Tag Archives: seizure

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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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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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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