evidence, the prosecutors cannot prove the thing they know the evidence would logically state, based on what the criminal pleading indicates.

Only now is the U.S. court even beginning to rule on the irrationality of Odebrecht’s objections: Brazilian law cannot bar them from disclosing the facts of their briberies. Their leniency agreement was designed to protect the criminal Brazilian investigators, not the books that prove the corruption of executives, operators or investors of Odebrecht. The change that prompted this sudden renewal of litigation activities is that the Brazilian Operation Carwash has concluded back in 2021 (after 278 convictions and the recovery of $800 million), and these investigators have made public the facts in the accounts recording the briberies, and their depositions about them (released back in 2017). Thus, records are now public, even if Odebrecht continues refusing to surrender these records. The reason for a decade-long stall is partially clarified by the finding of illegal collusion between Chief Judge Sergio Moro and the prosecutors in Operation Carwash in Brazil, which have led to the Brazilian Supreme Court’s annulling of most of this operations convictions and fines due to misconduct. These absurdly stumbling trials are themselves evidence of Odebrecht’s ongoing successes at corrupting the criminal and civil judicial processes. Odebrecht is still an active company, with annual revenues that have dropped to around a billion from a peak of $30 billion pre-scandal. It is the vulture investors who anticipated Odebrecht’s “sudden” or artificially orchestrated legal collapse in 2016 who made a lot of money, and it might be their accounts that Odebrecht has been fighting to protect from implication. They also made a windfall when the Supreme Court refunded Odebrecht’s apparently temporary corruption fines.

This case proves that following-the-money is not possible without hacks when the sued party corrupts the system into blocking the legal opening of their books. And in such cases of billions-worth-in-corruption, there are no good guys. Even the 2019 Intercept uncovering of messages between Carwash prosecutors and Judge Moro showing a coordination of strategies served to reverse the criminal findings, instead of bringing new charges against the exposed judge and prosecutors. Perhaps, anti-corruption investigations are doomed to be corrupted? Who can resist bribes with billions on-offer? Across the decades the bribery and the failed lawsuits have been happening the Workers’ Party has been mostly in charge. Luiz da Silva, who just won a fourth term in October 2026, was the president between 2003-10, followed by Workers’ Party’s Dilma Rousseff (2011-6), before Rousseff was impeached and removed from office. Operation Carwash’s prosecutors had argued that the Workers’ Party was running the pay-to-play ring that Odebrecht was merely a player in. There was a claim that Lula secretly owned a house that Odebrecht and another construction company had spent over $200,000 remodeling, among other “gifts”. These accusations convinced Judge Moro to convict Lula of corruption and money laundering, for which he spent 580 days in federal prison. The 2019 Intercept leak found evidence against Judge Moro and annulled Lula’s conviction. This is why Lula could run for office yet again, and has just won. And Lula has been crushing his opponents through the courts, including convicting Jair Bolsonaro of attempting a coup d’etat for plotting a violent overthrow to overturn his failed 2022 election run. And immediately after Senator Flavio Bolsonaro lost the most recent 2026 election Lula targeted him with multiple criminal investigations over money laundering (via links to a sports-betting corporation), raising money from a financier for a film about his father, and securing campaign financing from U.S. conservative donors. And now Flavio has illegally (despite his passport being seized in Brazil) escaped into the U.S., where he has been granted visas by Trump. There are no good guys in this story, but it is a dramatic and captivating saga.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Brazil’s Odebrecht Continues Corrupting the Judicial Process to Evade Restitution.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 29, 2026).

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No Surprises Invites Doctors to Sue en Masse for Higher Payments

28 Oct

Since the bipartisan No Surprises Act (NSA) went into effect on January 1, 2022, there has been a flood of lawsuits by providers over insurance underpayments. NSA bans surprise out-of-network bills for patients, including by out-of-network providers working at in-network hospitals. It also caps patient costs to standard in-network cost-sharing amounts (copay, coinsurance, and deductibles). And NSA shifts responsibility over disputes from patients to a negotiation between insurance and medical providers working through independent arbitrators. The element cluttering the courts now (with hundreds of thousands of cases filed by providers against insurers) is that NSA does not include a “private right of action” that would allow doctors to sue insurers in federal court over skipped payments. Without this wording, federal courts have been dismissing an avalanche of filed direct federal enforcement suits.

Without this right, insurers have been taking defensive actions such as not paying the fair amount even after the federal Independent Dispute Resolution (IDR) votes against them. Instead of pursuing a losing strategy, providers such as Dr. Jonathan Nissanoff have been finding loopholes such as California’s quantum meruit and Unfair Competition Law (UCL).

Nissanoff v. Blue Shield of California (2026) began when Dr. Nissanoff performed an emergency orthopedic service to a Blue Shield enrollee. After submitting this case to the insurer, Nissanoff determined Blue Shield’s initial payment was “substantially below the reasonable and customary value” for such procedures. Dr. Nissanoff filed an IDR complaint under NSA and it determined on September 17, 2024 in favor of Dr. Nissanoff, ordering Blue Shield to pay an adjustment amount of $56,623.40 for the services. Blue Shield refused to pay this full sum, so this case moved forward in a state court to force Blue Shield to cover to award. Only the equitable and California UCL pars of the lawsuit survived, while the claims under NSA (impossible to enforce decisions of IDR), Knox-Keene Act (does not apply to private parties), common law contracts and ERISA (failure to plead administrative exhaustion) were dismissed.

Doctors never have time to check insurance before an emergency procedure, so testing the law in this case is relevant for many similar cases. And Dr. Nissanoff’s claim specifies that this is not an isolated case, but rather that in his experience Blue Shield has demonstrated a pattern of “lowballing initial payments, forcing IDR, and refusing to honor the results.” It is absurd that the current law forces an arbitration process, but lacks a firm recourse for the winners of this process to enforce what the process decides.   Insurers are succeeding in avoiding following a bipartisan decision for them to bill fairly by unfairly refusing to grant sums judged to be fair. An Act of Congress can made the decisions of IDR legally enforceable with an amendment to NSA by adding wording specifically granting a private right of action or a streamlined confirmation process. Though according to the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, there have been 2.6 million IDR disputes filed by providers in 2025 alone (77% increase). Providers win in around 90% of cases. If all of these wins are enforceable, insurers might have to drastically raise their rates. Are doctors really asking for the fair rate, or are they asking for as much as possible? Since America’s medical industry is already costing Americans more than twice the second-highest paying country (Switzerland), if these costs climb still higher because of a law that tips the scale in favor of doctors pressuring for maximum payouts, the public might end up losing. The rational solution to keeping costs low is for arbitrators to enforce a qualifying payment amount (QPA) or a median per-procedure in each geographic region to keep costs steady. But following these median rates has been prevented by litigations against this barrier.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “No Surprises Invites Doctors to Sue en Masse for Higher Payments.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 28, 2026).

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Squabbles Over “Genuine” Signatures vs Stopping Israel-U.S. War Profiteering

28 Oct

In Alan H. Peres and Piergiorgio Uslenghi v. The Municipal Officers Electoral Board for the Village of Oak Park, et al. (2026), the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed that a public referendum petition substantially complied with the Illinois Election Code, rendering it valid despite an accidental omission of the explicit statutory phrase certifying that the signatures “are genuine.”

The proponents are Caren Van Slyke and Jesse Simon Bauer, who circulated a petition to this village’s residents to put a question before their voters in the upcoming November 3, 2026 ballot: “[s]hould the State of Illinois repeal laws that ban state investment in businesses that boycott the State of Israel?” This petition obtained 3,504 signatures from undisputed registered voters. But then Alan H. Peres and Piergiorgio Uslenghi filed an objection to this petition at the Oak Park Electoral Board to prevent this question from appearing on the ballot by arguing the certification statements on these petition sheets were defective by failing to specify these signatures were “genuine”. The words of the certifying statement is a paraphrase of the standard language, which specifies the person signing is a “qualified elector”, but does note specifically the signatures were not forgeries. The court ruled that this deviation was insubstantial, or that the wording that was included met the intent of the requirement to include this certifying language.

Justice Pucinski delivered the judgement, arguing the statement served the intended purpose of validating the identity of the signers. Denying the rights of the signors on this technicality would have unjustly denied their voting rights. Justice Hyman dissented, arguing the allowance of a substitution of “presence” for “genuineness” changes this legislative mandate, inviting more creative rewordings in the future.

The distance this miswording has gone in the courts almost suggests somebody intentionally inserted this mistake to attempt to disqualify this referendum if it succeeded in finding enough signatures. And the investment in covering court fees by the filers indicates they were overly interested in reversing what so many in their village wanted to vote on. And wasn’t there a bigger problem in the wording of the referendum question itself: why would it be logical to ban investments in the businesses operated in Israel, as opposed to banning investments in its government? Isn’t it directly antisemitic to boycott all Israeli businessmen? Though blocking the businesses of countries with whose leaders American politicians disagree is a standard, as seen in the ongoing blockade of Cuba.

Boycotting countries is typically within the federal jurisdiction. Some city councils or state legislative bills have handled such boycott requests. There has been a unique movement to divest from Israel via local ballots, like the one that passed in Somerville, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island. The latter referendum referred to foreign countries engaged in severe violations of human rights, as opposed to Israel specifically. There have not been any statewide referendums to boycott Israel. States have moved in the opposite direction, with 37 states passing binding anti-BDS laws or executive orders that have penalized or banned contracting with businesses that are publicly boycotting Israel.

The movement to boycott Israel is not entirely strange, as during Apartheid in the 1970-80s dozens of U.S. cities, universities and state legislatures voted to divest public funds or pensions from companies doing business in South Africa. On the federal level, the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007, authorized state and local governments to divest from companies operating in Sudan’s power, mineral or oil sectors. And the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) orchestrates economic embargos or business-blocking for countries on the Department of State’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” blacklist, which includes Cuba, Iran and North Korea. Since the start of the war after the terrorist attack in October 2023, Israel’s economy has been surging (by 130% in the Tel Aviv stock market), despite a drop in its labor force due to the mobilization of reservists and a leveling of tourism and construction (due to fears related to the war). The major economic hit has been the $114 billion in debt Israel’s government has taken on to wage this war. The U.S. has spent around $33 billion on this conflict. Thus, if Americans believe this war can be ended by draining Israel’s military budget, U.S. would logically stop spending money on this war on the U.S. end and would stop giving military aid to Israel. But the U.S. has instigated wars with Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries in the Middle East, so it is not merely aiding Israel but rather is pushing Israel into perpetual conflict. The problem is perpetual warmongering: wars are too profitable for the companies selling the tools of war for them to allow federal blockades. And the U.S. might have to label itself as a terrorist state, if it puts Israel on this list, given their joint operations that have put Israel on international human rights violation lists.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Squabbles Over “Genuine” Signatures vs Stopping Israel-U.S. War Profiteering.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 30, 2026).

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Why Would a Broker Feel Entitled Not to Repay $1.8 Million in Loans to Ex-Employer Merrill Lynch?

28 Oct

In Lahoud v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., United States District Judge Margaret M. Garnett denied petitioner John Lahoud’s motion to vacate a FINRA arbitration award and granted Merrill Lynch’s cross-motion to confirm it. The court upheld the arbitration panel’s order requiring Lahoud to repay $1,181,594.35 in outstanding principal balances on corporate promissory notes, plus daily interest, costs, and $150,000 in attorney’s fees.

John Lahoud had written three loans to himself from Merrill Lynch’s accounts between 2013-7 when he worked there as a broker and advisor. Instead of repaying these loans, as his contract dictated, after leaving the firm in 2021 to begin working for a competitor, he decided to keep the money. He was unpersuaded by a demand letter, forcing Merrill to commence this FINRA arbitration. To defend his right to keep these funds, Lahoud filed counterclaims on December 12, 2022 with the defense of a constructive discharge. He accused Merrill of breach of contract, interference with his pursuit of economic advantage and unfair competition and unjust enrichment, specifically for permitting other advisors to solicit his clients, and of mercilessly alleging he was guilty of mortgage fraud to force him to resign. FINRA ruled for Merrill.

While this case seems to be a simple corporate dispute, the Epstein Files include several unrepaid loans that have been made by brokers who were involved in financial misconduct, including Jeffrey Epstein himself at Bear Stearns. At Epstein’s companies, his attorney Indyke was also given over $7 million in loans as “retention bonuses” that were expected to be forgiven. Similar though lower-valued retention “loans” were given to around ten other employees. ICIC made $290 million in loans “of which all but perhaps $25 million is apparently lost. About $93.5 million… were used to purchase shares of BCCI itself”. While Merrill Lynch is not directly implicated, Epstein met with a Dr. Merrill in 2016, which might have been code for Merrill Lynch. The fact that Lahoud is insisting on keeping loans he is contractually obligated to return suggests he was promised he could keep these funds in exchange for something nefarious, as in the Epstein Files such non-repayments tend to be for items that cannot be legally credited and made to people who are attempting to dodge taxes.

Back in Lahoud’s case, the court found that Lahoud was not forced to depart, but rather resigned after negotiating a high-paying new position, not only for himself but also for his whole team. Lahoud was also contesting the $150,000 for two years in attorney’s fees as excessive, despite his own salary being in the millions. Since mega corporations defending their millions tend to be charged top-rates by their lawyers, it is certainly logical that forcing Merrill to take him to court generated a high legal fee. It would be illogical to levy such charges due to a loan non-repayment onto the loan-issuer.

And why would anybody making hundreds of thousands need a non-nefarious loan for such enormous sums? The final $1.8 million due was only a portion of the millions Lahoud had repaid before departing. Just one of his promissory notes was for $4.2 million. This case raises a lot of questions and suggests a need for a forensic investigation into the accounts of both Lahoud and his team and Merrill Lynch during the years Lahoud took out these loans. The bits of information available in the public filing are insufficient to reach conclusions, but they suggest many malevolent theories.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Why Would a Broker Feel Entitled Not to Repay $1.8 Million in Loans to Ex-Employer Merrill Lynch?” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 28, 2026).

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A First Win for Activists Challenging DOJ’s Right to Investigate Non-Criminals

27 Oct

The Oregon Court of Appeals has reversed a trial court’s dismissal of Farrell-Smith v. Oregon Department of Justice. The plaintiffs are suing the Oregon Department of Justice (ODOJ), the Attorney General, and the Chief Counsel of ODOJ’s Criminal Justice Division over their questionable authority to operate a domestic intelligence unit called the Oregon TITAN Fusion Center: Terrorism Information Threat Analysis Network. This is one of many nationwide intelligence hubs developed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to assess or anticipate threats post-9/11. The plaintiffs allege that TITAN surveils politicians and activists based on their views, instead of on any suspected criminality: and this is outside TITAN’s executive mandate.

Plaintiffs have presented evidence TITAN routinely monitors activists that oppose the Jordan Cove Liquified Natural Gas Pipeline, without a “criminal nexus” for these investigations. TITAN is also improperly colluding with a private PR firm (Teneo) and a pipeline-funded sheriff’s unit to gather information while bypassing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requirements. Privacy is also being violated when TITAN applies software to track on social media those who use the Black Lives Matter hashtag. And plaintiffs object to ODOJ’s secrecy in blocking public scrutiny and media record requests about demonstrations (i.e., Women’s March) by invoking broad “criminal intelligence” exemptions.

The trial court rejected the case partly because it interpreted the lawsuit as a request to shut down TITAN, whereas the Court of Appeals adjusted this aim to this being a challenge to the legality of TITAN’s cited operations. The case is asking: is it legal for a government agency to collect intelligence on citizens despite a lack of a suspicion of criminality? The appellate answer is that ODOJ is bound by the powers Oregon has assigned to it, or investigating: organized crime, public corruption or searching for investments of criminally implicated funds. Investigating outside these boundaries means TITAN is acting without a legal mandate. TITAN attempted to defend its actions by using loosely related laws, such as ORS 181A.250 that is inapplicable because it prohibits the collection of data based on political, religious or social views. The court rejected that obtaining a grant or a letter of acknowledgement from Governor Kitzhaber gave TITAL a special mandate.

There have been several federal lawsuits by civil liberties groups making FOIA requests to expose DHS-supported fusion centers spying on non-criminals. For example, a 2008 FOIA request revealed the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center (MCAC) had investigated anti-death penalty and peace groups; the outcome of litigation was forcing the dismantling of the research files MCAC had gathered. And in 2025, ACLU v. Department of Justice was dismissed after a FOIA request succeeded in proving FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and DHS fusion centers were investigating non-criminals by grouping radical causes with minorities and “domestic terrorism”. This Oregon case is a first state litigation that challenges the legality of such agencies to investigate non-criminals, as opposed to merely seeking FOIA data that this illegal surveillance exists. Legal scholars hope that if this Oregon case continues to see positive outcomes, it might help dismantle the 79 fusion centers across the U.S.

The lack of past accountability over these fusion centers might stem in conservatives’ successful attempts to redefine “communism”, “socialism” and other pro-justice and pro-humanist causes as amoral and thus equivalent to illegal. Mis-programmed voters tend to mis-define “communism” as totalitarianism or a lack of individual rights. They have been taught to assume there is something amoral about supporting equal rights for all, including racial and economic rights. It is in the interests of all humans to support other humans, but this re-programming turns this rational goodness into the opposite. The beneficiaries of this reversal are monopolists and pro-totalitarian rulers who prefer to limit rights: the opposite of the stated objective. Fusion centers are a present Big Brother experiment: it is an extreme form of totalitarian socialism of the Soviet variety. If DOJ’s entities are investigating non-criminals for conservatives’ political gains, they are not spending this time investigating the true criminals. Resources are being wasted to support one of two of America’s parties, while letting criminals continue criming to the detriment of us all.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “A First Win for Activists Challenging DOJ’s Right to Investigate Non-Criminals.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 27, 2026).

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First Female Black Judge in Tulsa OK Reprimanded for Shouting, Favoritism and Dishonesty

27 Oct

A public reprimand was issued by the Oklahoma Supreme Court against Tulsa County District Judge Sharon Holmes in Investigation of Sharon Holmes (2026 OK 67) for cumulative violations of the Code of Judicial Conduct. Previously, the Council on Judicial Complaints had recommended invoking removal proceedings for “oppression in office”, but the Supreme Court found her actions were merely legal errors and abuses of discretion as opposed to grounds for removal.

The Court did agree with the Council’s findings that Holmes had violated several rules of judicial conduct. 1. Ex parte communications: Holmes held unauthorized private conversations with a criminal defendant in a hallway, and spoke privately with jurors for several minutes (refusing to disclose the substance of this conversation). And she read private emails from incarcerated defendants’ families without filing them or notifying the parties. 2. Failure to disqualify: she did not recuse herself from cases involving such ex parte communications, as well as cases brought by attorneys who had previously represented her. 3. Sentencing violations: she disregarded statutory sentencing restrictions by allowing ineligible defendants to plead into a specialty treatment docket (Arise Program) without making mandatory on-the-record findings. 4. Undignified demeanor: she demonstrated a pattern of hostile courtroom behavior, including screaming at an assistant public defender in a hallway (as opposed to during a trial) and left the bench to approach an agitated defendant with her firsts raised in a manner that was taken to mean she was preparing to fight them. 5. Lack of candor: her testimony to the Council contradicted evidence, indicating dishonesty.

The Court rejected the Council’s recommendation for removal because they found “oppression in office” (intent to commit acts that are wrong or beyond judicial authority) had not been proven. Two of the justices offered dissenting opinions, recommending a removal trial (Justice Combes), or a suspension without pay (Justice Rowland).

The Council had begun its investigation in June 2025 when they received a complaint of an ex parte communication, and then received additional complaints as they commenced. In the central violation, in open court, a criminal defendant asked to speak with Holmes about a personal matter. Holmes replied that while she could not privately discuss the case, “she would speak to him privately as long as it was alright with his attorney.” It almost seems as if she was set up to make a mistake because neither attorney’s objected in court to this conversation, but then the Tulsa County DA asked for Holmes’ recusal from this case because of it. Holmes refused to recuse herself because this conversation “did not have anything to do with this case, at all.” In the second case where she spoke with jurors, she did recuse herself eventually “in the interest of efficiency to allow the case to move forward quickly.” The Council argued that these brief private conversations were sufficient for her impartiality to be reasonably questioned.

Seemingly, it was certainly unbecoming for her to have shouted at an assistant public defender, but witnesses proved their own hostility when they described her as being “very hostile and very nasty”. This seems to be a case of coworkers and subordinates refusing to accept the authority of a female judge. Accusing her of yelling and being “nasty” seem to be insults designed to minimize her power. It is very difficult for women today to find a “balance” between been powerfully intimidating (as male bosses are to gain leadership positions) and remaining femininely polite while bossing people around.

And observers might have assumed Holmes was obtaining some benefit to bending the rules to send convicts to the Arise Program because it echoes the Kids for Cash scandal from a few years ago that took down for kickbacks (from a for-profit juvenile detention facility) Pennsylvania judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan.

In contrast, Holmes seems to have been speaking with parties and referring unqualified convicts to a rehabilitation program out of a desire to seem especially helpful. Holmes was first elected to this position back in 2014 as the first Black woman elected as a district judge in Tulsa County. She was an Assistant District Attorney for Tulsa County (2000-3). She won the 2026 reelection by default and is scheduled to remain in her judgeship through at least 2030. Holmes’ approach to mixing bombastic yelling with yielding on talking about personal matters, and being especially kind to some defendants in sentencing has been the reason she had acquired and retained a job no other Black woman had previously climbed into. When judges are elected, they must placate the defendants they see in court to convince the public she represents the interests of the populace poor. Ideally, it would be possible to stop judges from displaying favoritism either because they are being corruptly influenced in a given case or because their reelection depends on them placating some organized criminal group sponsoring their runs. An auditor is unlikely to have witnesses of bribery confessing to having bribed a judge to gain favor. So, they have to rely on appearances of impropriety, of which there were a few in this case. And the problem was not merely that she chatted with jurors, but that she refused to disclose the content of this conversation, which suggested it included inappropriate content she did not want to out. Given these uncertainties and borderline questions, it is a good sign that the Council investigated these allegations, and probably also a good sign that the Court ruled they were not serious enough for the removal of the first female Black judge in this district.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “First Female Black Judge in Tulsa OK Reprimanded for Shouting, Favoritism and Dishonesty.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 27, 2026).

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Remunerating Doctors to Buy Blood Clot Treating Devices: Illegal?

27 Oct

On September 22, 2026, U.S. District Judge Gregory H. Woods dismissed a class-action securities fraud case: Michiana Area Electrical Workers’ Pension Fund v. Inari Medical Inc., et al. (2026). The investors had failed to prove with sufficient specificity that the company had engaged in an illegal doctor-kickback scheme or deliberately misled shareholders to inflate its stock price.

The evidence confirmed that Inari was providing up to $50,000 in corporate dinners, junkets a vacation destinations and NASCAR race tickets in exchange for doctors ordering Inari’s products. But such spending was found to be standard in this industry (according to the AdvaMed Code of Ethics on Interactions with Healthcare Professionals), as opposed to amounting to illegal kickbacks. The filers attempted to argue AdvaMed does specify a “per individual limit of $3,000 for gifts and promotional materials.” While one salesperson spent $50,000 on physician dinners over a three-month period, and another $5,000, each physician was not receiving over $3,000.

Inari is a manufacturer of technologies that treat and remove blood clots. The case was filed against Inari’s three former administrators: CEO, COO and CFO. They had operated a successful doctor-buttering scheme between 2021-4, before, on February 28, 2024, revealing to investors that they had received a civil investigative demand from the Department of Justice (DOJ), which was investigating if Inari’s practices were violating the Anti-Kickback Statute and the False Claims Act. This revelation led to a single-day 21% drop in Inari’s stock price, at a loss of $700 million in market capitalization.

Since this meant three invested pension funds had lost a lot of money, in May to June 2024, they filed a joint complaint over securities fraud and racketeering. One of the pension funds’ objections was that the administrators had collected $155.5 million in profits during the three years when the DOJ probe was active, but was not publicly disclosed by Inari.

The pension funds lost partly because DOJ’s probe failed to uncover evidence the gifts to physicians were illegal, and this meant the civil lawsuit lacked evidence underlying crimes had occurred. The administrators were allowed to delay disclosure until the date when they revealed it: they did not break the law by their delay. And they were acting in the best interests of shareholders by not disclosing earlier, since the stock would have plummeted earlier, and too soon before the DOJ had to report they had not found any prosecutable law-breaking. The filers might have assumed DOJ records would have what apparently failed to surface in discovery: they had no specific names of a doctor, date, or venue where a provably illegal transaction had taken place. All records proved was that Inari had spent a lot of money on sales and marketing.

The funds might have attached erroneous assumptions by the finding in the Purdue Pharma fraud case. It seems on the surface that Inari spending 68% of its revenue on sales and administration to cultivate customers was as illegal as what Purdue was doing. But in Purdue, the feds were able to prove systemic quid pro quo financial bribery in paying fraudulent “speaker fees” and consulting retainers well over the $3,000 limit to serve as pushers of prescriptions that they were fraudulently selling as safe when they were deadly addictive. There was nothing proven to be fraudulent with Inari’s core devices. Most small businesses wish it was illegal for giant corporations to spend such enormous sums on convincing people to buy their products. But his is how capitalism works: not the best products but the most effective sales campaigns win market share. The legality of Inari’s actions should have been apparent through brisk disclosures without a years-long DOJ audit. If DOJ had dropped their case upon failing to find wrongdoing, investors would not have lost millions in a panic sell-off. The public is too trusting in government actions: when the government declares it is auditing somebody, the public assumes the entity is guilty before the test results come in.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Remunerating Doctors to Buy Blood Clot Treating Devices: Illegal?” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 27, 2026).

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How a “Fantastical” Claim from a “Presidential Candidate” Was Stuck in Pre-Trial for 7 Years Before Dismissal

26 Oct

The common problem in American courts is for cases to be instantly dismissed for a lack of merit due to slight errors made by lawyers, despite their central claims being of significance to the public. The Raysor v. Safi civil lawsuit displays a less common problem: how cases truly without merit clutter the courts’ dockets and thus force judges to reject potentially more weighty disputes.

Events began in November 2017, when officer Troy Ann Safi responded to a domestic dispute in Brooklyn, New York. Ftema Raysor was beating her boyfriend with a hairbrush and biting his ear. Kings County District Attorney dropped criminal charges against Raysor during the initial arraignment process.

Two years later, in November 2019, Raysor filed a federal civil rights complaint pro se in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. A year still later, in December 2020, she amended her case by asking for $100 million in damages, and narrowing her claims from many more to two: false arrest and excessive force by Officer Safi. These initial complaints were a standard civil rights complaint hat accused NYPD of false arrest, racial bias and physical assault. Across the following years, Raysor failed to provide discovery on the federal case, while also pursuing a state case.

Finally, on November 12, 2025, the parties submitted a draft joint pretrial order. Then, at the Pretrial on December 29, 2025, U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati warned Raysor that the witness list she had submitted for this meeting was deficient because she had subpoenaed irrelevant high-profile figures: Donald Trump, a former First Lady, Barack Obama, NYC Mayor Eric Adams, Reverend Al Sharpton and U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin. At the January 20, 2026 meeting, Raysor’s filing remained noncompliant. So, on February 18, the judge refused to schedule a trial date until Raysor amended her witness list, and the case was referred to court mediation. On June 11, the parties held a video mediation settlement conference before a federal magistrate judge, but failed to reach an agreement. The judge issued another pretrial order on June 18 for Raysor to fix her filing, which she again refused at a July 8 hearing. Finally, on July 21, the city filed a motion to dismiss.

But the case was not immediately dismissed, and instead escalated on August 12-14 when Raysor submitted what the court termed “fantastical” filings that claimed her life was in danger.  In this submission, Raysor explained why she was still insisting on subpoenaing high-profile individuals by stating: “I am running for President of United States of America and was when this event took place my witness are relevant.” She insisted she was refusing “to sit back and let the Law Department kill me.” She refused to cite “cases” because “this is a matter of life or death.” In parallel with these increasingly alarming to the defendants claims, she also set up a protest tent and began living outside the federal courthouse, and began posting photographs and alleged threats against the defense lawyers on YouTube and Instagram. She apparently did indeed register to run as an independent for president in the 2028 election: and this was partly what she was documenting on her social media.

Only after this breakdown—and not immediately afterwards but two weeks later—did Judge Gujarati finally dismiss this lawsuit with prejudice (i.e., without a right to appeal). Did the slowness of the American judicial system drive this filer mad, or did it drive her to the rational solution that instead of subpoenaing presidents she had to run for president to finally obtain some justice? Was she delusional at any point, or is this a woman who succeeded in manipulating judges to keep her case on their docket for a decade? Why was she given such extraordinary number of chances to amend her complaint? Plenty of pro se and public-defender litigants have rational claims rejected on technicalities. This case many lessons to teach us all. But these lessons are too mysterious for a law class.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “How a ‘Fantastical’ Claim from a ‘Presidential Candidate’ Was Stuck in Pre-Trial for 7 Years Before Dismissal.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 26, 2026).

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Voter vs Ohio County Board Choosing Primary Substitute in a Closed Meeting

26 Oct

Can a county Board of Elections choose a substitute candidate in a closed meeting? This was the central question in The State ex rel. Koebel v. Erie County Board of Elections et al debated in the Ohio Supreme Court. It was filed by a voter who demanded the removal of a Republican replacement candidate from the shortly forthcoming November 2026 general election ballot. While the court agreed this voter’s claims had legal standing, they objected that his 25-day delay in filing this lawsuit meant that they were now beyond the point when ballots could be changed without extremely wasteful costs. Overseas and military ballots had already been mailed starting on September 18. And rewriting and reprinting 36,450 physical ballots was deemed to be too costly.

Events began on August 4, when D.J. Swearingen won the Republican primary but then withdrew from the general election. On August 10, a Republican Party district committee met behind closed doors and chose Caleb Stidham as their replacement nominee. The filer of this lawsuit is a regular voter, Carl Koebel, who tried to gain entry to this meeting, but was denied entry. Koebel has argued that the closure of this meeting to the public meant this committee took upon themselves to perform an illegal (by Ohio’s Open Meetings Act) sovereign governmental function. Then, on August 20, the Erie County Board of Elections reached a 2-2 tie to certify Stidham that had to be broken by Secretary of State Frank LaRose in favor of Stidham’s certification. Koebel’s petition for removal was filed on September 14.

The outcome of Koebel’s filing was that the court reaffirmed the Ohio precedent that any voter has a beneficial interest to sue an election board to force their performance of statutory duties. However, Koebel’s delay invalidated the filing, meaning the court did not have to decide on if the nomination violated the Open Meetings rule. A minority of judges—Justice Brunner and Chief Justice Kennedy—had wanted to vote on the merits despite the tardiness.

According to Ohio’s procedural rules, when a nominee withdraws, the replacement is made by a district committee made up of county party leaders. Political parties are private organizations that can hold closed meetings to choose a replacement candidate. An exception has developed in Ohio after Jones v. Geauga County Republican Party Central Committee (2017) that decided that whenever a private party meets to fill a public government vacancy it is performing a “sovereign governmental function”, and this falls under the Open Meetings Act. The 2017 case had addressed the appointment of vacancies such as county commissioner or sheriff, whereas this latest case is about appointing a county party nominee. Thus, this could have been an interesting case for the court to address if it would not have been wasteful to engage in debate at the cost of complicating and spiking the cost of an ongoing election.

Though the more interesting question nobody has asked is: why are parties private? Why are a few unelected people gathering in closed rooms to decide who the public is allowed to vote on? Though America is more democratic than other countries in some regards. Elsewhere, political parties are also private, and they privately select their candidates, whereas in the U.S. the public votes in primary elections to instruct these private institutions who they should forward as their candidate. Though even if slightly more democratic, the private party system invites antidemocratic corruptions. The voters should see some list of positions of all candidates on issues they care about and click to pick how they side on the issues to choose a candidate. Or better yet, true democracy would mean voters logging into a national voting system and voting separately on each item a representative would otherwise vote over on their behalf. Directly choosing to go to war or not, or what government funds should be spent on would override many of the problems we face when representatives’ votes can be bought by interested corporations, foreign entities, or other actors.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Voter vs Ohio County Board Choosing Primary Substitute in a Closed Meeting.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 26, 2026).

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Federal RICO Oversight of Teamsters Set to End

26 Oct

The latest decision in U.S.A. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, et al., U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska formally transitions the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) away from the preceding independent, court-ordered oversight and with a plan to return disciplinary control back to the union. Federal oversight commenced with a RICO lawsuit against IBT that established a consent decree in 1989. These restrictions began to be loosened in 2015 when the government seized direct involvement and put in place an outside oversight system. This 2026 order designs a plan to end oversight, claiming IBT is now free of mob corruption by having built a lasting democratically voting organization.

IBT has around 1.3 million active members across US and Canada, mostly in the delivery (UPS), transport (school buses), warehousing (Costco), civil service, airlines, railroads and food processing (Sysco) sectors.

There are now anti-mob injunctions, wherein IBT members must agree to avoid associating with a long list of barred individuals, such as La Cosa Nostra. The plan specifies that the role of the external Independent Investigations Officer (IIO) will be terminated on December 31, 2026, when their functions will transfer to IBT’s internal Office of Compliance Standards and Investigations (OCSI). Though federal judge Barbara S. Jones has been appointed to one more final three-year term as the Independent Review Officer (IRO) to oversee if the union is continuing to obey by anti-corruption mandates. And even after this three-year transition, IBT will continue to be overseen by an outside attorney with the title Independent Compliance Professional (ICP), who will sit on IBT’s Audit Committee.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has had an interventionalist strategy against unions since the 80s. Aside for IBT, four other unions have been the subjects of federal lawsuits that have led to consent decreases for monitoring or government takeovers: International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and United Slate, Tile and Composition Roofers. Most of these oversight programs are coming to an end. In related litigation over IBT, there has been recent dissolution in Chicago, after 40 years of oversight, of Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. These attacks on the unions contributed to lowering the overall union membership rates in the US from around 18% in 1985 to 10% in 2025 (CEPR). Though a similar trend is seen internationally, as OECD reports developed nations’ union rates have dropped from 30% in 1985 to 15% in 2023. America is more sharply falling behind on collective bargaining coverage, as workers covered by collective agreements have fallen from 47% (1985) to 33.6% (2024), but in the US this number is down to 11.3%. There have been some similar to the US anti-corruption lawsuits elsewhere that have also installed government-overseers in unions, as with Australia’s compulsory state administration over its construction union CFMEU, and Canada’s trusteeship over its construction unions.

Union membership fees have increased in part to support the millions the federal government has been charging unions for their oversight. Though beyond these RICO litigations that have framed unions as corrupt, there have also been decisions such as Janus v. AFSCME at the Supreme Court that struck down mandatory agency fees for public employees that instantly halved memberships in public-sector unions.

There have been a few other non-governmental entities that have faced similar RICO scrutiny. In 2015, the football FIFA association was indicted by DOJ over accepting over $150 million in bribes to decide who would host its future championship. DOJ then placed its own monitor to oversee its operations to avoid similar corruption in the future. And DOJ filed RICO charges against SAC Capital Advisors ($14 billion in assets), thus forcing it to restructure and pay for a court-appointed compliance monitor in addition to paying $1.8 billion settlement. Back during Trump’s one failed presidential run, IBT’s General President Sean M. O’Brien made the then strange step of being the first Teamsters president ever to address the Republican National Convention (RNC). While O’Brien did not endorse Trump and focused his speech on corporate greed, by breaking the union’s prior exclusive relationship with the Democratic party (as by hosting events with Trump at Mar-a-Lago) O’Brien ingratiated himself to Trump’s administration sufficiently for the current continuation of the shift to liberate IBT from oversight.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Federal RICO Oversight of Teamsters Set to End.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 26, 2026).

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Conviction of Podcaster for Threatening Officials’ Demise Overturned

26 Oct

In a September 15, 2026 decision in State v. Ford, the Court of Appeals of Ohio, Sixth Appellate District reversed a previous conviction of a podcaster, Ashli Ford, over her hyperbolic anti-officials statements.

Three years earlier, in 2023, Ford was arraigned on falsification charges for publishing a Facebook post aimed at four Norwalk city officials—the Mayor, Law Director, Police Chief and Safety Service Director. She claimed she had these officials “on” their “knees”, adding: “I will escort you to your demise in a manner more akin to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King Jr.” Though the rest of the post stated she hoped to “crumble the reputation” of justice-blockers by pursuing them in the “court of public opinion”. She accused them of being guilty of municipal corruption, sex scandals and fiscal mismanagement. Initially, the court agreed with the officials that the reference to the “manner” of “demise” of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King suggested a threat of an assassination, finding her guilty of four felony counts of intimidation, punished with a probation sentence.

The appellate court overruled this previous decision by finding that the broader context threatened reputational versus physical harm, and thus could not be interpreted as a harm-threatening intimidation. One element of this context was that she had threatened to run for mayor herself, which contradicted any plans to assassinate her opponents. The court decided that under the First Amendment, a listener’s subjective fear alone is legally insufficient to transform political speech into a “true threat”. Ford had no history of physical violence, and previously merely threatened to sue these officials into bankruptcy: these were examples of mere political hyperbole protected by the law.

There have been many similar cases that have similarly been decided in favor of the speaker, unless the language used includes explicit, unconditional promise of physical violence. The precent for this direction in decisions has been Watts v. United States (1969), when during an anti-war rally, an 18-year-old stated: “If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sight is L.B.J.” He was initially convicted before the Supreme Court reversed it, establishing the right to “crude, offensive political opposition” as a protected hyperbole, and not a “true threat”. Though an Alabama woman was federally indicted for posting on Facebook a direct threat of violence against Trump: “i’ll put a bullet through him if he dares” visit their local football stadium. While there have been a few exceptions, the scales have shifted further in the direction of free-speech-guarantee in Counterman v. Colorado (2023) that decided the prosecutors not only needed to prove a “reasonable listener’s” feeling threatened, but also the speaker’s subjective mindset, or that they acted recklessly while consciously intending to express physical violence. The reason for this shift towards free-speech must be the widespread use of semi-threats, or hyperbolic aggressive language across social media. If each threatening message was prosecutable, the courts would have a lot of added cases on their dockets. It is easy to sympathize with both sides of many borderline cases. When modern politicians assassinate fishermen by blowing up their boats without due process, it is very easy for emotions to flare and for a speaker to respond with equally violent rhetoric without intending to cause any harm. On the other hand, a politician or a reporter who faces veiled threats of violence is likely tempted to turn these over to the police to protect themselves in case the speaker is issuing a warning of planning to do them physical harm.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Conviction of Podcaster for Threatening Officials’ Demise Overturned.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 26, 2026).

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Ohio Judges Confirm the Burden to Prove Righteousness Is with the Police in Excessive Force Allegations

25 Oct

Do police officers have a special right to assault suspects? This strange question has been under debate in Ohio courts. Historically, the prosecution has harried the absolute burden of proof over every element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, while the defendant had to prove affirmative defense by a preponderance of the evidence. But then in 2019, the Ohio General Assembly amended its rules to state that if a defendant raises self-defense, defense of another, or defense of a residence, the burden shifts to the state to disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt. This legislation failed to mention “reasonable use of force by a police officer”, leaving an opening for the ongoing dispute. Back in 1989, Graham v. Connor had established that a police officer’s violence was legally justified if it met standards of “objective reasonableness”. Then in 2024, State v. Graham argued that the State of Ohio bore the burden of proof to show an officer’s use of force was unreasonable. This decision was flipped in March and reaffirmed more formally in September 2026 in State v. McInnes, where the panel decided the police officer bore the burden of proof use of force was reasonable.

Officer Ian W. McInnes was accused of excessive force in four incidents that took place between 2020-2. He had: 1. kicked one man in the face while he was subdued by a taser, 2. kicked a handcuffed 17-year-old in the groin while handcuffed, 3. kicked a complaint, kneeling mentally ill man in the back, and 4. struck a fleeing suspect with his police cruiser. The jury convicted McInnes on the first three charges on October 18, 2024, but acquitted him on the last. He was sentenced to a 30-months prison sentence in 2025. Then, by citing State v. Graham, McInnes’ lawyer appealed his conviction arguing the burden of proof should have been with the prosecutors. If they had won this appeal, anybody accusing police of excessive force would have to go to extraordinary length to insist police surrender body cameras of an assault, or to gather witness testimony to support their position that they had indeed been beaten up when they were complying with a police officer.

Given the repeat violations McInnes was guilty of, this was a good case to test the irrationality of the opposing position. A victim of police brutality might have a concussion, and is likely to be incarcerated after this interaction, so place the burden of proof they have been violated on them or on their likely public attorney would have unjustly further shifted power towards violence-prone officers.

McInnes claims he had “slipped” when hitting a tasered man, made a tactical miscalculation when kicking a surrendering man, or had made contact with the upper thigh instead of the groin of the third seem to have been rebuttals one issues when they anticipate they will not be reprimanded no matter how ridiculous their excuses are.

The initial case was a public corruption and civil rights indictment that had been filed against 13 East Cleveland police officers, whose trials and appeals were later severed. 7 of the officers either entered guilty pleas or became cooperating witnesses, 3 officers had cases dismissed or acquitted, and three officers (including McInnes) proceeded to full jury trials and were convicted to between 1 and 4 years in prison. While the other two convicted cops also filed appeals, only McInnes’ case was selected for the top-level en banc full-court review. With bodycams as the norm across all major precincts, officers should be informed during retraining that they cannot hit-a-man-when-he-is-down as a legal fact. It is important for jurisdictions to explain elements such as who has to prove misbehavior, and for these decisions to be plainly explained to officers, who might otherwise assume they are the Law.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Ohio Judges Confirm the Burden to Prove Righteousness Is with the Police in Excessive Force Allegations.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 25, 2026).

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Attempt to “Solve” LA Homelessness by Blocking Federal Funding

25 Oct

In LAHSA v. Donald Trump, et al, Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) and the Los Angeles Continuum of Care (LA CoC) filed a lawsuit against the federal government, naming President Donald J. Trump and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as defendants. This suit is in response to the June 11, 2026 abrupt order from HUD that had suspended LAHSA’s mandated role as the collaborative applicant that had been managing the region’s federal homelessness grant applications. HUD explained this defunding by pointing to a two-decade history of “obvious fraud”, gross financial mismanagement, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and a severe failure to pay local shelter providers $69 million (according to the overdue balance specified in LA County Auditor-Controller’s review in 2026). The latter has meant that many shelters were already on the brink of bankruptcy before HUD blocked LAHSA’s funds.

The recent appeal is primarily objecting that the defunding occurred after LAHSA had already been funded by HUD for the 2024-6 period. The sudden withdrawal means the Los Angeles region anticipated receiving $239 million federal funding that will no longer be accessible, leading to a looming crisis among LA shelters. The first filing was successful in convincing the California U.S. District Court to issue a preliminary injunction o force HUD to reinstate LAHSA’s role and to disburse the promised $239 million. However, the latest September 2026 ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the motion to remove LAHSA (because it was too abrupt, given that HUD knew about corruption in LAHSA across the past decades), but upheld HUD’s right to block paying the $239 million (because HUD had invited shelters to apply directly with them, instead of using LAHSA as a corrupted gatekeeper). Though the latter excuse is problematic because HUD has admitted it had not received any successful direct applications through its special portal from shelters that now cannot apply through LAHSA: these small entities have not hired any grant writers after decades of allowing LAHSA to handle this work for them.

Back in the 2007 HUD audit, regulators found that LAHSA failed to conduct onsite fiscal monitoring of project sponsors, lacked required documentation, paid for ineligible expenses, and had poor cash management controls. Then in the 2022 HUD audit, it found that LAHSA had allowed $3.5 million in Continuum of Care (CoC) grant awards expire unused, missed performance deadlines, and lacked documentation for over $870,000 in internal payroll and rent costs. Fraud allegations against LAHSA accuse it of over-requesting funding from HUD and inappropriately shifting cash balances between different grants to mask deficits. And a 2026 review found that LAHSA had undisclosed conflicts of interest in direct personal ties between LAHSA’s CEO and awardees.

While LAHSA is a notoriously corrupt example, HUD has filed similar funding blocks against many other agencies and states that have no such records of corruption. In response, the attorneys general of states including Washington, New York California and Rhode Island have successfully sued HUD to block their attempts to rapidly change funding rules. These successful lawsuits have explained that HUD has attempted to decrease funding by 90% while implementing pre-conditions on homelessness aid (i.e., mandatory job training or drug treatments). Federal judges have blocked these rule-changes nationwide.

There have been a few failed attempts to stop corruption at LAHSA, such as the LA City Council’s 2023 issue of restrictions when it learned LAHSA was not tracking when homeless people left hotel housing, and thus was receiving public funds for empty hotel rooms. And in 2025, the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to defund LAHSA starting on July 1, 2026 because it was routinely late in paying shelters (the source of the $69 million figure), which had caused 284 layoffs. HUD’s attempts to suddenly withdraw funding has been met with expected blocks by courts because they threaten to leave thousands of homeless people stranded. It seems as if HUD’s organizers are deliberately attempting to prove corruption investigations or funding withdrawals from mismanaging entities is impossible by applying a maximally irrational approach in their ironic attempt. The LA homelessness funding system is indeed in need of an overhaul as the homeless are being blocked access to resources that are being eaten up by corrupt middlemen. But switching middlemen by instead forcing the homeless or the minor homelessness agencies to apply directly through a far more inefficient and likely more corrupt federal portal is obviously the wrong approach. There must be some way to disburse assistance systematically. There should be buildings that just provide housing to those who can meet minimum requirements to prove they need it. Homelessness is solved by providing homes, not by wasting most of the funding for this problem on self-dealing administrators.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Attempt to ‘Solve’ LA Homelessness by Blocking Federal Funding.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 25, 2026).

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Juvenile Life-Without-Parole Conviction So Egregious It Has Not Been Overturned

25 Oct

Back in 2012, Miller v. Alabama outlawed mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders. Then, in 2016, Montgomery v. Louisiana found that this rule had to be retroactively applied to past cases. This invited relitigating of past life-without-parole cases. Over 1,200 applicants of the near 3,000 appeals have successfully reversed life sentences and have been released from prison. The new minimum sentences are capped at between 25-40 years. Only around 4.1% of appears have resulted in a judge reissuing the life-sentence under the “irreparably corrupt” offender standard. This latter category includes Jason Michael Pilcher, who has been denied a reversal and has failed a new appeal on September 23, 2026 in State v. Pilcher at the Court of Appeal of Louisiana, Third Circuit.

In 1993, Pilcher was 15 when he and a companion runaway stole a car, and burglarized guns before driving this stolen car into a ditch, and breaking into the rural home of Mrs. Phyllis Albritton, who let them in to use her phone, and gave them ice water. While partaking of this hospitality, Pilcher pulled out his stolen .38 caliber revolver and her killed her instantly by shooting her in the head. Pilcher also shot to death her 11-year-old son Jusin and tried to shoot her 13-year-old daughter. In 1994, Pilcher was convicted in an 11-to-1 non-unanimous jury vote to mandatory lime imprisonment without parole for two counts of second-degree murder.

Pilcher failed to convince the court at a 2025 resentencing hearing to lower his sentence because his 30-year prison record proved he remained “irreparably corrupt” and thus a continuing danger to society. Expert testimony from Dr. Simoneaux had explained that the prison record indicated Pilcher had no taken classes (that might have helped by providing proof of his attempts at rehabilitation) in prison since 2016. Back in 2017, Dr. Simoneaux had concluded Pilcher still had a “clinically elevated profile”, meaning he was unusually “resentful, angry, and distrustful” for an adult. Anger and paranoia are a combination for violence.

Pilcher’s appeal had focused on accusing his family of providing a difficult childhood. For example, Pilcher’s mother, Janet Harmon, testified that she drank during the pregnancy, though she could not recall if it had been “whiskey” or “Crown Royal”. Pilcher was diagnosed with ADHD in elementary school and was prescribed Ritalin. Before this, his father had begun disciplining Pilcher by spanking him with his “hand on the butt”. There were several other problems, and during his first trail, neurologist Dr. Pinkus concluded he had a “congenital malformations of the brain and right temporal lobe with learning disorder, poor coordination, and lack of impulse control.”

While this is a sympathetic list of problems Pilcher has had to overcome, the fact that he remains a danger to society is proven by the over a hundred disciplinary conduct infractions Dr. Simoneaux reported Pilcher had been cited for while he has been in prison: he is still displaying signs of a dangerous antisocial personality disorder. If Pilcher had been released despite these continuing violent incidents, he would probably have been back in prison by now on new violent charges. This case seems to prove judges have been able to discern which of the life-without-parole appeals have been filed by those who had not developed psychological resilience or rationality since their juvenile actions. Yes, it is at times unfair to continue to penalize an adult for the actions of their undeveloped youth, but not when they keep committing similar actions now that they are an adult.

***

There was a similar recent appeal in Louisiana in State v. Craig that initially ruled that Dale Dwayne Craig was eligible for parole before the latest September 10, 2026 ruling reversed this decision, reinstating his original parole ineligibility. In 1992, Craig and three accomplices kidnapped out of a Louisiana State University parking lot a freshman Kipp Gullett, torturing and then murdering him. Craig was initially sentenced to death in 1994, then this was commuted to life in 2005, and a sentencing review in 2023 temporarily made him eligible for parole before the latest appeal pointed out that Craig had attempted two previous violent escapes: threatening to kill a guard with a shank during his 1993 trial, and then cutting his window bars and climbing over security fences from death row in 1999. A three-judge panel heard the 2026 appeal, with two of them for the reversal (led by Judge Stromberg) and one dissenting (Judge Fields), found he had a permanent disregard for the law, categorizing him among the state’s “worst offenders” that mandated a permanent containment. Louisiana is one of two states where life without parole is an automatic sentence for adult second-degree murder. Thus, letting either Pilcher or Craig go free after even a prolonged sentence—just because of their age during the crime—would be unfair to adults that do not have a chance to argue about their difficult youth or other mitigating circumstances.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Juvenile Life-Without-Parole Conviction So Egregious It Has Not Been Overturned.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 25, 2026).

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Music Professor Fired Over Alleging University Leadership Was Misappropriating Funds

25 Oct

On September 11, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana immediately rejected an appeal filed over the dismissed case Rushing v. Yeargain (2025). Steven J. Rushing was a tenured professor at Southeastern Louisiana University (SLU) when he alleged the university’s leadership, in 2018, abruptly informed their faculty and staff that external operational compensation (for “additional work activities outside of their responsibilities at the university”) that had been promised had been cancelled due to a “budgetary crisis”. Rushing countered SLU’s claims by conducting his own forensic account that reached the conflicting conclusion the university had manipulated its balance sheets to hide institutional theft as part of its systemic corporate fraud and fiscal malfeasance led by SLU’s President John Crain and his internal auditor.

Rushing alleged that after he submitted his report, he was gagged from raising these concerns to the Faculty Senate Executive Council. And as he continued attempting to appeal to make a public statement about misappropriations the university terminated his employment, despite his tenured status. They cloaked this retaliatory dismissal as being aimed at decorum enforcement, and restructuring to meet the budgetary crisis. He first received a notice of intended termination on January 3, 2019, after first voicing concerns that September 2018.

SLU’s reasons for the termination included his refusal to “complete a workplace fitness evaluation”: this is irrelevant and petty. It also accuses him of asking students to support his claims at the Faculty Senate Meeting: this is in violation of students’ and his own speech rights (as Rushing’s initial claim alleged). SLU also nitpicks by finding faults in innocuous details, such as labeling Rushing’s email as “threatening behavior” when it merely stated: “I am afraid for you to meet with me”. And it penalizes him for “being behind schedule for Music 438”, when this tardiness might have resulted in needing to explain concepts more closely, or due to being distracted by being under fire by the administration. As Rushing’s filing explained these were not suitable reasons for the university to have proven “a breach of contract”. Such nitpicking and fabricated accusations are common in academia. Administrators have been systematically draining funds into their own coffers while shrinking faculty pay and finding any excuses to terminate tenured faculty to instead hire adjuncts at ever-decreasing salaries. The shrinking of the percentage of faculty in America who are tenured has not been an accidental shift, but rather a deliberate campaign to shift power and money in academia from the researchers who students attend to learn from to the administrators raising their tuitions.

Instead of winning on the facts, SLU won on minor abnormalities in the filings, such as that the university had “sovereign immunity”, the plaintiff’s inability to prove the Board violated specific “rules”, and Rushing had failed to name the Board (the entity that decided on his firing) in his lawsuit. The American legal system is thus running on gotchya: defending lawyers of corporations and judges claim that jurisdictional or filing mistakes made at the first filing are sufficient to dismiss a case, and that a litigant cannot refile the same case with these issues fixed because a dismissal has already been issued. Instead of logically fixing glitches and then judging a case on its merits, highly paid lawyers win by finding reasons the judge can ignore allegations by dismissing instead merely for misfiling. This single case might seem inconsequential, as it is unclear why the public should care about a professor’s external funding. But when thousands of similar cases never go to court, or are similarly quashed, the public suffers by the best professors being pressured out, as tuition goes up and money is misappropriated without even self-auditing. After this professor was fired, surely no other professors attempted to similarly complain of misappropriation at the next Senate meeting. This appeal failed without the judge asking for “oral argument”, or even a “reply” to be filed by the defendants. The mistake the appeal hoped to correct was that the initial judgement nitpicked on procedure, which the filer had now corrected. But because the filer had not found new evidence, nor could prove the initial judgement was nitpicking illegally, they lost yet again. This nitpicking needs to be stopped, and rationality should prevail for America’s legal system to once again represent the interests of the people over whoever can pay for a lawyer who can find a typo sufficient to refrain from even hearing arguments that allege corruption and fraud.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Music Professor Fired Over Alleging University Leadership Was Misappropriating Funds.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 25, 2026).

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Podcast Episode: Fraud, Corruption, And Corporate Power

25 Oct

Pip: Anaphora Literary Press has been covering the week's legal docket, and if you enjoy stories where the house always wins and the house is on fire, you are in the right place.

Mara: We're moving through four territories today: crypto fraud and who escapes it, law enforcement corruption from the inside, corporate SLAPP suits targeting plaintiff lawyers, and oligarch wealth meeting Caribbean politics. Let's start with the crypto cases and who ends up holding the bag.

Crypto Fraud and Who Escapes It

Pip: The core tension here is not just whether a particular token was fraudulent — it's why some crypto founders go to prison while others collect pardons.

Mara: The Bitcoin Latinum case puts that contrast in sharp relief. Founder Donald Basile convinced investor Arshad Assofi to put in fifteen million dollars by claiming the coin was "backed by an asset trust and insured for up to $1 billion" and endorsed by the producers of Star Trek — a claim Paramount denied.

Pip: Those funds went to personal real estate and a one-hundred-and-sixty-thousand-dollar horse. The coin now trades around forty-one cents.

Mara: The SEC has since filed its own civil fraud suit, and the post asks a pointed question: is the line between crypto fraud and legality determined by whether you're "operated or protected by the president"? The SEC has lowered its crypto enforcement activity by sixty percent under current leadership.

Pip: Which is a regulatory posture, not a verdict — though the timing is hard to ignore.

Mara: And the pattern holds across the sector. Sam Bankman-Fried is serving twenty-five years. Do Kwon got fifteen. Meanwhile the biggest platforms face regulatory suits at most, not criminal charges. From there, let's look at corruption that runs a little closer to street level.

When the Handler Is the Problem

Pip: This segment is about what happens when the person running an informant decides the informant is more valuable as a business partner than as a source.

Mara: HSI agent Anthony Sabaini was receiving tips from drug dealer Gary Howard while simultaneously asking other agencies to stand down on investigating Howard's dealing. The coded arrangement was explicit: "50 words on a page" — fifty standing for fifty thousand dollars — which Sabaini used to buy a new car.

Pip: Sabaini also pocketed a separate fifty-thousand-dollar HSI cash advance meant for a controlled buy, handing his informant counterfeit bills to use in the sale instead. That is a level of operational creativity that deserves some grudging acknowledgment.

Mara: The scheme unraveled when Howard tried to sell two ounces to a DEA informant in 2017, then got caught in a full two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand-dollar cocaine sting in 2018 run by a different DEA source. Two federal agencies, running separate informants, caught each other's corrupt operation. Howard's appeal, affirmed by the Seventh Circuit in September 2026, argued the deals were authorized federal work — a claim that collapsed without Sabaini's testimony, which Sabaini refused to give. The post situates this inside a broader system: eighty percent of federal drug prosecutions involve confidential informants, and the DEA alone maintains an active list of eighteen thousand of them. Corporate litigation raises its own version of the same power-versus-accountability question.

3M, Black Lung, and the SLAPP Playbook

Pip: The question this segment is really asking is whether aggressive plaintiff lawyering can be recast as racketeering — and whether that recast is itself a litigation weapon.

Mara: Three lawyers — Hammond, Martin, and Givens — filed twenty-two mass-tort suits on behalf of over eight hundred and fifty coal miners claiming 3M's dust respirators caused black lung. 3M's response was a federal RICO suit, and the post quotes the key legal tension directly: the lawyers argued "their standard legal actions of filing lawsuits and managing discovery cannot serve as predicate acts under federal racketeering laws."

Pip: The judge let the RICO claim proceed to discovery anyway, while tossing the Kentucky state fraud counts. So the miners' cases stay stalled while the lawyers defend themselves from a corporation that faces potential bankruptcy if the miners win.

Mara: The post is careful here. There are real questions about claim quality — sixteen suits were dismissed before 3M filed, then forty-three more shortly after — but the evidence 3M offers for actual fraud is thin. The most damning exhibit is a text from one defendant to opposing counsel, which the post calls incredible to take at face value. The CDC reports around a thousand miners die of black lung annually, and roughly one in three veteran underground miners in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia test positive today.

Pip: 3M and Mine Safety Appliances have held a duopoly on mining respirators since 1970. The death rate has not meaningfully changed since miners started wearing the masks.

Mara: The Maine campaign finance piece sits in adjacent territory — a different kind of institutional power blocking accountability. When eighty-six percent of Maine voters passed a law restricting foreign-influenced corporate election spending, Central Maine Power and its parent Avangrid sued, and a federal court struck down the law's core provisions before it ever took effect. The court found the five-percent foreign ownership threshold too low to justify restricting corporate speech. Power over democratic outcomes is the thread that carries into the next segment.

Oligarchs, Kickbacks, and a Missing Yacht

Pip: This is a story about a Russian fertilizer oligarch who tried to hide a superyacht by pretending he didn't own it, and then discovered that Antigua's government had noticed the same thing.

Mara: Andrey Guryev purchased the Alfa Nero through offshore shell companies, claiming he merely chartered it. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Antiguan officials blocked the yacht from leaving harbor, passed legislation declaring it abandoned, and sold it at auction for forty million dollars — below the highest bid of sixty-seven million. His daughter Yulia Guryeva-Motlokhov is now pursuing discovery in Florida, and the filing alleges that Prime Minister Gaston Browne's "administration was set to receive up to a 50% commission" on the sale.

Mara: Six million dollars has been separately alleged as a hidden bribe paid to Browne through his personal attorney, recorded in the yacht broker's corporate accounts. Four million dollars from the sale total remains unaccounted for. Florida subpoenas now reach into four parallel proceedings: a constitutional challenge in Antigua, a civil damages suit in Russia, a criminal complaint in the UAE, and a defamation suit Browne filed against the lawyers pursuing him.

Pip: Guryev stayed silent about the war to protect his fertilizer stake and is now confined to Moscow, unable to enter his superyacht or his four-hundred-million-dollar London mansion. The oligarch who did speak out — Oleg Tinkov — lost his bank, renounced his citizenship, and eventually got his yacht back. The post leaves the lesson somewhat open.

Pip: Fraud charges for the small, pardons or passes for the large, and democratic votes that money can reverse — the week's cases are pretty consistent about who the system is designed to protect.

Mara: The black lung miners, the drug dealer's informant, the Maine voters — all waiting on institutions that are simultaneously being litigated against and litigated through. More of the same, next time.

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Another Crypto Founder Charged with Fraud, While the Giants Remain Unscathed

25 Oct

Back in 2022, Arshad Assofi et al v. Donald Basile e al was filed in the U.S. District Court in California. After an arbitrator issued a $42.5 million damages award in 2025, GIBF filed a new appealing lawsuit in Delaware: GIBF GP, Inc. v. Arshad Assofi, where Judge Maryellen Noreika has just confirmed the California decision to issue the award.

The lawsuit was first filed by investor Arshad Assofi against the founder of Bitcoin Latinum token (LTNM) Donald Basile and GIBF GP, Inc., alleging this operation was a worthless scam. Assofi argued that Basile convinced him to invest based on false information about the other backers, such as receiving $20 million from the producers of Star Trek (denied by Paramount). Basile had suggested this association by naming this currency after “latinum”, a fictional currency employed by the Ferengi in Star Trek. Basile had also falsely claimed that the coin was backed by an asset trust and insured for up to $1 billion.

Assofi had invested $15 million by purchasing simple agreements for future tokens (SAFTs). But Basile had misappropriated these funds on personal real estate and luxury items such as a $160,000 horse. When he realized Basile was not building this coin and that it would remain worthless, he asked for a refund that Basile refused, leading to this battle.

SEC also filed a civil fraud lawsuit against Basile, GIBF GP, Inc. and Monsoon Blockchain Corporation on April 17, 2026 in New York. SEC’s case mirrors Assofi’s filings, while aiming to apply new penalties, including banning Basile from serving as an officer of a public company.

Bitcoin Latinum saw a peak token price of around $190 during the 2021 crypto boom, but has dropped to around $.41. KuCoin shows an all-time high as $9,322, but this was a brief glitch at which the public would not have been able to trade this coin. The coin’s website is defunct, but the business has not yet officially filed for bankruptcy protection.

While the case names hundreds of defrauded investors, it seems there was only $16 million invested, with most being from Assofi. Other investors have filed in Michigan against a promoter who had convinced them to purchase Latinum.

The most recent appeal filing claimed the arbitration award was manipulated “by corruption, fraud, or undue means” with “evident partiality or corruption in the arbitrators”, specifically Daniel B. Garrie, Esq., who were “guilty of misconduct in refusing to postpone the hearing” and by “refusing to hear evidence pertinent… to the controversy”.

From Basile’s perspective, he claimed Assofi’s purchase of the tokens was made with no binding investment relationship. Basile argued that the sudden 95% drop in the token’s price coincided by the crypto market’s crash, as opposed to any deception on his part. Basile initially attempted to threaten a $1 billion countersuit that accused Assofi of filing fabricated fraud charges in an extortion scheme. Basile has not yet surrendered any money or assets in response to the arbitration decision. And if SEC wins their case before Basile pays Assofi, SEC might empty Basile’s coffers before Assofi digs in.

There have been several similar lawsuits over crypto currency owners defrauding investors: the crypto owners have lost most of these. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried diverted $8 billion in customer deposits and is now serving a 25-year federal prison sentence with a looming $11 billion forfeiture order. Terraform Labs’ Do Kwon was found guilty of operating a $40 billion fraud, now serving a 15-year prison sentence, and owns $19 million in forfeiture. The one escape-hatch has been Changpeng Zhao securing a pardon from Trump and negotiating a settlement with the Department of Justice by paying a $4.3 billion penalty for Binance.

Is the difference then between crypto fraud and legality in if it is operated or protected by the president? If not being too cynical, there are provable frauds in these convicted crypto entities, as in the Latinum case: false claims of insurance protection and backers, and a lack of a finance platform on a recognized public blockchain. As long as World Liberty Financial (WLF) is disclosing that it is paying out millions in tokens to the Trump family, it is not defrauding other buyers. Though WLF has recently been civilly sued over constitutional and corporate violations, such as corruptly accepting billions from foreign governments (especially UAE).

All but the top major multi-billion crypto businesses have been sued by U.S. regulators (SEC, CFTC, DOJ) over fraud or unregistered security offerings. Largely because of Trump’s personal profiteering from crypto, he has put leadership in place at SEC that has lowered its crypto laws by 60%. The biggest still operating crypto companies, such as Binance and Crypto.com have only been hit with regulatory lawsuits, as opposed to criminal fraud charges. The reason the top crypto company in the world, Bitcoin ($1.62 trillion), has not been sued by a U.S. regulator is because it is a decentralized, open-source software protocol without any corporate founder who might have been accused of fraud. Though it is very suspicious that the second largest business, Ethereum ($286 billion), has never been sued despite it having a founder, Vitalik Buterin. It is logical to assume that the companies at the top have been knocking out their competition by encouraging federal prosecutions against their competitors over fraud charges. Otherwise, there would not be exceptions of top companies that are committing the same securities violations, but are skipped over. For example, the third largest company, Tether ($182 billion), has faced multiple lawsuits, such as about its corporate statements that each 1 USDT token was backed 1:1 with cash, when it was merely backed by unsecured commercial debt and commingled corporate funds. It is improbable that Ethereum or Bitcoin have billions or trillions in cash in their vaults, and yet they have not faced the same scrutiny.

The winners in the crypto game seem to be hackers who can create the illusion of their non-involvement and thus prevent being vulnerable to personal fraud charges. The biggest fraudsters are those who can escape liability even beyond the protections offered to corporations.

And why are coin founders being accused of pocketing millions from investors for “personal gain” when all American corporate CEOs are pocketing millions in salaries and bonuses? Is the distinction that the crypto businesses are collapsing too soon after this pocketing? The lack of profitability is normal, as around 13% of biotech and AI startup companies in the Nasdaq have no revenue, and half are unprofitable. Investors who bet on unprofitable ventures are being defrauded through false advertising that promises they are going to become ultra-profitable in the future. There must be many exaggerations in unprofitable companies’ marketing that have cast this false confidence over the public. The point of fraud cases against crypto founders seems to have been to discourage small startups in this sphere for the giants to monopolize it. Crypto as a concept is a fraud: it is a fictional currency that can be manipulated by hackers who pretend a system is functioning because it is being fairly “mined”. Then again, state-issued currencies that are not backed by gold are also frauds: because there is no 1:1 backing for trillions in fictional bucks being printed. In an ideal world, nobody could speculate on currency, as there would be some international monetary unit that does not change in value and has no “creator”. People would just trade goods and services at standard exchange rates, without needing to worry about their local currency being devalued. But with trillions to be made on intervening in this utopia as middleman pocketing a share of all transactions, we are going to continue to see litigation until this sector is a monopoly.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Another Crypto Founder Charged with Fraud, While the Giants Remain Unscathed.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 25, 2026).

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Drug Dealer Informant and His Corrupt HSI Handler Caught in $280,000 Cocaine Sale by DEA’s Informant

24 Oct

On September 25, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Northern District of Illinois affirmed the conviction in United States v. Gary L. Howard of Howard to a 13-year prison sentence. Howard was appealing that the drug deal he was caught making was part of the work he previously did as a confidential informant for Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Howard has been convicted on three federal drug charges for selling cocaine in a 2018 sting when he attempted purchasing 10 kilograms of cocaine for $280,000 in the parking lot of informant seller “Z’s” furniture store. A search of his home uncovered a loaded firearm and a drug ledger.

Howard’s HSI handler Anthony Sabaini had been receiving tips from Howard on rival dealers. In exchange for information, Sabaini had been asking other agencies to “stand down” on investigating Howard’s drug dealing. For this, Sabaini was convicted of federal corruption charges. Part of Howard’s appeal was objecting to the court refusing his request to subpoena Agent Sabaini, who could have provided a “public authority” defense for his drug dealing. Sabaini had refused to testify voluntarily because he was anticipating his own appeal, and feared discussing recorded jail calls that explained his quid pro quo deal with Howard.

Howard was also unsuccessfully objecting to the warrantless search of his phone, but Judge Steven C. Seeger disagreed because this search fell under the inevitable discovery doctrine: investigators had probable cause from text messages.

Howard should not have needed to continue dealing because he was being paid by HSI for informing. The standard method of payment is up to 25% of the net recovery from an asset forfeiture or net recoveries from a trafficking bust. They can also make up to $100,000 per year in cash payouts, with most paying only a few thousand dollars for a few buys. One of Howard’s problems was that he needed to pay his corrupt handler Agent Sabaini at least $50,000 for protection and law enforcement information. This specific amount was communicated in the coded text: “50 words on a page”, where “50” stood for $50,000. Sabaini used this cash to purchase a new car. In another case, Sabaini requested $50,000 from HSI for a cash drug buy only to pocket this cash while giving his informant counterfeit bills to use in the sale.

The corrupt dealings might have continued if wires were not crossed when Howard tried to sell two ounces for $2,400 from another confidential informant in 2017: this one from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). This suggests that American drug enforcement agencies are spending so much money and labor that they are catch each other in corrupt activities internal auditing methods are failing to catch. Sabaini managed to convince DEA agent Phillip Hahn not to prosecute his “golden goose” in 2017, he failed to intervene before Howard was arrested on a second DEA informant’s sale in 2018. With Howard in the system, it was too late for DEA Special Agent Anthony Anglada to take Sabaini up on his offer for Howard to “work it off if he cooperated”. A new problem then surfaced when Howard refused to “work it off” or to cooperate with Agent Anglada’s investigation. Thus, the DEA had to press charges for this sale against Howard. While Howard refused to cooperate in some ways, he had given a post-arrest statement that confessed to the drug deal because the investigator convinced him with a false promise of leniency. This meant Howard’s coerced statement could be suppressed at the trial, but not the gun, cash, and drug-dealing ledger that were found during a search at his house.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 80% of federal drug prosecutions involve confidential informants. And the total might be higher because 95% of drug cases are plea bargained, meaning the government never has to disclose how they obtained the evidence against the person on trial. And the United States Sentencing Commission has found that 50% of federal drug defendants cooperate or snitch on other drug dealers to ease their own sentences. And Forbes found that the DEA has an active list of 18,000 confidential informants. Their study calculated FBI, DEA and AFT jointly paid informants $548 million over a few years. While this seems like a lot, if the other two agencies have similar numbers of informants, each of them would have made on average $2,537 per year. Meanwhile, the National Bureau of Economic Research has concluded an average street dealer makes less than minimum wage at between $6-11 per hour.

To summarize what is happening: half of all people facing drug charges offer to serve as informants, but only a small percentage of these are asked to do so officially, and most might only assist with one or two drug buys. This is because after 2-4 controlled drug buys, they have worked off the quota required by their agreement that dropped their charges or reduced their sentence. And after helping to arrest their immediate network, an informant stops having value because they lack additional contacts that an officer would not be able to find themselves on cold buys.

The trick that Howard and Agent Sabaini pulled off before their arrest was to generate no drug busts or arrests across their affiliation. Howard did not make any controlled sales because the agent on his case wanted to make money from Howard in exchange for not busting him. The reason Howard transitioned from a $2,400 sale in 2017 to a $280,000 sale in 2018 was because he did not rat on his contacts, but rather helped to protect these connects with Sabaini’s help. Howard had become a rare example of a profitable dealer because of Sabaini’s protection.

A drug dealer in America has a 1-in-4 chance of being arrested in a given year, and near 100% certainty of being arrested over their career. This is assured by the 50% informant-turning odds, and is the reason for America having one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. In contrast, in Western Europe, Canada, Japan and most other developed nations, it is unheard of for agencies to give enormous cash payments to criminal informants. Abroad paying cash to informants is classified as bribery, as only basic reimbursement is allowed. And elsewhere prosecutors lack unreviewable discretion to wipe away felony charges because a defendant offers to snitch.

This case thus helps to explain that one way America could rapidly drop its incarceration rate, as well as its higher murder and lethal drug overdose rates is by adopting other countries policies of not paying cash to informants, and not dropping charges in exchange for snitching. Having one of the highest incarceration rates in the world has create a cycle of spiking addiction and criminality rates because those who enter the system cannot find work outside of it. Returning to Howard’s appeal: why did a dealer feel he was in the right despite being busted in this massive sale? From Howard’s perspective, he was paying kickbacks to a government agent who was (seemingly officially) directing him to make sales to have money to pay him kickbacks. If Sabaini was orchestrating these deals, he succeeded in deploying the American secrecy shield to not be forced to incriminate himself by explaining this under oath. Though mostly the appeal was the work of a lawyer who wanted to make a bit more money from a convicted drug dealer by nitpicking about a warrantless search and the definition of an “agreement”.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Drug Dealer Informant and His Corrupt HSI Handler Caught in $280,000 Cocaine Sale by DEA’s Informant.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 24, 2026).

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3M SLAPP Sues 3 Lawyers for Aggressively Pressing Claims of Hundreds of Black Lung Suffering Clients

24 Oct

On September 30, 2026, in 3M Company v. Glenn M. Hammond et al, Judge Robert E. Wier of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky allowed 3M’s federal civil RICO claim to proceed to discovery while dismissing Kentucky state fraud and conspiracy claims. The defendants being sued by 3M are three lawyers—Glenn Hammond (of Kentucky), Michael Martin (of Texas), and Johnny Givens (of Mississippi)—who had filed 22 mass-tort product liability lawsuits in Kentucky against 3M on behalf of over 850 coal miners, who allege 3M’s dust mask respirators were defective, and thus caused them to contract black lung. 3M alleges that to obtain a massive settlement these lawyers cold-called “fraudulent claimants”, who they allege never wore 3M masks, never mined or had not been diagnosed with black lung.

On a first review, this seems to be a retaliatory suit filed by 3M to avoid paying the suing miners. This allegation was first raised suspiciously, on January 17, 2023, when one of these defendants, Martin, texted 3M’s counsel with the message that he “lamented that Defendant Hammond was ‘hurting our clients with real claims because so many are frivolous’”. It is incredible that Martin just happened to confess this to opposing counsel; he seems to have been intimidated or otherwise manipulated into writing this. The defendants seem to have been diligently weeding out unsubstantiated claims, as they had dismissed 16 claims beforehand between 2021-2, and then dismissed 43 other claims on January 27, 2023. But then 3M objected to these dismissals, so the defendants agreed to keep these claims.

While these additions and subtractions of claimants seem routine, the conclusion 3M’s counsel reaches is that this means the defendants “intended to deprive 3M of money through fraud, deceit, and artifice”.

The lawyers’ defense is logical: their standard legal actions of filing lawsuits and managing discovery cannot serve as “predicate acts” (i.e., mail and wire fraud) under federal racketeering (RICO) laws. A lawyer cannot worry of committing a federal crime every time they aggressively pursue a lawsuit. The judge countered this by arguing 3M’s accusations stretched beyond regular lawyerly conduct, as it was accusing them also of engaging in deception, fabrication of evidence and multi-state fraud. The Kentucky state fraud case was dismissed, while federal RICO conspiracy claims will proceed.

Judging who is in the right in this case is more difficult than the surface suggests. The tort lawsuits have been stalled since 3M filed this countersuit against the lawyers. The initial court filings accuse Hammond of having “forged intake records to conceal” misconduct. But then, when offering specifics on another case, it merely accuses Hammond of ignoring a client: a simple neglect for which he was oddly sanctioned by the Kentucky Supreme Court. And Martin was sued by one of the 3M clients who he dropped for $150,000 in damages. Givens also had a misconduct allegation made against him for merely misstating that one of his claimants had worked for a “parish” he had no in fact worked for. There is no rational evidence provided here that would prove anything but the mistakes likely to seep in when lawyers attempt to file cases on behalf of hundreds of clients. 3M is fighting against certain bankruptcy because only two miners previously secured a $67.5 million verdict. Paying all litigants such sums would bankrupt the world’s biggest companies.

The rational approach seems to be for 3M to argue that its labeling never promised black lung protection levels. They have argued this, as has federal safety regulations that state masks are insufficient for dust compliance safety. They should be accompanied with a ventilation system, water sprays, dust traps or other preventative measures. The reason the 2 miners won in 2018 was because they argued there were mask defects (that caused leaks in hot and sweaty mining conditions) that 3M knew about since the 1970s.

Is it logical to bankrupt a major mask manufacturer to help miners? 3M’s scientists have introduced very expensive redesigns that have solved the hot-sweating-leaks, but most mining companies tend to purchase the basic 3M models that have not changed since the 70s. While recommending not suint 3M so they can invest more into lowering the price of their innovatively protective products seems like a good idea, 3M has proven that they prefer to stick with what has been profitable. According to the Centers of Disease Control, around 1,000 miners die of black lung annually, and this number has been rising. And according to PBS, around 1 in 3 veteran underground miners in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia today test positive for black lung. 3M and Mine Safety Appliances have had a duopoly over mining respirators since 1970, when miners began wearing masks, while continuing to die of black lung. The rate of death seems to have been the same before and after 3M masks began to be used. While a mask might block 95% of particles, it is the remaining tiny particles that cause the mega damage. Perhaps if these lawsuits take 3M out of business, this industry will figure out how to create products that would not contribute to killing so many people that three cold-calling lawyers will find thousands of miners with claim-worthy accounts.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “3M SLAPP Sues 3 Lawyers for Aggressively Pressing Claims of Hundreds of Black Lung Suffering Clients.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 24, 2026).

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86% of Maine’s Voters Banned Foreign Election Interference, Before CMP’s Money Reversed Their Decision

24 Oct

In Central Maine Power Company (CMP), et al. v. Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices, et al., the United States District Court for the District of Maine granted motions to allow CMP to continue donating to political candidates by declaring two portions of Maine’s new campaign finance law unconstitutional, but denied motions regarding the remainder of the statute, allowing the rest of the law to survive through legal severance.

The first element the court objected to in the law is the 5% corporate foreign ownership rule, arguing that this was too small of a share, and that only a controlling shareholder should be significant enough to exclude a corporation’s influence over elections. The second point was over if a foreign government “directly or indirectly participates in the decision-making process” over elections spending. The court interpreted the latter as possibly merely meaning a foreign government had consulted a corporation, even if this corporation was fully owned by American shareholders.

According to OpenSecrets, CMP and its parent company Avangrid have largely spent money on ballot referendums. By donating over $35 million to the Maine Affordable Energy PAC, they defeated a referendum that would have forced a consumer buyout of the utility grid. And they spent tens of millions to defend their referendum for a hydropower transmission line through western Maine.

Maine passed a ballon initiative restricting Foreign Government-Influenced Entities (FGIE) back in 2023. The Act could apply a $5,000 civil penalty or double the amount donated. They could no longer spend on elections, and their public communications had to carry mandatory disclosures of foreign-influence. It also applied a new burden onto media companies to check if block ads that failed to meet these disclosure rules. Because of this lawsuit, this law was blocked on the eve it was going to go into effect. This stillborn law had passed by a historic 86% margin. The law had been led by the nonpartisan Protect Maine Elections, and democracy reform groups such as American Promise and Maine Clean Elections. And Free Speech for People and Campaign Legal Center have filed amicus briefs arguing the 5% limit is a globally recognized threshold. Though most democracies, such as France, Canada, Japan and South Korea, completely ban corporate political contributions: foreign and domestic. Thus, there limit is 0%. After the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling that allowed unlimited spending on elections by American corporations, U.S. states and cities have begun applying the 5% threshold to at least limit foreign spending.

Aside from Maine, there was also a failed attempt to implement foreign spending limits in Minnesota. The only state where a spending limit is currently being enforced is in Washington, which uses the controlling-share limit, as opposed to the 5% cutoff. The only places in the U.S. that have a 5% limit being enforced are the cities of Seatle (2020-) and San Jose (2024-).

Leading up to and after Citizens United, there has been systematic campaign to corrupt U.S. elections by arguing that corporations have a First Amendment right to “speak” with unlimited campaign contributions. Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump had been judged by oversight agencies to have been interfered in by foreign actors—especially Russia—this wave of attempts to counteract America’s slide into unbridled corruption could have given some hope, if it had not been repeatedly quashed by moneyed interests. Corporate donations had been banned in the U.S. by the 1907 Tillman Act. Because corporations reacted by attempting to donate indirectly, a few acts—between 1947 and 2002—followed that further limited activities, such as requiring that corporate employees could only donate indirectly into Political Action Committees (PACs). Citizens United reversed this march towards democratic representation. If CMP had not been able to block the Pine Tree Power buyout, Maine taxpayers would have taken on $13.5 billion in debt to buy the utility, but could have been rewarded with improved reliability and a lower electricity cost. And while the NECEC corridor added tons of energy to the grid, it clear-cut pristine northern Maine woods (undercutting tourism and wildlife) to bring power to Massachusetts. The point of democratic referendums is to invite voters to decide which among such choices they care most about. When 86% of Maine’s voters voted against foreign interference, and a corporation with these foreign influences could buy their way into winning a lawsuit to reverse the voters’ decision, this is an extreme case of anti-democratic voting-system suppression.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “86% of Maine’s Voters Banned Foreign Election Interference, Before CMP’s Money Reversed Their Decision.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 24, 2026).

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Russian Fertilizer Oligarch Battles Against Kickback-Taking Antigua Prime Minister Over His Superyacht

23 Oct

A tragedy has been unraveling for fertilizer Russian oligarch Andrey Guryev, who invested time and effort into purchasing the Alfa Nero 257-foot superyacht in 2014 by via offshore shell companies to pretend he did not “own” it, but merely “charted” it. The problem: Antigua’s corrupt officials heard of Guryev’s insistence of non-ownership and decided to declare it as abandoned to pocket the proceeds.

Antigua won early litigation in U.S. federal and New York courts, with the latter even ordering Guryev’s daughter Yulia Guryeva-Motlokhov to destroy all U.S. banking records they had clawed out through discovery. But now a Florida court is questioning why the Antigua records have been allowed to not be turned over having been categorized as “lost”.

On September 7, 2026, U.S. Magistrate Judge Marty Fulgueira Elfenbein of the Southern District of Florida allowed applicant Yulia Guryeva-Motlokhov and her attorneys at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP to issue subpoenas to uncover the missing money trails and corporate records linked to an alleged international public corruption ring orchestrated by Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne. Guryeva claims that “Browne was strategically involved in the” illegal seizure and “subsequent sale of the Alfa Nero”—a $120 million superyacht with its onboard art.

Prime Minister Gaston Browne’s “administration was set to receive up to a 50% commission”—i.e., kickback—on this sale. The refusal to submit the paperwork from this transaction is also being litigated as contributing to “hiding criminal proceeds under” UAE law.

After the commencement of the Ukraine-Russian war, this yacht that had been docked in Antigua was stopped by Antiguan officials from leaving their harbor. They then passed legislation “to declare” Alfa Nero as “abandoned” to be able to sell it at an auction. It was thus sold for $40 million to the Yildirim Group, a Turkish construction and shipping company. This seems to have been a manipulated auction since this was lower than the highest bid of $67 million. In other words, the auction organizers favored a lower bid than the most profitable option for the state because they had an under-the-table deal with the lower bidder that kicked a bribe over to them.

The new Florida discovery request focuses on Gastone Browne III, the Prime Minister’s son and business proxy because he is especially reachable due to ties to south Florida. And Browne III is “likely to possess critical information about the 2024 sale of the Alfa Nero and associated kickback; his father’s business partners, ventures, and real estate holdings (including his extensive properties allegedly located in this District); and the disposition of the sale proceeds and kickback.” Northrop, the yacht broker who submitted the low winning bid, are also being asked to disclose their records.

One of the questions the discovery hopes to resolve is what happened to the $4 million left out of the total $40 million sale, from which only $36 million have been accounted for by Northrop in previous disclosures.

The bigger criminal problem is that in addition to this reported $40 million price, $6 million has been alleged to have been paid as a hidden bribe credited as a “consulting” fee to Prime Minister Browne, paid via his personal attorney. This payment was recorded in Northrop’s corporate accounts.

The U.S. Federal Court approved these new subpoenas to provide this evidence to four separate international proceedings. In Antigua and Barbuda, there is a pending constitutional challenge to the legislative act that was used to initially seize and auction the vessel as abandoned, when it merely could not be moved due to sanctions against its owner. In Russia, a civil lawsuit is seeking financial damages for the illegal expropriation of the yacht and its art. In the United Arab Emirates, a federal criminal complaint is under review over the hiding or transacting of illicit criminal proceeds. And a retaliatory defamation lawsuit was launched by Prime Minister Browne against the Boies Schiller Flexner legal team. Thus, the court has ruled Boies’ lawyers have a right to use federal discovery to prove the “defense of truth” against the Prime Minister’s claims.

The cost of pursuing these cases is likely to have cost millions in federal, state, constitutional, civil and global attorney’s fees on all sides. And this is only one of around twenty similar Russian oligarch yachts that are in litigation over these assets being frozen or forfeited.

While Anglo-American courts have been refusing to accept “straw owner” claims over these yachts, there was a single victory—that proved billionaire Alisher Asmanov had no legal control—in Germany over the priciest $600 million Dilbar superyacht.

There have been at least one other corruption accusations against forfeiture proceedings: US has argued the liquidation sale of the Amadea would see its $187 million in proceeds going to Ukraine, but instead it has been spent internally within the U.S. Marshals Service.

Russia’s spending 43% of its government budget on its military has contributed to around half-a-million Russian and over a hundred thousand Ukrainian war fatalities. Meanwhile, Russia’s civilian economy is starved, its bond market has continued to crash and debts have been ballooning. And the recent strikes on Russian oil refineries have prevented Russia from profiting from record-high oil prices.

What good have the yacht confiscations done? They did convince a single oligarch, Oleg Tinkov, to post a tirade on Instagram in 2022 that insisted that 90% of Russians oppose the Ukraine war, categorizing this invasion as “insane” and “crazy”. In retaliation, the Russian government then pressured to sell his stake in his Tinkoff Bank for a fraction of its value. And shortly thereafter he renounced his Russian citizenship. UK then removed Tinkov form its sanctions blacklist, freeing Tinkov to take possession of his yacht, which had been docked in Mexico, whose authorities refused to participate in Western seizure efforts.

In contrast, poor Guryev has remained silent about the war to retain a 48.4% stake in his fertilizer business, but has had to live in Moscow because he cannot legally enter not only his superyacht, but also his $400 million London mansion.

Suggested Citation:
Faktorovich, Anna. “Russian Fertilizer Oligarch Battles Against Kickback-Taking Antigua Prime Minister Over His Superyacht.” Anaphora’s Law Review (October 23, 2026).

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