Opinion ID: 552336
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Contents of Earlier Mailings.

Text: This brings us to the heart of defendant's appeal: whether the district court's finding that the first 11 mailers contained cocaine was clearly erroneous. Essentially, the evidence as to the packages' contents boils down to (1) the sender's receipts referable to those packages, (2) the seizure of the twelfth package, (3) Sklar's post-arrest statements, and (4) the inferences logically to be drawn from this evidence under the aggregate of the attendant circumstances. 2 Although the question is close, this evidence, viewed in a light favorable to the government, was adequate to bottom the challenged finding. We explain briefly. The receipts, the handwriting, the sender's consistent use of fictitious names, and the packages' common points of origin (south Florida) and destination (all were mailed to Sklar at remote post office boxes), were more than enough to allow a finding that all 12 envelopes had been sent by the same person. The evidence of stealth was apparent; the sender, after all, not only employed aliases, but gave four different addresses (three of which were nonexistent). In the same vein, reasonable suspicion could attend Sklar's serial rental of successive post office boxes in towns where he neither lived nor worked. The court could certainly have inferred that the mailings were illicit. Sklar's acceptance of the twelfth package and his self-confessed knowledge of its contents also had evidentiary significance with respect to the earlier mailings. When several acts closely resembling each other occur in a series, and the known characteristics of each are on the same order, there is room to infer that characteristics not fully known will bear the same degree of resemblance. To cap the presentation, Sklar's postarrest admissions--that he knew what Package No. 12 contained, that he had survived from September 1988 to January 1989 by selling cocaine, and that the money orders found in his car were to be sent to his source to pay for the shipment in question and for antecedent debts--were adequate to convince a rational factfinder, on a preponderance standard, of the probable existence of cocaine in the original 11 packages. See, e.g., Restrepo, 903 F.2d at 654-55 (discussing quantum of proof necessary to meet preponderance standard in sentencing guideline context). The defendant argues that because the 11 earlier packages were not produced and there was no direct evidence of their contents the district court's finding that they contained cocaine was too speculative to stand. We do not agree. It is settled that the existence of narcotics can be satisfactorily established for sentencing purposes by circumstantial as well as direct evidence, so long as the standard of reliability is met. See, e.g., Bradley, 917 F.2d at 605; United States v. Hilton, 894 F.2d 485, 488 (1st Cir.1990); United States v. Gerante, 891 F.2d 364, 368-69 (1st Cir.1989); United States v. McMahon, 861 F.2d 8, 11 (1st Cir.1988). The law is not so struthious as to compel a judge, in making factbound determinations under the sentencing guidelines, to divorce himself or herself from common sense or to ignore what is perfectly obvious.