Opinion ID: 504646
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Scope of Sec. 1341

Text: 42 Finally, Rubin argues that the mail fraud counts under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1341 should be dismissed because they consisted essentially of assertions that he caused members of the Assembly to do unwarranted favors for him and thereby deprived the people of New York of their intangible rights to honest and fair government. He contends that prosecution of this conduct under the mail fraud statute is foreclosed by the Supreme Court's recent decision in McNally v. United States, 107 S.Ct. at 2875. We reject his factual premise. 43 In McNally, the Court dealt with the convictions of Kentucky politicians for mail fraud on the basis of their scheme to require an agency that provided insurance to the commonwealth to share its commissions with agencies owned by the defendants. The Court noted that there had been no allegation, and the jury had not been required to find, that the commonwealth had been defrauded of money or property or deprived of control over its property. Holding that Sec. 1341 was designed to protect only property rights, not the citizens' intangible rights to good government, the Court reversed the convictions. 44 The indictment and proof in the present case are significantly different from those of McNally. Here, the indictment charged Rubin with executing and attempting to execute a scheme and artifice to defraud the people of the State of New York of thousands of dollars in public revenues and to obtain this money by means of false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises. Thus, the court instructed the jury that the indictment charged a scheme to obtain ... money from the State and to defraud the State of New York of public revenues in the form of New York State payroll checks. The jury was instructed that 45 [i]n order to find the defendant guilty of the mail fraud conspiracy, you must find that he conspired with at least one other person to place a secretary, or secretaries on the payroll of a New York State Assembly member or members with the knowledge and intent that that person would work neither for the Assembly or the Assembly member in return for the compensation from the state. 46 In light of the evidence that Rubin caused approximately one-half the salaries of Wagner and Robles to be paid by the Assembly and that they spent no more than 1-2% of their time working on Assembly matters, the evidence amply supported the allegation that Rubin had fraudulently deprived the State of many thousands of dollars, and had not just deprived its citizens of their rights to honest government. His conduct was thus unlike that at issue in McNally and was well within the scope of the mail fraud statute.