Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-1059_e2p3.pdf
Page Number: 13

Cite as:  590 U. S. ____ (2020) 

11 

Opinion of the Court 

that constraint raised no problem: The entire point of the 
fraudsters’ plans was to obtain the employees’ services.  But 
now consider the difficulty if the prosecution in Cleveland 
had raised a similar employee-labor argument.  As the Gov-
ernment noted at oral argument here, the fraud on Louisi-
ana’s licensing system doubtless imposed costs calculable in
employee  time:  If  nothing  else,  some  state  worker  had  to
process  each  of  the  fraudster’s  falsified  applications.    But 
still,  the  Government  acknowledged,  those  costs  were
“[i]ncidental.”  Tr. of Oral Arg. 63.  The object of the scheme
was never to get the employees’ labor: It was to get gaming 
licenses.  So the labor costs could not sustain the conviction 
for property fraud.  See id., at 62–63. 

This case is no different.  The time and labor of Port Au-
thority employees were just the implementation costs of the 
defendants’ scheme to reallocate the Bridge’s access lanes.
Or  said  another  way,  the  labor  costs  were  an  incidental 
(even if foreseen) byproduct of Baroni’s and Kelly’s regula-
tory object.  Neither defendant sought to obtain the services
that the employees provided.  The back-up toll collectors—
whom  Baroni  joked  would  just  “sit  there  and  wait”—did 
nothing he or Kelly thought useful.  App. 303; see supra, at 
5.  Indeed, those workers came onto the scene only because 
the Port Authority’s chief engineer managed to restore one 
of  Fort  Lee’s  lanes  to  reduce  the  risk  of  traffic  accidents. 
See  supra,  at  5.  In  the  defendants’  original  plan,  which
scrapped all reserved lanes, there was no reason for extra
toll collectors.  And similarly, Baroni and Kelly did not hope
to obtain the data that the traffic engineers spent their time
collecting.  By  the  Government’s  own  account,  the  traffic
study the defendants used for a cover story was a “sham,” 
and  they  never  asked  to  see  its  results.    Brief  for  United 

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a joke.”  Ibid.  Wire fraud?  No.  And for the reason Judge Easterbrook 
gave: “[T]he victim’s loss must be an objective of the [deceitful] scheme
rather than a byproduct of it.”  Id., at 1226.