Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-15-03547/USCOURTS-ca7-15-03547-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Shaft Jones
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

In the 

United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 15‐3547

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff‐Appellee,

v.

SHAFT JONES,

Defendant‐Appellant.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Northern District of Indiana, Fort Wayne Division.

No. 1:11‐cr‐00078‐TLS‐1 — Theresa L. Springmann, Judge.

____________________

ARGUED NOVEMBER 2, 2016 — DECIDED DECEMBER 12, 2016

____________________

Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and POSNER and WILLIAMS,

Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge. A federal jury found the defendant

guilty of conspiring to possess, with intent to distribute, five

or more kilograms of cocaine, and of related crimes includ‐

ing carrying a gun in connection with drug trafficking. The

district judge sentenced him to 270 months in prison.

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2 No. 15‐3547   

A government informant named Martinez had arranged

with Jones to sell him 20 kilograms of powder cocaine. (The

term he used was “20 eggs” for making omelettes. Obvious‐

ly that was code.) At their rendezvous outside a car wash

police seized Jones, who drove his luxury SUV through the

car wash and emerged to a semicircle of waiting police cars,

and in a pat‐down search found a loaded pistol and four

magazines each containing 20 bullets. The police also found

an assault rifle in the back seat of Jones’s car together with

four more magazines, each containing 30 bullets, plus a

night‐vision scope and bags containing a total of $353,443 in

cash. Pursuant to a search warrant, police found in his home

and in a second car parked there another $321,280 in cash

plus more guns and ammunition, a bullet‐proof vest, a mon‐

ey counter, and a digital scale.

By the time their searches were done, they had seized

$890,210 from Jones, including cash from several bank ac‐

counts. There was no evidence that he could have obtained

this much cash from lawful business dealings; indeed there

was no credible evidence that he had any lawful sources of

money. While in jail awaiting trial he told another prisoner

that he’d been at the car wash to buy “keys,” which is a

street name for cocaine. He bragged that he never bought

less than $100,000 worth of cocaine at a time. The cash,

which the judge found to be proceeds of drug dealing, was

evidence that Jones had sold 31.79 kilograms of cocaine, as‐

suming a price of $28,000 a kilogram. Adding the 20 kilo‐

grams promised in the sting operation, the judge concluded

that Jones had engaged in an ongoing scheme that had in‐

volved the purchase and resale of more than 50 kilograms of

cocaine. There was also evidence that he’d conspired with

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No. 15‐3547 3

brokers in the criminal drug trade to purchase illegal drugs

and resell them.

The judge, concerned particularly about the considerable

weaponry found in Jones’s car when he was arrested, and

about the magnitude of his drug activity, sentenced him to

270 months in prison, a sentence at the top of the applicable

guidelines range.

The arguments for reversal made by the defendant’s

lawyer in his briefs and at oral argument were exceptionally

weak, including his argument that the $353,443 in cash

found in the defendant’s car could have been for anything,

when obviously it was to purchase cocaine from Martinez,

the informant. There was no evidence of any other possible

use of the money, or any other possible motive for meeting

with the informant, who testified plausibly about his negoti‐

ations and meeting with the defendant. No motive was of‐

fered for carrying so much weaponry if the money was to be

given to the recipient (Martinez) for a legal transaction. He

argues that he did not have enough money with him to

complete the transaction: he had agreed to buy 20 kilograms

of cocaine at $26,000 per kilogram, but as 5 of those kilo‐

grams were to be bought on credit the immediate cost to him

would be $390,000. A lot of money—yet it would hardly

have been a surprise if he’d tried to bargain down the price

that he’d agreed to pay by pleading that $353,443 was all he

had—an amount equal to 90.6 percent of the agreed‐on price

of $390,000, and therefore not trivial. Or he might have

thought the seller would agree to front him even more of the

cocaine for later payment, or reduce the amount of cocaine

that he would buy. A final bit of evidence of the defendant’s

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4 No. 15‐3547   

involvement in the cocaine trade is that as noted earlier a

digital scale was found in his home.

At oral argument the defendant’s lawyer said that his cli‐

ent had been a boxing promoter, but no explanation was of‐

fered for why a boxing promoter should be carrying so

much cash and weaponry, and the evidence that Jones had

ever been one was slim: Martinez testified that the brokers,

in suggesting Jones as a potential client, referred to him as a

“boxing trainer” who “always pa[id] on time,” and Jones

told the waitress at the restaurant that he had taught one of

the brokers to box. The notion that the deal between Jones

and Martinez had something to do with Jones’s work as a

boxing promoter (if indeed he ever did such work) could not

be squared with his having bragged to Martinez that he’d

been in business for 26 years without ever having been im‐

prisoned—a comment that a real boxing promoter would

not have made.

The defendant also disputes the sufficiency of the evi‐

dence supporting his conspiracy conviction. He could not be

convicted of conspiring with the government’s confidential

informant, United States v. Bey, 725 F.3d 643, 649 (7th Cir.

2013), and was not; he was convicted of having conspired

with two brokers to obtain cocaine from Martinez, who held

himself out as a cocaine supplier. The brokers largely

dropped out of the picture before the transaction between

the defendant and Martinez, but a conspiracy is just an

agreement, not the acts that the conspirators agree to com‐

mit, and there was an agreement between the defendant and

the brokers and it is irrelevant that it wasn’t implemented.

The brokers had expected that they would be paid for their

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No. 15‐3547 5

part in the deal, even though Jones had not wanted them to

be present at the transaction.

The defendant also argues that much of the evidence pre‐

sented at his trial should have been excluded. He claims that

the police did not have probable cause to arrest him and

therefore that the evidence seized during the searches of his

SUV and then of his property should have been excluded as

the fruits of an illegal search. But the agents who arrested

him knew he’d been negotiating a sizeable drug deal and

had tried to flee when he saw the police at the car wash.

They thus had probable cause to suppose that he was com‐

mitting a drug offense. He claims that the statements by the

brokers, because they didn’t testify at trial, should have been

excluded as hearsay. But the court did not err in concluding

on the basis of Martinez’s testimony and the content of the

brokers’ statements that the brokers were Jones’s co‐

conspirators.

He further argues that the recordings from the recording

device that Martinez had worn during his conversations

with Jones were unreliable because the batteries of the de‐

vice failed midway through one meeting and because the

tapes displayed an incorrect date. But the government had

produced a chain of custody for the recordings, and the dis‐

trict judge was entitled to admit the recordings and let the

jury decide for itself whether to believe them.

Last, Jones challenges his sentence, arguing that he

wasn’t responsible for more than 50 kilograms of cocaine.

But the district judge had two good reasons to think he was:

calculating backward from the money the government

seized, and relying on testimony that Jones had purchased

90 kilograms through one of the brokers. The government

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6 No. 15‐3547   

had the defendant cold, and the district judge was on solid

footing in saying that a sentence above the guideline range

would be reasonable given the magnitude of Jones’s criminal

activity, though ultimately the judge sentenced Jones within

the guidelines range.

AFFIRMED

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