THE BANKERS AND THE LAWYERS – THEY ALL FALL DOWN!

VENICE CIVIL RIGHTS ATTORNEY STEPHEN YAGMAN FOUND GUILTY OF TAX AND BANKRUPTCY FRAUD CHARGES

More Bankers and Lawyers are going to jail these days than at any time in the history of both professions. Not because there are more of them, but because more whistle blowers are coming forward, risking their careers and sometimes their lives, to make sure that corrupt bankers, lawyers and judges do not get away without paying the price for their follies.

Take Venice, California civil rights attorney Stephen G. Yagman for example who was recently convicted of attempting to evade the payment of more than $100,000 in federal income taxes by concealing his assets and committing bankruptcy fraud.

A federal jury in Los Angeles convicted Yagman of 19 felony counts – one count of attempting to evade the payment of taxes, one count of bankruptcy fraud and 17 counts of money laundering (engaging in monetary transactions in criminally-derived property).

Yagman once won a major civil rights case against the Los Angeles County Sherriff’s department when he represented thousands of prisoners awaiting trials or hearings who were forced by Sherriff’s Deputies to sleep on cold floors because of overcrowding.

Those forced to sleep on the floors were granted a small amount for each night they slept there but few if any received more than a penny for the problems.

It was that case, which Yagman led, that triggered the counter intelligence operation which resulted in Yagman’s downfall. No wonder it is difficult to get a good attorney to stand up against injustices. Today, you could easily generalize and label the majority of Bankers and Lawyers in this country “Al Capone’s”, and yet it would be true.

Most attorneys know how to manipulate both justice and orchestrate injustices. All they need are a good banker, a private investigator and a corrupt Judge in their back pocket and they can ruin anyone’s life or destroy a business forever.

A professional study commissioned by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors after Yagman won his case recommended that the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail be shut down due to security concerns.

The evidence presented during the four-week Yagman trial showed that he filed federal income tax returns for the tax years 1994 through 1997, but paid only a small portion of the taxes that, according to his own returns, were owed to the Internal Revenue Service.

As a result of the underpayment, Yagman accumulated federal income tax liabilities for those four years that, with interest and penalties, totaled more than $158,000.

During the four years, Yagman also failed to pay significant amounts of federal payroll taxes owed by his law firm, which was then called Yagman & Yagman, P.C.

Instead of paying these overdue federal taxes, Yagman engaged in a scheme to conceal his assets and to impede the collection efforts of the IRS.

As part of the scheme, Yagman deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars into various bank and brokerage accounts in his girlfriend's name to disguise his personal assets.

Yagman used the accounts to pay for personal purchases and to conduct the majority of his personal financial transactions, according to court documents.

In 1999, Yagman attempted to subvert the IRS's collection efforts by filing for both personal and corporate bankruptcy. Yagman made numerous misrepresentations and omissions in his bankruptcy petitions and in court proceedings relating to those petitions.

In his personal bankruptcy petition, for example, Yagman failed to disclose to the Bankruptcy Court that he lived in a 2,800-square-foot house near the beach in Venice, for which he made mortgage and property tax payments, as well as claiming the homeowner's mortgage-interest deduction on his tax returns. That property is worth over $2 million as it sits right on the Venice Boardwalk.

Yagman also failed to disclose in his bankruptcy proceedings various personal bank and brokerage accounts that he controlled, but were in his girlfriend's name, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements, client payments and attorney’s fees that he received in 1999 and 2000, mostly from settlements from cases in which he represented victims of the criminal justice system.

"The public expects attorneys to be honest, to be trustworthy and to show respect for the law. The jury's verdict finding Mr. Yagman guilty on all counts sends a powerful message that his acts of deception and illegal conduct will not be tolerated," said Internal Revenue Service Special-Agent-in-Charge Debra King.

Yagman is scheduled to be sentenced by United States District Judge Stephen V. Wilson on September 24, 2007. The tax evasion and bankruptcy fraud counts each carry a maximum statutory penalty of five years in federal prison. The money laundering counts each carry a maximum statutory penalty of 10 years in federal prison.

"This verdict should serve as a strong deterrent to others who would misuse our nation's mail system to commit tax or bankruptcy fraud," said Acting Postal Inspector in Charge Robert Malaby. "The United States Postal Inspection Service remains dedicated to our mission to protect our nation's mail system from criminal misuse."

The information for this case was provided by the IRS-Criminal Investigation division, the United States Postal Inspection Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The United States Department of Justice provided most of the information for this article.

The FBI is currently overwhelmed with investigations of more than a thousand mortgage bankers who originated over a trillion dollars worth of stated income loans in the sub prime mortgage market that contained fraud for illicit profit.

Those illicit profits coming from loaning trillions in mortgage money through what the industry calls “Liar Loans” were illegally laundered by the Federal Reserve Banking system through more than 10,000 different banks and savings and loans in the United States alone.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating more than a dozen publicly traded mortgage companies who packaged up and fraudulently sold more than a trillion dollars worth of phony liar loans since the year 2000 to domestic and foreign institutional investors such as insurance companies, banks and the 22 major main Wall Street brokerage houses who are all accomplices in the greatest housing swindle in the history of real estate.

By the time the majority of these corrupt bankers and lawyers are brought to justice, and all the defaults have wound their way through the various county foreclosure processes, the global economic depression which ensues from purging these phony pillars of power politics will be well underway.

2008 is going to be a very great year for some savvy big money investors.

Therein lays the Bonanza of the new millennium!