Opinion ID: 222737
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Alonzo Braziel

Text: Alonzo Braziel first became involved in the scheme in 2004 as a buyer applying for mortgage loans at the direction of others. The indictment charged that Braziel participated in fraud surrounding the purchases of three residential properties in the Chicago area located at 1430 Portland Avenue, 14820-22 South Hoyne Street, and 7321 South Evans Avenue. Braziel raises two issues on appeal. He argues that the district court erred by admitting a statement made by one of his co-defendants in which Braziel was implicated, in violation of Bruton v. United States, 391 U.S. 123, 88 S.Ct. 1620, 20 L.Ed.2d 476 (1968). Second, Braziel asserts that the district court should not have applied a two-level sophisticated means enhancement in calculating his guideline sentence.
In Bruton v. United States , the Supreme Court held that a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses against him is violated when the confession of a nontestifying co-defendant implicating the defendant as a participant in the crime is admitted in a joint trial of both defendants. 391 U.S. at 137, 88 S.Ct. 1620. A Bruton violation may be avoided, however, by redacting the reference to the defendant and substituting a generic reference such as another person or another member of the group. The issue here is whether the redaction used by the government, substituting for Braziel's name the words straw buyer, was sufficient to solve the Confrontation Clause problem. Braziel argues that, despite the redaction, the straw buyer reference still pointed to him as a participant in the crime. Although this is a close case, we conclude that the use of the edited statement with the straw buyer reference did not violate Bruton here.
The government sought a pretrial ruling on the admissibility of statements made by Braziel's co-defendants, as well as an order to limit defense counsel from eliciting portions of these statements that would give rise to a violation of Bruton. The motion stated that the government would call as a witness FBI Special Agent Donald Kaiser who would relate co-defendant Donald Thomas' confession. Thomas, also on trial with Braziel and Miller, would not testify and thus would not be subject to cross-examination on the statement. The motion summarized the statement that the government would elicit from Special Agent Kaiser. It included a description of the property transaction, but it did not mention that Braziel was incriminated in that section, nor did it provide any description of the redaction that the government intended to use. The day before Special Agent Kaiser's testimony at trial, the government discussed with defense counsel and the court how it had redacted Thomas' statement to conceal Braziel's identity. The prosecutors noted that the original statement referred to Braziel as the purchaser of 14820-22 South Hoyne Avenue, but they had replaced his name with the term straw buyer. Braziel's counsel made no objection at that time. At trial the next day, Special Agent Kaiser offered his testimony: Q: Did Donald Thomas tell you about getting money for any particular properties? A: Yes, he told me that he received $20,000 for the sale of 14822 South Hoyne in Harvey. Q: Did he tell you anything else about that transaction? A: Yes. Mr. Thomas explained to me that he had found a straw buyer, his term, for that property, and he explained the arrangement he had with that straw buyer. Specifically, he stated that the agreement was the straw buyer would purchase the property and then deed the property back to Mr. Thomas. Mr. Thomas would, had agreed to then purchase the property from that straw buyer several months later, and in that time frame Mr. Thomas was supposed to make the mortgage payments until he was able to repurchase that property. Q: Did Donald Thomas say whether he had paid the straw buyer? A: Yes, he indicated that he had agreed to and that he actually did pay that straw buyer $5,000 for the purchase of that property. Several minutes later, Braziel's counsel objected and requested a mistrial, claiming that the jury could identify Braziel as the straw buyer, so that admitting Thomas' incriminating statement without the opportunity to cross-examine him violated Braziel's Confrontation Clause rights under Bruton. [1] Although the Thomas statement was redacted, the jury heard other witnesses read mortgage and bank records naming Braziel as the purchaser of 14820-22 South Hoyne Avenue. Heather McCartney, an employee of lender Fremont Investment & Loan, read the following from a real estate contract in Fremont's loan application for the South Hoyne property as part of her testimony: Q: Who is the buyer? A: Alonzo Braziel. Q: What is the street address of the property at issue? A: 14820 and 22 South Hoyne, Harvey, Illinois 60426. A few minutes before Special Agent Kaiser read from Thomas' statement, he had testified about bank records he had reviewed as part of his investigation: A. The first real estate transaction is 14822 Hoyne Avenue in Harvey, and that transaction closed or funded on 12/20/2004. The seller was the Marquette Bank Trust 16575, and the [buyer] was Alonzo Braziel. [2] Putting these pieces together, the jury could have inferred that Braziel was the straw buyer to whom Thomas referred. The court deferred ruling on Braziel's mistrial motion until later that day when it reviewed the transcript from the conference the day before. Acknowledging some potential confusion in their prior discussion, the court then denied the mistrial motion. Braziel renewed his motion at the close of the trial, and the court again denied the motion.
On appeal, Braziel maintains that the district court erred by denying his motion for a mistrial. We review the district court's denial for an abuse of discretion, United States v. Tanner, 628 F.3d 890, 898 (7th Cir.2010), but we begin by reviewing the court's application of Bruton de novo. See United States v. McGowan, 590 F.3d 446, 453 (7th Cir.2009); United States v. Nash, 482 F.3d 1209, 1218 (10th Cir.2007). After the Supreme Court's further refinement of Bruton in Richardson v. Marsh, 481 U.S. 200, 107 S.Ct. 1702, 95 L.Ed.2d 176 (1987), and Gray v. Maryland, 523 U.S. 185, 118 S.Ct. 1151, 140 L.Ed.2d 294 (1998), it is clear that a redacted confession of a nontestifying co-defendant may be admitted as long as the redaction does not obviously refer to the defendant. This determination, focusing on the minutiae of the substituted word or phrase and surrounding context, is not always easy to make. See Gray, 523 U.S. at 195-96, 118 S.Ct. 1151. A district court's evaluation becomes especially difficult when the defendant's identity can be established through other evidence offered at trial, as here. Statements that despite redaction, obviously refer directly to someone, often obviously the defendant, and which involve inferences that a jury ordinarily could make immediately are prohibited under Bruton. Id. at 196, 118 S.Ct. 1151; see also United States v. Brooks, 125 F.3d 484, 501 (7th Cir.1997) (describing the Richardson Court's distinction between specific testimony identifying the defendant and an inferential incrimination). This case falls close to that subtle line. We have navigated these murky waters in several of our prior cases. In United States v. Stockheimer, 157 F.3d 1082, 1086-87 (7th Cir.1998), we found no Bruton violation where the altered statement did not incriminate the nontestifying defendants by itself. In that case, the government used an open-ended reference (inner circle) that avoided a one-to-one correspondence between the statement and the defendant, even if other evidence at trial incriminated the defendants as those members of the inner circle. See also United States v. Souffront, 338 F.3d 809, 829 (7th Cir.2003) (finding no Bruton violation where there was no one-to-one correspondence between the redacted statement and the defendant). In contrast, a more obvious one-to-one correspondence such as an alias or pseudonym is too transparent to pass muster. For example, in United States v. Hoover, 246 F.3d 1054, 1059 (7th Cir.2001), we concluded that substituting incarcerated leader and unincarcerated leader for the names of the two defendants did not solve the Bruton problems because those were obvious stand-ins for the names of the defendants. The jury in that case heard that one of the two leaders of the gang operated the gang's activities from state prison, while another served as acting leader on the outside. The Hoover court found that incarcerated leader and unincarcerated leader functioned the same way deleted or another similarly obvious indication of alteration would. 246 F.3d at 1059. Those terms so closely resemble Bruton 's unredacted statements that . . . the law must require the same result. Id., quoting Gray, 523 U.S. at 192, 118 S.Ct. 1151. As a general matter, we have recognized that such a delicate determination requires case-by-case consideration rather than a brightline rule. See id. (noting that little evidence is incriminating when viewed in isolation and that to adopt a four-corners rule would defeat the point of Bruton ). Here, we do not find the use of straw buyer in the Thomas confession to be so obvious a reference to Braziel as to violate Bruton. First, unlike an alias or a pseudonym used to disguise a single individual, straw buyer is more similar to an anonymous reference such as another person or an individual. We agree with Braziel that straw buyer is not neutral insofar as it connotes some illicit activity, but the substituted word or phrase need not be neutral. In context, the Thomas statement was describing a transaction with a straw buyer, so using the phrase was not much different from using the buyer or the person. The statement was highly incriminating to Thomas, but his statement was not used to show that Braziel was the buyer. Most important for our analysis, the use of straw buyer did not facially incriminate Braziel as clearly as the terms incarcerated leader and unincarcerated leader did in Hoover. The straw buyer term could refer to anyone. Taken alone, nothing in Thomas' statement as told by Special Agent Kaiser suggests that Braziel was the straw buyer. Second, although a reasonable jury member could have concluded that Braziel was the straw buyer to which Thomas referred by comparing other evidence presented at trial, the evidence required to make that connection was farther removed from the redacted statement than the clear correspondences present in Gray and Hoover. The Supreme Court has distinguished this type of acceptable indirect inference from an unacceptable immediate inference. See Gray, 523 U.S. at 195-96, 118 S.Ct. 1151; Richardson, 481 U.S. at 208, 107 S.Ct. 1702 (reiterating that only those statements that expressly implicate the defendant or are powerfully incriminating trigger Bruton ). Though the case came very close to the Bruton line, the district court did not run afoul of Bruton by admitting the statement and did not abuse its discretion by denying a mistrial.
At sentencing, Braziel objected to the two-level upward adjustment for sophisticated means recommended by the presentence investigation report. See U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1(b)(9)(C). The district court rejected Braziel's arguments, applied the adjustment, and imposed a within-guidelines sentence of 40 months in prison on each of his three counts of mail fraud. The court stated that it was applying the sophisticated means enhancement to Braziel, as it had to every other defendant involved in the scheme, because the whole scheme was sophisticated. We review the district court's finding for clear error. United States v. Wayland, 549 F.3d 526, 528 (7th Cir.2008). Braziel argues on appeal that the district court erred by applying the enhancement to him on the basis of the sophistication of the general scheme rather than his activities in particular. This argument is not consistent with the guidelines definition of relevant conduct. See U.S.S.G. § 1B1.3(a)(1)(B). Under the guideline rule for relevant conduct, Braziel is responsible for all reasonably foreseeable acts and omissions of others in furtherance of the jointly undertaken criminal activity, even if not charged as a conspiracy. Id. Therefore, a sophisticated means enhancement could be applied to Braziel so long as the use of sophisticated means by other criminal associates was reasonably foreseeable to him. See United States v. Crosgrove, 637 F.3d 646, 666 (6th Cir.2011) (affirming use of enhancement based on activities of others); United States v. Jenkins-Watts, 574 F.3d 950, 965 (8th Cir.2009) (same). The district court did not err by finding this whole scheme to be sophisticated. The application note defines sophisticated means as especially complex or especially intricate offense conduct pertaining to the execution or concealment of an offense. U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1, note 8(B). We have upheld the use of the enhancement when the conduct shows a greater level of planning or concealment than a typical fraud of its kind. United States v. Landwer, 640 F.3d 769, 771 (7th Cir.2011), quoting United States v. Knox, 624 F.3d 865, 871 (7th Cir.2010). The commentary provides several examples of such conduct, illustrating the wide variety of criminal behavior covered by the theft and fraud guideline. See also Wayland, 549 F.3d at 528 (elaborating on the meaning of the commentary). Here, the defendants' overall scheme lasted three years and involved numerous complex fraudulent transactions, the creation of fake documents, and the participation of nearly twenty individuals. The district court did not err in deeming it sophisticated. Nor did the district court err by applying the enhancement on the basis of its finding that the whole scheme was sophisticated. The evidence showed that Braziel spoke with his co-defendants about several aspects of the general schemefrom the falsifications of rent and employment records to the concealment of financial transfers among the participants. On the basis of this evidence, the conspiracy's sophisticated criminal conduct was reasonably foreseeable to him. We affirm Braziel's sentence.