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.
