White Collar Crime News

Get out of your fantasy world and face the truth February 17, 2010

I recently had a client that came into my office with a letter from a Government agency.  He/she is not in any trouble yet.  In fact, the letter doesn’t even say that the client will be charged, sued or anything.  However, from my trained eye, I was able to piece together the entire situation in about 2 minutes.  Unless a good lawyer really pulls off some magic here, this person will be in prison in a few years.  How do I know all of this from looking at a letter?

Well I also spoke to the client of course about what he/she does for a living which is directly related to the letter.  While the letter doesn’t tell me that the client is under investigation, it is clear that he/she is.  It is also clear as to what this Government agency is looking for.  Of course, the client thinks that this is all a big nothing and that he/she did nothing wrong.  When I told the client my fee, which was not equivalent to a speeding ticket but at the same time, was nothing ridiculous for this type of work, his head nearly popped off which is really ironic if you saw the website for his business.

After he left I did some research and I confirmed what I had suspected.  Within minutes, I found information on the Internet that is almost certainly fraud that was most likely committed by the client and it has been going on for quite some time.  The sad thing is that this client has convinced himself/herself that he/she did nothing wrong.  As a result, the client may wind up hiring a cheap attorney that will do nothing.  Worse yet, the client may not even hire an attorney.  As a result, I am pretty sure that I will be doing a blog post about this person within a couple years about the arrest, indictment and sentencing.   The sad thing is, if this person had any chance to avoid all of that, that chance may already be gone unless this client hires a good attorney and fast.

While you never know what will happen in any given case, your best chance for success is early intervention.  Its one of the main reasons I love white collar crime.  With “street crime” you almost never get to come in before the arrest.  Its always afterwards.  With white collar crime, you have the chance to end it all before it really begins.  While you may make much less money as a result (in some cases anyway) the enjoyment of a great win is priceless. 

While no attorney wins every case, my firm has racked up a nice little track record of cases where it looked like our clients were going down hard but due to our early intervention, they were never even arrested even though various government officials issued all types of threats.  On the other hands, I have met with many people who have came into my office only to convince themselves that they don’t need an attorney; which begs the question “why are you here?”.  And then, a few months or even a year or two later, I am reading about their arrest, indictment and prison time in the paper.  In fact, I even blogged about a few of them (withing pointing out that they came in to my office). 

So if you or anyone you know is under any type of investigation from any type of law enforcement agency and they have convinced themselves that they did nothing wrong, please stop them and have them hire a good attorney that is actually going to work to protect them and not just take a small fee to do nothing but open a file.  You have to assume the worst.  Prison is filled with people who convinced themselves that they are innocent and the Government will clearly see that so there is nothing to worry about.  Trust me, several have walked out of my office just in the past few years.