Court Opinion

ID: 9491651
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:19:36.727437+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:51.846563
License: Public Domain

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Although I agree with the ultimate result the court reaches, my own review of the evidence persuades me that there was no competent evidence from which an inference could be drawn that Daniel Marzano thought that the money Charles Marzano and Mark Davino were giving to him came from Charles’s drug dealings. The one remark cited in the court’s opinion indicates only that Daniel knew about Charles’s illegal drug activities. I find it too much of a stretch to conclude that Daniel’s offhand response to the question about where the money would come from demonstrates that Daniel thought he was laundering the proceeds from drug transactions. I therefore find the discussion of transferred intent, ante at 40(M01, to be unnecessary on this record. With respect to this part of the opinion, I think it is enough to note that there was ample evidence that Daniel knew he was laundering embezzled funds. That in turn is enough to sustain his conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 1956(a)(l)(B)(i).
Indeed, the only relevance of a potential link between Daniel’s illegal activities and Charles’s drag dealings goes to the questions of the propriety of joining Daniel’s case to Charles’s under Fed.R.Crim.P. 8(b) and the correctness of the district court’s refusal to sever the two cases under Fed.R.Crim.P. 14. Judge Ripple makes a powerful argument that the initial decision to join the two cases in the same indictment violated Rule 8(b). He also rightly notes that we must decide whether joinder was proper by looking at the face of the indictment, not at evidence that later enters the case. I am concerned about relying on a “chain or circle that connects at one end Charles Marzano’s drag dealings in which his cousin was not involved and at the other end the cousin’s laundering of the proceeds of Gentile’s embezzlement incident to the drug conspiracy.” Ante at 401. That reasoning would justify including practically any unrelated criminal activity of someone’s *405associate in an indictment, as long as the associate was engaged in some joint criminal activity with the accused person as well. Rule 8(b) requires line-drawing somewhere along this chain, even though it acknowledges the possibility of joining together defendants who have participated in the same “series of acts or transactions constituting an offense or offenses.”
For purposes of the charges under § 1956(a)(l)(B)(i), however, the nature of the illegal funds the accused is laundering seems less important to me than the fact that both defendants are alleged to be violating that statute through a connected series of acts and transactions. Cf. Edwards v. United States, — U.S. -, 118 S.Ct. 1475, 140 L.Ed.2d 703 (1998). The government was entitled to prove the exact way in which the statute was violated at the trial. Furthermore, even if this indictment improperly joined Daniel’s case to that of Charles and his associates, it is clear that Rule 8(b) violations are subject to the doctrine of harmless error. See United States v. Lane, 474 U.S. 438, 449, 106 S.Ct. 725, 88 L.Ed.2d 814 (1986). The district court here was scrupulous about cautioning the jury not to attribute any of the drug activities to Daniel. Looking at the record as a whole, I am confident that this jury did not confuse either the evidence or the charges that pertained to each person. I do not rely for this on the supposition that a significant percentage of the drug evidence would have been admissible in a trial against Daniel alone, because I have my doubts about that as well. Instead, I rely on the very distinctness of the two charges and the district court’s sound handling of the trial.
With these reservations, I concur in the judgment of the court.