danny burstein (dannyb@panix.com) Tue, 31 Jan 2006 22:38:42 -0500

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The trial took place here in NYC so there was some local coverage. There was also a related piece from the midwest. (Comment: while I'm glad to see some action here, if a burglar had broken into hundreds and then hundreds of thousands of houses and stolen from each, grabbing hundreds of millions ... he sure wouldn't have just been given a nine year hit. Oh, and the "fence" he used would have been dragged along as well.) Local: " The apple of John Gotti's eye is rotten to the core, said a Brooklyn judge who sentenced one of the Gambino crime family's top earners to nine years in prison yesterday for his role in a porn scam. " Richard Martino, 46, apologized to Brooklyn federal Judge Carol Amon and the victims he duped into doling out millions of dollars to his smutty Internet and phone scams. " The Gambino soldier pleaded guilty last February to racketeering and mail and wire fraud for bilking $650 million from porn perusers in what Assistant Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Eric Komitee described as the 'most sophisticated Internet fraud' he has ever seen. " Martino has admitted to luring visitors onto porn Web sites by promising the steamed-up surfers 'free tours.' " Internet users would then be billed up to $90 when they gave their credit-card number. The racket netted him $230 million between 1996 and 2002. . . rest at: http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/62643.htm and.... " A New York man, and an owner of the holding company that owns Cass County Telephone Company, was sentenced in federal court Monday for participating in a nearly $9 million conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, according to Todd P. Graves, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. " 'Three defendants in two separate, but related, cases will forfeit a total of $8.9 million to the government,' Graves said. 'This marks the largest amount of forfeiture ever paid in the Western District of Missouri.' ... " The Martinos admitted to their roles in a conspiracy to defraud the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), which disperses federal subsidies to rural telephone companies, and the National Exchange Carriers Association (NECA), which handles tariff filings and revenue distribution among carriers. The Martinos, along with Matzdorff, inflated expenses of the Cass County Telephone Company LP (known as CassTel) in order to qualify for $8.9 million in unwarranted subsidies and disbursements . . . rest at: http://www.democratmissourian.com/news3-011306.html _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

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