Evidence — tax fraud — disbarment proceedings

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United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

Criminal

Evidence — tax fraud — disbarment proceedings

In a prosecution of an attorney for tax fraud, it was not an abuse of discretion to admit evidence of his disbarment proceedings.

“As with the defendants’ joint challenge, we find no abuse of discretion by the district court in admitting this evidence as to Bartoli. Bartoli himself was the respondent in the ARDC proceedings, and there is no dispute that he was aware of the proceedings. The charges themselves would have alerted Bartoli to the suspect nature of the Aegis trusts. Moreover, although he was not present to hear the evidence presented to the Hearing Board, he was represented by counsel during the proceeding. A jury could reasonably infer that his counsel would have apprised him of the testimony, including that of Marutzky. Alternatively, or additionally, a jury might infer that Bartoli’s ignorance of what occurred during the ARDC proceedings, given his status as the respondent, represented a willful blindness to the illegality of the Aegis system. Moreover, there was evidence that Bartoli, like other defendants, remained active in the conspiracy as late as 2002, so the fact that the opinion of the ARDC’s Hearing Board did not issue until February 16, 2000, does not undermine its relevance as notice evidence. (The government did not, in fact, introduce or rely upon the final disbarment order issued in May 2002.)”

Bartoli points out that although the government agreed to redact all references to disbarment from its evidence concerning the ARDC proceedings, Dunn’s counsel nonetheless characterized the proceedings as disbarment proceedings twice during his opening statement. R. 942 Tr. 128. However, the court instructed the jury to disregard those references, R. 942 Tr. 136, and given the overwhelming evidence of Bartoli’s guilt, we believe it highly unlikely that those references had any impact on the jury’s assessment of the evidence.”

Affirmed.

08-3690, 08-3759, 08-4076, 08-4246, 08-4320, 09-1864 & 09-2174 U.S. v. Vallone

Appeals from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Norgle, J., Rovner, J.