A (Breaking) Bad Role Model
The Ohio Board on Professional Conduct has issued recommendations for discipline in a number of matters.
One proposed indefinite suspension involves a conviction recounted by Cleveland.com
A Cleveland attorney in federal prison for laundering money in a manner he learned from watching fictional sleazebag lawyer Saul Goodman on the TV show “Breaking Bad” has lost his appeal.
Matthew King, 46, took $20,000 from a federal informant named Marcus Terry with the promise that he would return it a few thousand dollars at a time, deducting money for fake legal services and business expenses.
Terry posed as a high-rolling cocaine dealer, but worked with Northern Ohio Law Enforcement Task Force and wore a wire during some of his conversations with King. The two talked about laundering even more money.
A jury found King guilty in June 2016 of two counts money laundering and one count attempted money laundering. Senior U.S. District Judge Donald Nugent sentenced him to 44 months in federal prison.
King argued to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati that his convictions should be overturned because Terry did not testify at trial. King claimed he had no ability to cross-examine Terry.
The appeals court ruled that Terry’s absence did not deprive King of his constitutional right to confront a witness, as the recorded conversations between Terry and King showed that King believed Terry came by the money they would launder through illegal means.
The recordings were not meant to show that Terry could obtain thousands by selling drugs, but rather that King believed that it was the case. Prosecutors must prove that the laundered money was “represented to be the proceeds of specified unlawful activity,” and that the recorded conversations were enough to establish that, the appeals court ruled.
King first met Terry in 2014 when both were at Christie’s Cabaret strip club in the Flats. He proposed that he help Terry set up a fake corporation as a cover to launder any drug proceeds, and that the money could also be “cleaned” by funneling it through King’s attorney trust account, according to an opinion.
The attorney’s scheme was similar to the one Goodman used to launder the money of main character Walter White on “Breaking Bad,” and the appeals court noted that King had learned it from the show.
King blamed his criminal activity at his sentencing on his alcohol addiction. Nugent ordered him to participate in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Residential Drug Abuse Program, which is a 500-hour program that reduce an inmate’s sentence by up to one year for people convicted of nonviolent offenses successfully complete it.
King had an office on West 3rd Street at the time of the investigation. Prior to that, he worked stints in the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office and at the city of Lakewood.
His law license was suspended following his conviction.
From the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirming the conviction
A sting operation blends fiction with non-fiction. The undercover officer feigns an offer to commit a crime and the individual accepts the offer, converting an offer to commit a crime based on untruths into a crime based on a true desire to violate the law. Sometimes, as it happens, the resulting crime blends non-fiction with fiction. In this instance, Matthew King, a lawyer, agreed to commit a real crime (by laundering the supposed proceeds of non-existent drug sales) and offered to do so on the basis of a money laundering technique observed on a fictional T.V. show (by imitating Saul Goodman, a lawyer character on Breaking Bad, who set up a sham corporation to launder drug proceeds).
This did not end well. A jury convicted King of two counts of money laundering and one count of attempted money laundering. King appeals his convictions on two grounds: (1) that the introduction of recorded conversations between him and the informant violated his Sixth Amendment right to confront the witnesses against him, and (2) that the district court improperly allowed the prosecution to ask him about his prior arrest for cocaine possession. We affirm.
In early 2014, Matthew King approached Marcus Terry at a strip club. He had heard that Terry was a drug dealer, and King, having fallen on hard times, offered to help Terry launder his drug money. As fortune would have it, Terry was posing as a drug dealer (he was a confidential informant in truth), and he told the police about King’s offer.
(Mike Frisch)