Category Archives: Business Law

Information about legal issues affecting small businesses, including big business. The latest news, videos, and discussion topics on Legal Issues involving business and money.

Blog, Business Law, Criminal, Drug Companies, Legal News, Organized Crime, Personal Injury, Supreme Court

Scott, Campbell counties hop on board Big Pharma racketeering lawsuit train


Two East Tennessee counties are now on board to join a growing and fast-moving national effort to use federal racketeering laws to hold drug makers, distributors and dispensers accountable for creating and fostering the opioid epidemic in the United States, records show.

Government leaders in Campbell and Scott Counties have authorized the filing of lawsuits in U.S. District Court against the firms that make, distribute and dispense opiate prescription painkillers.

The law firm Jessee & Jessee filed the first such legal action in the federal Eastern District of Tennessee on behalf of Campbell County earlier this year. The law firms Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and Taylor & Knight filed a similar action on behalf of Scott County late last week.

Full Read – https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/crime/2018/03/06/scott-campbell-counties-opioid-epidemic-big-pharma-racketeering-lawsuits/399172002/

Blog, Business Law, Immigration, International, Legal News, Organized Crime

A Mafia Acquittal Is the Latest L for Quebec Law Enforcement

Crime experts are expecting Montreal’s gang wars to heat up this year.

Patrick Lejtenyi

Leonardo Rizzuto and Stefano Sollecito walked out of the Montreal courthouse on Monday, February 19 as free men. That this caused surprise among organized crime observers is understandable. That it caused extreme frustration among law enforcement is probable, given that this is yet another case against Quebec-based organized crime figures botched by the cops and the Crown.

The two alleged high profile Mafia leaders had their charges of conspiracy to traffic cocaine and gangsterism tossed out of court after Quebec Superior Court Judge Eric Downs ruled that key evidence was inadmissible. That evidence stemmed from wiretaps planted by police in 2015 in the office of lawyer Loris Cavaliere—wiretaps that the judge said violated the sanctity of solicitor-client privilege. The accused argued that investigators didn’t put in enough safeguards to guarantee the privacy of Cavaliere’s other client. The judge sided with them and threw the wiretap evidence out, leaving the Crown with little else to prove Rizzuto and Sollecito’s guilt.

Full Read – https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/evmq3p/a-mafia-acquittal-is-the-latest-l-for-quebec-law-enforcement

Blog, Business Law, International, Legal News

Bizarre legal brawl intensifies at Trump hotel in Panama

By Joshua Partlow and David A. Fahrenthold February 26 at 6:57 PM 
PANAMA CITY — Last Thursday afternoon, the majority owner of the Trump International Hotel here in Panama arrived unexpectedly in the building’s swank Sky Lobby with an entourage.

He wanted to fire the Trump Organization, which has managed the hotel since it opened in 2011.

But the Trump Organization has refused to leave.

Since that first confrontation, police have been called multiple times to referee disputes between owner Orestes Fintiklis — who blames the company’s poor management and damaged brand for the hotel’s declining revenue — and the Trump Organization, which says it still has a valid contract to manage the place.

Offices have been barricaded. Several yelling matches have broken out. The power was briefly turned off, in a dispute over the building’s electronic equipment. At one point, Fintiklis — denied a chance to fire the hotel staff or even check into a room — played a tune on the hotel’s lobby piano as an apparent show of defiance.

Read Full Article https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/bizarre-legal-brawl-intensifies-at-trump-hotel-in-panama/2018/02/26/ccede22c-1b0e-11e8-98f5-ceecfa8741b6_story.html?utm_term=.c8bdf78771c3

Blog, Business Law, Criminal, International, Legal News, Organized Crime

He sold antiques in Florida. Then he helped ‘El Chapo’ launder $100M of dirty gold

BY JAY WEAVER AND NICHOLAS NEHAMAS

jweaver@miamiherald.com

nnehamas@miamiherald.com

January 16, 2018 08:00 AM

Updated 10 hours 10 minutes ago

The Chicago drug dealers working for notorious Mexican gangster El Chapo had a big problem on their hands: What should they do with the millions of dollars in cash they earned from selling cocaine?

They bought gold. Tens of millions of dollars worth from pawnshops — rings, necklaces and watches.

Then they had to find a place to fence it all.

More than a thousand miles away, in an industrial warehouse in South Florida, they found the perfect partner: an obscure gold-trading company called Golden Opportunities. El Chapo’s crew shipped the metal in dozens of FedEx deliveries to the Hallandale Beach company, according to federal court records.

The owners of Golden Opportunities, Jed and Natalie Ladin, may not have known they were working with Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo — but between 2011 and 2014 his brutal Sinaloa cartel laundered nearly $100 million of cocaine cash through Golden Opportunities, court records show.

A drug cartel’s Midas touch

Mexico’s brutal Sinaloa cartel used a small South Florida gold business to launder nearly $100 million in cocaine profits. Here’s how they did it.

The Ladins did more than look the other way: After selling the gold to big refineries that would melt it down for manufacture into coins, bars and high-tech consumer products, Golden Opportunities wired the proceeds to Sinaloa shell companies in Mexico. That made Jed, 69, a former antiques dealer, and his wife, Natalie, 65, part of an international money-laundering operation transforming El Chapo’s cocaine profits into clean cash.

The money-laundering pipeline was revealed in 2014 in the ongoing federal prosecution of 30 members and associates of the Sinaloa cartel in Chicago. Already, more than half of the defendants have pleaded guilty, including the group’s two leaders. A dozen other alleged participants are fugitives. (El Chapo is in a U.S. prison awaiting trial for a different series of crimes.)

The Ladins’ case shows how international organized-crime groups manipulate America’s hush-hush gold industry to launder money and keep their businesses running. Even minor industry players like the Ladins can wind up playing supporting roles in vast criminal operations. While the couple was never charged in the Chicago case, Golden Opportunities shut down after the Ladins pleaded guilty in 2014 in a separate money-laundering prosecution involving gold.

Full Read http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article194188089.html