Opinion ID: 2967751
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Promotion Money Laundering

Text: Under the evidence, the Industrial Check Transactions were designed to avoid disclosing the Related Party Transactions to Medicaid, allowing the Boldens to evade Medicaid’s regulatory requirements and charge Medicaid inflated costs. Further, Emerald Health’s payments to Industrial compensated Nelson for his part in the scheme, encouraging his continued participation therein. Finally, Carolina Supply used the money it received from Industrial to purchase and UNITED STATES v. BOLDEN 21 deliver part of the supplies Industrial billed to Emerald Health. These partial deliveries provided an aura of legitimacy to Emerald Health’s payments to Industrial, allowing the Boldens to further conceal their scheme. Thus, the circumstances underlying the Industrial Check Transactions are sufficient to justify the finding that the Boldens committed promotion money laundering. In other decisions, we have ruled similarly. For example, in United States v. Wilkinson, 137 F.3d 214 (4th Cir. 1998), we found the evidence sufficient to sustain convictions for promotion money laundering. There, the defendants had obtained loans from an insurance company by misrepresenting that the funds would be used to finance accounts receivable for physicians. The funds were instead employed to promote risky non-medical businesses. In their scheme, the defendants created a sham business for the purpose of handling the loans. The insurance company wired loan proceeds to the sham business, which transferred those proceeds to the non-medical businesses. We found the transactions to constitute promotion money laundering, in contravention of § 1956(a)(1)(A)(i), because, as Judge Hamilton explained, the transfer of money from [the sham business] to the non-medical businesses was integral to the success of the overall scheme. Id. at 221. In this case, Industrial was a sham business, used solely to deceive Medicaid on the Related Party Transactions, and it was thus integral to the success of the scheme.