honor this is a case in which the government we allege that we argue failed to prove to my client was part of the conspiracy as well edged in the indictment the indictment alleged a indictment charged three men in one they went to trial in the final form charge three men in that indictment with the amount of five kilograms more with twenty eight grams o cocaine upside crack but the jury came back and ethics is kind of telling us to the evidence this case with kind of an odd verdict they found different amounts for each of the the three defendants we argue on it that that is telling because really the government didn't prove a single conspiracy there was a substantial variance here they proved at most that mr goodman sold some amounts of drugs to different people at different times distribution amounts squeezing distribution level amounts yes that he distributed and sometimes on credit  yes you're on a but not never on consignment in other words the credit there was some occasions where he quoting to the testimony lines i have to accept the the evidence in the li she at some point she paid him later she also had during this time had a relationship with them a boyfriend girlfriend if you would relationship with them which was kind of what she did she went with different people at different times and purchased drugs and up team drugs from them at that point in time he insisted that she she pay him and then at a point in time they they separated and she no longer pain drugs from him this case you're going to have started with th investigation of a of a cocaine and crack distribution network that existed in orange county at this period of time but focused in on this individual name quits and he you on a was the subject of the investigation they put a pool camera in front of his falce he was arrested and indicted with a with a firearm and ultimately took a guilty plea to that and then the government restructured it from its theory for this trial and in the every structure theory suddenly it was mr goodman who was the the focus of this conspiracy and he was supposed to be the center of it it's telling that judge cybil in sentencing mr goodman pointed out that he was no kingpin awards in this event but we had you on to say he was no non government's theory was that this was what the that was going on over a long period of time that there was some sort of a a pattern of activity that was was taking place but yet they never found any support for that in any concrete evidence they made more than fifty purchases by undercover agents during the course of this investigation none of that cocaine a crack ever was traced back to mr goodman there was no he was not charged with any distribution sees only charged with appoints to the summary order in that case and says well that should be controlling your respectfully i disagree because the situation with the boy is even those drugs would not link mr goodman why because there was no fingerprints there was no d n a testing on that and most importantly the surveillance saw all those drugs being livid they say in a shopping bag there beneath us and that different people like mr wheeler and mr forrest who you also mentioned testified they had alternative sources of supply there was no this was just one source that they could go to they had no joint connection to a conspiracy that would give it any kind of cohesion what's happening is that we're getting to a point where we're diluting this concept of of hub and spoke to to get a situation w if you have buyers and sellers then it's a conspiracy you honest reasonably understood that they were part of something where there were you know where the guy they were getting it from was going out and also selling they're coming back to him but there is no me that has no meaning to them what what basis do they have why was it a coming together of having a common interest i mean if this was what difference would make to miss florence if mr goodman sold more than one person it doesn't keep him in business i mean he could be just buying from somebody else and selling it to her and making a little bit of a markup doesn't make any difference he's just in that one source that she had to put a supply of into she decided to go to somebody else she had no interest in him staying in business that she had to ensure that he was able to represent of the united states both at trial and here on appeal your honors the judgment here should be affirmed in every respect st of all there is no basis to disturb the jury's verdict that the evidence at trial was sufficient to convict mr goodman beyond a reasonable doubt on the conspiracy count to the contrary the evidence proved that for over a year call your good men trafficked in large wholesale quantities of cocaine which he provided on credit to a few select drug dealers whom he expected and this is confirmed by the intercepted wire conversations whom he expected to work quickly and consistency consistently to resell that cocaine to their own customers in order to return goodmans money to him in short the evidence showed that goodman and his dealers shared a conspiratorial purpose to engage in drug dealing and i can see how they are sharing it with each other that is the other spokes that are just out there in other words what is the proof of the ram you know there's significant proof of the rim in this case your honor especially with respect to mr goodman who demon wheeler and in the course of buying redistribution quantities of drugs from demon wheeler learned that wheeler supplier was goodman and began dealing with goodman directly in the course of meeting good men and developing a personal and drug relationship with him she explained to goodman the way that she had been operating with wheeler and so there's significant evidence of their awareness of each other's process and then ms flores of course goes on to deal with one beneath because and she does significant quantities for over a year so even though the law does not require this your honor there has been a lot of evidence in the case that actually spokes all know each other and they have a good sense of what each other is doing as part of the conspiracy is to a certain extent the one the dealer of mr goodman's  and that's because they all shared an interest in this drug market and economy that they were part of continuing and so when counsel says that flores is indifferent to whether realer is successful that's actually incorrect because what goodman is doing is he's dealing wholesale quantities of drugs wholesale prices to his dealers and then he's expecting them to go out and sell and to return money to him and we have very good evidence from the wire calls of the supplier do your relationship between goodman and dealers and this conspiracy we have with respect to goodman and wheeler we have the argument which is in the record government is exhibit fi eighty three which shows that goodman becomes very angry with real or when he gets behind on his drug dealing and wheeler tells goodman that he was just taking two days off and goodman says just shoot it back because i could have got it done today i don't need to wait two more to use for you for when you feel like doing it let me get mine the bread or the work meaning the money or the drugs and so while our position is that the cases don't draw a distinction between credit and consignment with and sort of like the common law of ailments but here we do have  very good direct evidence that goodman considers these drugs to belong to him until the money is returned to him after that intercepted call where there's a fight between the two of them it shows that they made plans to meet it shows that they did in fact meet there was surveillance of that meeting and there's text messages after that meeting showing that they made up or texted goodman i hate a conspiratorial purpose in seeing wheeler's downstream sales of additional drugs be successful if wheeler is unsuccessful then god goodman can't get his money back  and goodman can't pay for more drugs that he wants to supply to his other dealers including one dollar beneath and their various times to nice for us i'd like to move on to the evidence of the drug wait there was significant evidence in this case that allowed the jury to appropriately infer that the amount of cocaine that was distributed during the course of this conspiracy was well in excess of so again i'm going to start with denise flores as testimony because what she gives us is her own conduct and we know from her testimony that the amounts of cocaine that she was dealing were over the course of over a year were all ultimately obtained from goodman she starts out dealing with wheeler and in relatively small but in quantities ten to twenty grams a week over a couple months that then she begins dealing with one beneath as and she testifies that she understood that goodman was beneath us as supplier so all of the crack all of the cocaine that she was doing with binny ca's was also cocaine that goodman supplied during the course of this conspiracy she testified that she was getting on an average forty to forty five grams of both cocaine and crack on a weekly basis and th she was dealing with many ca's for for about a year until she was arrested she was living with him in his home from about november to may and so on  for us is personal feeling alone we're getting about three kilos of cocaine it adds up very quickly but we know that actually flores is is relatively speaking something of a small fry in the goodman cocaine conspiracy she is getting from beneath as who says over the wire that he's doing five hundred a week and he and so five hundred a week for a year i'm again we're just getting to it we're getting to amounts that are significantly an excess of five kilograms we also had evidence from the wire showing that  need because owed goodman fourteen thousand one hundred dollars and that corresponds at forty seven dollars a gram which was the evidence that flores provided was but what goodman was charging these pieces of evidence that we have about the two and a grams from korea that were seized the amounts that beneath says that he's moving over the wire that makes sense because she testifies about a daily drug operation that she was the problem with the prosecutor's arguments are that when we look at the citations to prefer they didn't support arguments i put that down in the reply i went through page by page where she said m and yet the prosecutor says it all came from mr goodman he is a debt he had we don't know what the debt was for we do know that mr goodman was an illegitimate business he he had a store he had activity t store we don't know what mr binney quizzes debt was for because that wasn't developed missed florus testimony when you go in you read is what you would expect from somebody who's a drug user for many years it's all over the place when the prosecutor says that mr forrest got so many grams of cocaine and so many grams of of crack for mr goodman she makes a salad with force at some organizations or oh i get forty grams of crack at forty grams of cocaine that's not what she said she said i got forty grams and they said was forty grams of crack or forty grams of cocaine and she said yes there was no paperwork here they had a individual under investigation they never even went into the store to look around they did search warrants this they searched his home at the time was arrest they didn't search the store they didn't come up with a shred of paper didn't find a computer record they found nothing what they had here is they took these speculations and they stood them on top of each other time and time again it's as i said it's all speculation when they go and he tells us about miss flora says the drug dealings it's spoke it's a spoke that goes to a hub but doesn't create a wheel the prosecutor said that there was a rim there was no room she said that there was some relationship some common understanding among the bias even miss force who was an insider the ultimate insider who had a  and it's important here because it's because of this idea that there's one conspiracy that there's a ten year mandatory minimum if it wasn't for that one conspiracy there wouldn't be a ten year mandatory minimum would have been up to judge cybil to give the appropriate sentence but she didn't have that option she gave the sentence because of the mandatory of the mandatory minimum and the jury did not find that in the case of one that was over five hundred grams and in the case of the other that it wasn't even five hundred grams so they didn't find this one conspiracy that the prosecutor says existed and the and the effect of that you both united states versus martinez and george versus the u s equal employment opportunity commission on submission so i will ask the clerk please do with your