Opinion ID: 149697
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Government relationship with Dave Bowden

Text: In its investigation, the IRS also relied on Dave Bowden, operator of a car cleaning business, who met Struckman in 1996 when Struckman brought in several cars to be cleaned. Bowden told the IRS that Struckman used $30,000 in cash to buy a car from Bowden and boasted that he sent his wife to the bank nearly every day to withdraw an amount under $10,000. In a grand jury proceeding in 2003 concerning Struckman's wife, Laura, Bowden testified that he had given documents taken from Struckman's car to Hardaway. Before trial, Struckman moved to compel disclosure of material concerning Dave Bowden, including Bowden's tax returns, audit file, motivation for illegal black bag operations at the behest of the government, and past acts of perjury on tax forms. The government at first denied that Bowden had been audited by the IRS, did not produce Bowden's tax returns, and denied that Bowden had given photocopies of papers that he had taken from Struckman's car to Hardaway or any other IRS agents. As it turned out, Bowden had in fact received notice of an audit from the civil division of the IRS in 2004 and contacted Hardaway about it soon afterwards. Hardaway then had contact with the auditor about Bowden's audit, but never memorialized either his contact with Bowden or that with the auditor at the time, waiting until two days after the court-ordered motion to compelnearly three years after the contactto do so. Hardaway asserted that he had told the prosecutors on several occasions, the last time on the day after the court order compelling disclosure of information about Bowden's audit, about his contacts. In declarations under penalty of perjury submitted to the district court, attorneys Wszalek and Odulio each acknowledged Hardaway's post-disclosure order statement to them, but said that he did not recall any earlier disclosure by Hardaway about the audit contacts. One day after the court's order compelling disclosure and the same day as Hardaway's last disclosure to the prosecutors, the government changed its stance: The government acknowledged it had made a `misstatement' concerning the existence of an audit on Bowden and that it had other exculpatory information concerning Bowden's contact with IRS agents. Additionally, Bowden told IRS criminal investigation agents that he had taken documents from Struckman's car in 1996 or 1997, on his own initiative, and that he had later given those documents, along with others Struckman had given directly to Bowden, to Hardaway. Bowden also recalled telling Hardaway how he had obtained the documents. At the evidentiary hearing on the motion to dismiss, Hardaway continued to recall some contact with the IRS auditor but deniedcontrary to testimony by the IRS agent assigned to audit Bowdenany recollection of an in-person meeting with the auditor about Bowden's audit or of giving the auditor access to records that Bowden had given to Hardaway. He also initially denied any recollection of receiving the documents taken from Struckman's car by Bowden. Only when Struckman's counsel demanded them did Hardaway remember the existence of a box of documents related to the case that he had inexplicably kept apart from the other case documents.
After the evidentiary hearing on the motions to dismiss, the district court issued an 83-page order denying the motions. The district court first rejected Struckman's argument that the court did not have personal jurisdiction over him because of the manner in which he was brought from Panama, relying on the Ker/Frisbie doctrine. That doctrine provides generally that the manner by which a defendant is brought to trial does not affect the government's ability to try him. United States v. Matta-Ballesteros, 71 F.3d 754, 762 (9th Cir.1995) (citing Ker v. Illinois, 119 U.S. 436, 444, 7 S.Ct. 225, 30 L.Ed. 421 (1886) and Frisbie v. Collins, 342 U.S. 519, 522, 72 S.Ct. 509, 96 L.Ed. 541 (1952)), cert. denied, 519 U.S. 1118, 117 S.Ct. 965, 136 L.Ed.2d 850 (1997). Struckman maintained that Panama had actually extradited, not deported him, and that the extradition did not comply with the Extradition Treaty between Panama and the United States, in which case the Ker/Frisbie doctrine would not apply. As to Struckman's motion to dismiss the indictment on grounds of misconduct in the investigation and in responding to discovery, the district court declared that the government had indeed committed serious Brady/Giglio violations. [4] First, as to the informant Ted, the district court found that information regarding the identity of the informant submitted by Hardaway and Chinn right before trial was remarkably different from their previous statements when it comes to details. Disbelieving the agents' ultimate submissions, the court concluded that: [T]he sheer volume of discrepancies in the testimony of the agents who claim to have handled the informant, the degree of irregularities in the record concerning the alleged informant, as well as the uncontested testimony of [Bonnie Moritz and Jennifer Wininger] that Gary Moritz could not have been the informant, lead the court to find that there was no single source of information for all the information attributed to Ted, and that the source of all that information could not have been Gary Moritz. . . . . While in isolation all these discrepancies could very well be attributed to sloppy record keeping, faulty memories, simple misstatements or minor omissions, in the aggregate, they add to nothing more than a house of cards built to support the illusion of the existence of [Ted]. Regarding the Bowden information, the district court similarly found that the government had been considerably less than forthcoming. There was a secret deal between Hardaway and Dave Bowden, the district court found, pursuant to which [n]ot only was Bowden not prosecuted[on tax-related charges], but in return for his testimony in the Laura Struckman trial, and in the upcoming trial of David Struckman,. . . Hardaway prevented a proper audit of Dave Bowden by the civil branch of the IRS. Also, the district court concluded that [w]hile it may be a coincidence that the box of documents Bowden gave to SA Hardaway [was] simply kept out of the knowledge of the prosecutors, it is more likely that SA Hardaway was trying to maintain those records separate from the investigatory file in this case. Because the government ha[d] yet to produce the documents Bowden took and copied from defendant's cars, the court went on to declare that given the pattern of misconduct in the case, . . . the government should not be allowed to introduce[ ] those documents at trial. Despite its strong condemnation of the government and its finding of Brady/Giglio violations, the district court rejected Struckman's motion to dismiss on Brady/Giglio grounds. Instead, the court excluded evidence attributed to Ted, precluded Bowden from appearing as a witness at trial, excluded all evidence Bowden had taken from Struckman's car, and required the government to assure that the evidence produced at trial was not derived from suppressed evidence. The district court did not make any finding as to whether the prosecutorsas opposed to the IRS investigators  engaged in affirmative misconduct. Struckman proceeded to trial. O'Brien, Hardaway, and Chinn did not testify. Struckman was convicted of one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States under 18 U.S.C. § 371 and three counts of income tax evasion under 26 U.S.C. § 7201. He was sentenced to 70 months imprisonment and ordered to pay more than $2.9 million in restitution. The trial court never made further inquiry into the actual sources of the information attributed to Ted, and the government never revealed them. Struckman now appeals the district court's denial of his motions to dismiss the indictment.