Records
released last week by the U. S. Supreme Court reveal that when Brooklyn U. S.
District Court Judge Leo Glasser sealed the record of Felix Sater’s conviction
on a guilty plea to joining with crime syndicate members in cheating investors
all across the country, while Sater awaited sentencing in the Brooklyn case,
the secrecy order enabled Sater to bilk more than 100 other investors in Fort
Lauderdale’s Trump International Hotel & Tower. The $200 million Las Olas
Boulevard construction project now stands incomplete, empty, and chained off
along Fort Lauderdale’s popular beachfront.
Joe
Altschul, attorney for 75 of the bilked purchasers of units in the failed
condominium hotel development explained why the Brooklyn court’s secrecy order
aided in the fraud against his clients: “Each of these purchasers had a right
to know who they were dealing with. It’s bad enough that they prop up Donald
Trump as the developer, but then you find out that it’s not Trump but a
convicted felon already charged in financial shenanigans.”
Briefs
in the Supreme Court case contend that the Sater case is only one of many in
the Eastern District of New York in which prosecutors get judges to seal
conviction records of mobsters – records which should be public to protect
other innocent investors considering putting money into deals with felons who
have already pleaded guilty to financial fraud, but whose convictions the court
keeps secret on the supposed basis of a need to protect the lives of crime
figures cooperating in government investigations into mob activities. Lawyers
involved in this particular case are especially miffed because in passing
sentence Sater’s case Judge Glasser took a pass on the traditional measure of
ordering Sater to make restitution to the folks he duped while secretly
convicted on his guilty plea and awaiting sentencing. There’s nothing about
that aspect of the case that could have contributed to avoiding a mob hit on
Sater.
When
prosecutors and the courts contribute to the ongoing frauds of criminals
against the investing public, and then shirk responsibility for making whole
the folks they are supposed to protect from mob activities, it makes honest
people in the construction business wonder whose side these public officials
are on.
Sater
owns a $4.8 million condo on Fisher Island, and allegedly paid the mob $1.5
million to be let in on the Fort Lauderdale Trump project. One of the lawyers
involved in the Supreme Court case which resulted in release of the sealed
record of Sater’s conviction is former federal judge Paul Cassell, who blames
Judge Glasser for not immediately making Sater’s guilty plea conviction public.
“The court illegally gave away millions to a criminal,” Cassell says. Miami
first Amendment lawyer Tom Julin agrees. “It’s the worst thing a court can do.
In a day and age when economic crimes can affect massive amounts of people,
there’s a real danger in super sealing these kinds of judicial proceedings.”
