and if this tongue will hear right versus s as you know the district court dismissed investor rights rico claim on the basis that there was no pattern and prepared and you have to prove relatedness in continuity and the district court decided that the alleged bribes the defendants engaged in down in venezuela was unrelated to the acts of mail and wire fraud that were designed to discredit ambassador reich from testifying as an expert witness in a defamation trial that that's primary focus was on the truth of those bribery allegations and that was that was a defamation case the defense brought against my right that your view is if the vertical test is the result is always hon times where that that does not perhaps occur but in this case we obviously have the the the acts of bribery down in venezuela were related to german dissociates because obviously those acts of bribery related in energy sector contracts thousand and twelve the bribery allegations lasted from october of two thousand and nine until november of two thousand and ten and i believe that the phone calls occurred in the fall of two thousand and twelve your task that there was a two year time and time difference no i don't still generally speaking if you get x records hearing occurring within ten years of each other they can be viewed in a block to establish pattern continuity i don't think anything has changed about that h d d and doesn't change that about the statutory definitions of two years as well in th ten year time difference plus the temporal relationship here between the defamation suit being being filed by defendants against b b c down in florida in late two thousand and twelve and again the whole the whole issue in that case was the bri s did it actually occur not and b b c then literally a month later contacts investor right to retain him as an expert and then the next month in november december defendant start making phone calls to distinguishing characteristics of the not isolated events might be first what do you when you had all of them and my first i think the best argument is this common sense relationship that we've been talking about here where ambassador reich was hired as an expert to testify about the truthfulness of these bribery allegations so if you want to buy defense argument defense just woke up some day regardless of the b b c litigation and decided they're going to call investor x clients and discredit him that makes no sense they call rex clients to discredit him from testifying about the bribery allegations that is a common sense relationship which doesn't fall in the h g you just don't get a common sense relationship but that's the only question my question is when you rely on silly purposes results participants victims methods of commission or some other rip into related needs based on distinguishing characteristics that are not isolated to my point goes to the other distinction characteristics but also when you look at common purpose and what are those on the distinguishing characteristics that common sense relationship they just described investor reich was hired as an expert to testify about the bribery allegations and then was discredited from testifying are those isolated events which we are too much into  he was hired as an expert to testify about bribery that's not isolated they are interrelated and connected and that i think goes to the last aging factor as far as purpose is concerned you have a common purpose here and that is to perpetuate and enhance the defen be rather than basically an association that exists only as a criminal conspiracy i think it is the proper level because when you go when you go to asia and you look at why  adopted these factors you get away from the separate scheme approach which suffered from that same problem you can sparse down schemes to be so narrow that nothing can be it's all depends on subjective observation of where the scheme begins where it we do i think we all do we're all here to talk about the case and to and to try to come to resolution of it and and that's the natural way to look at what happened here none of this occurred in isolation it was all if you don't have the the  to somehow distinguish that there has to be an exclusive purpose rather than a common purpose or an exclusive victim rather than a common victim is also country to each tank we have a common victim here it's the people and government of venezuela just because the people that were paying for these inflated contracts i mean clearly the competitors in paper who lost money here it was the people of venezuela the government of venezuela they were clearly the common victim just because there are other victims like a the competitors doesn't mean there isn't a common victim requires a common victim and if there's a rico claim i conclude if there's a rico claim then you're you have access to records extended expenditures fictional provisions and since there's no dispute that mr becker lopez and so i came in and looked at this case in retrospect and when i look at all of the context the defendants in specially mr betancourt have with new york city it's enormous and the response to that on the domicile question is but you know what i never intended to live here and that's that's a subjective if anybody can come up to saying he was thomas and i i think that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence circumstantial evidence where you can look at it and infer yes he's  doing business here is is up in the air but yes he does business here he is at home here he has millions on it always says it's corporations that you can't find present if they're doing business but for people if they do some business in new york city money that that mr betancourt love has has invested here in new york city you look at his homes you look at all of the induced law firm relationships banking relationships p r relationships relationships with with his personal life he has many our time seven and three your honour's we think judge at can was clearly correct that on the face of this complaint this is not a rico case there's no pattern it's there these  that we have to recognize that the rico statute does not cover all violations of the travel act it doesn't cover wire frauds it doesn't cover all intentional torts so the inquiry here is whether or not these are related and as the court this court has recognized and the supreme court has recognized the real protection against excessive application of the rico statute is the pattern requirement i'd like to go directly to some of the discussion with mr grout in that i found it rather stunning actually that now we are told at this point that mr wright the plaintiff was hired as an expert witness this two hundred some odd paragraph multi page seventy some odd page complaint never says that he was a witness of any kind it says he was hired as a consultant it says his profession is r lobbying and political consulting he gives no indication that he has any basis for being an expert witness and i think that's pretty reputation can still be damaged oh absolutely if he does he makes nothing absolutely of what why my focus so much on that point this court has really never confronted a case where the supposedly connection or related notice between two predicate act wax well it might it might be arguably in some cases but the case that the the the plaintiffs cite i think is an excellent illustration of why it's not the case here there is no allegation in this complaint that mister mr reich ever had any information to report to anybody that he reported any information to anybody that he had firsthand knowledge or even expert knowledge  of corruption with respect to to our clients his argument is that he wanted to be hired so that if he were hired he might develop that information he was a consultant he never alleges that he knows some first hand information about these clients and that's exactly the distinction between this case and seven circuits decision in to go up indigo well you have somebody who's an employee of a firm  in tax violations he keeps complaining about it time after time about these tax violations he's he's criticized he's given bad reports on is employment finally he says i'm going to go to the authorities and report this and he goes to the authorities and reports it and he's fired you get that's a retaliation kind of situation this is nothing like that because mr reich didn't report to anybody he didn't threaten to report to anybody he didn't say he had any facts to report to anybody other than the general information that was already in the public domain in the blob's that we're told told about repeatedly in the complaint all he knows is what's publicly available and in addition the only did he not report anything to anybody they tell us in the complaint that they're for government agencies that are already conducting inquiries into the activities of the defendants that never bring any charges but there's really not even a suggestion that is in the united states the s e c the i r s homeland security and the treasury department according to the complaint so this is a case that is a far cry from the kind of case that you might entertain where you might say you if there is a predicate crime and if there is other criminal activity designed to discourage the reporting of that crime or retaliate against somebody who does report that crime under sarbanes oxley that might be a case where they are related but this is not such a case as saying the complaint here of my father backfired or to investigate the ruins business practices in the united states why isn't that brought enough to include economic because he hasn't done excuse me it says the bank hired hired him because at that point he they're trying they're he they haven't at the time that the phone calls are made they haven't been hired there's no reason to believe that they have any information i guess you could say well he's an investigator so you don't use him as an investigator you use somebody else's an investigator but i still think that's a long way away from a situation where somebody has already done an investigation or they already have information that they could report of the alleged rico scheme that the sedan you know is proper is not properly part of it or what can you comment on that it doesn't seem to be part of it we're not told that mr sidin you know had any particular information about their work that he knew anything about the alleged bribery or anything like that so consequently it would not seem that that that seems to be extra what i would think of is really perhaps arguably you and apparently mr sit in your didn't have enough confidence in the plaintiff to keep him on after that but i don't think that that makes it related to the bribery that was going on in arguably going on in venezuela because there's no suggestion that mr sidin you know had any involvement with that at  nothing i think the closest case this isn't lederman case where they submitted some references to a joint letter to the court with twelve points and the court said that's not good enough as an argument you haven't a group district court filings he incorporated his file and so what he incorporated was a special joint appendix two one six two two one seven seven which was his statement of facts allegedly supporting a prima fascia case in footnote four of the court reference and one reference was my client a master card and citibank that subjects me jurisdiction and the court i think you know gave that short shrift as it should have but i think going back to what he supposed to do in an appeal that's all he did so in his one page argument his initial and then the district were dealt with that in the april thirtieth order and went through it in the in the general statement while law firms and enough why the p r was not enough why the so called the focus the money in the bank is really more mr betancourt there was some focus but these these very broad statements and then as the district court correctly noted one of the big difference is that mr truro doesn't have a residence there doesn't own any property there and i think that the comment was made sleeping on the friend's couch really doesn't subject you to personal jurisdiction but the point is i've been put in a position on this appeal we makes no argument i mean what part of judge atkins order does he disagree with what part of his order is he saying was wrong nothing he just kind of throws it on the table and says well go look at one hundred eighteen paragraphs and they submitted then there's something in there go find it spoke about how the pattern element is the bulk work against frivolous rico claims relatedness is one of the most liberal standards in all of rico  rs elements it is it is not a burdensome standard it is not a high hurdle this court has held this that before in feinstein and other cases cited in our briefs so relatedness simply means yeah if they stole a loaf of bread from somebody back in hiring of our right to what's required to establish relatedness on the basis of coverage of coverage well again i think if you look at what mr wall argued here he said well iraq had nothing to conceal he was just a consultant he was is a big a big crusader against corruption down in latin america he had no idea what he knew all they knew was they didn't want him involved in this they could assume based on what you just said that he knew a lot right right and they want to quiet the guy and that's what they did of course they didn't they obviously didn't think about this very well because it got them into litigation one way or the other and they fired off a few phone calls thinking that they could you know muscle people out of the equation like they do like they've been doing to reporters and everybody else up and down the line and again when you look at what they did otto reich it's not like he's the only person they did this to anybody who's critical of their business practices and that as well as his alleged in the complaint is attacked by them all right is one of the many people that they have victimized and yes we rely on publicly available information because that's all that's there and a rule and b which they never brought a motion rule and be challenging the the strength of our allegations we're entitled to do that and we would love to get into discovery to to figure out more of the particulars relating to this corruption and their efforts to silence critics in the united states and in latin america and so this whole argument that mr wright is not some kind of victim of retaliation of course he was retaliated against because they didn't know what he had to say and now that they've got a complaint and it was that the relationship was cut off so early he didn't have time to develop and investigate into figure out more information that would have perhaps helped b b c defend their claims and on this issue that they never got any property they did get property because shortly after mr reich was fired by a b c these guys were able to settle issue of whether he is subject to restriction or one hundred sixty five b so if this case if there is a rico claim and if we are entitled to those expanded jurisdictional provisions we would more be more than happy to go down and and explore that issue with mr turbo and also notice that  relationships all everything is the same he doesn't contest that he's relying on procedural technicalities which i made a strategic just decision not to waste another twelve pages going over the same facts for both defendants and