Court Opinion

ID: 9473693
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:36:59.975989+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:41.233679
License: Public Domain

BAILEY ALDRICH, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring.
It is difficult to disagree with the court’s strong opinion, and I have only one reservation. It is certainly true that defendant, as to whom no reporting rule or regulation whatever is directed, faces jail while the bank, which, in my opinion, post, was in clear violation, faces nothing, and true that the government has gone to the “limits of statutory interpretation” at defendant’s expense. I must also agree that this differentiation in prosecution is not our affair. However, I wish to comment further upon the factual, as well as the statutory, limits to which the government would have the court go.
If, for the moment, we forget November 13 — the government, until recently, forgot the significance of it altogether — on vari*684ous days in November, 1980, defendant purchased a single cashier’s check for less than $10,000, from the Haymarket Cooperative Bank, all for one client, for whom he was purchasing securities from a New York broker. The check transactions, being for less than $10,000, were not individually reportable. The government, on these facts, would have it that defendant must go to jail because he did not bring all the money in at once and acquire a single check. It paints with a broad brush. In its summation it told the jury,
“So the scheme becomes moving large amounts of cash through banks to make it appear legitimate____ In late 1980, • the Bear Stearns money, $100,000----[I]f this is all right, then the reporting requirement is meaningless. If you can simply create 12 phony transactions out of one larger sum of cash and avoid the currency reporting requirement, what’s left of the law? ... That is not the law. The law is that structuring is not okay____ With the $100,000, the first scheme, the web is obvious.”
Apparently government counsel’s so stating the law to the jury was with the court’s approval; it did not correct or change it.
There is nothing in the statute or regulations specifically requiring.a customer to make reports, or to handle his money in any particular fashion; the only reporting duty is on the bank. I find it singular to think that the government should be able to impose duties by indirection, or to say that the customer must conduct himself so as to create such a duty, unless, possibly, in very special circumstances. C.f. United States v. Thompson, 603 F.2d 1200 (5th Cir.1979). “If you purchase a $8,500 check on Monday and another on Tuesday, it is jail for you for not buying them both on Monday if your intent was that the bank should not have to report.” That may be an “obvious web” to the government. It is anything but to me.
November 13, however, was different. On that one day defendant acquired three $8,500 checks from the Haymarket Bank; one from its East Boston branch and two from different tellers in its Hanover Street branch. Even without knowing of the reporting form requirement (I do not agree with the court that the Secretary was unauthorized to issue instructions on the form, though I do agree that defendant was not on notice thereof) a customer knowing, as defendant did, that the bank had a $10,000 reporting obligation, might reasonably think that splitting $17,000 between two tellers, if not $25,000 between two branches, was finagling, with the improper hope that the bank would fail to notice its duty. It is a different matter to attempt to conceal (18 U.S.C. § 1001, opinion, ante, n. 8) when the bank had a duty, as distinguished from avoiding creating one. To say simply, as the court does, that defendant had no duty not to conceal, seems perhaps too easy an answer. The court’s statement that the bank “did not commit any crime by failing to report transactions as it lacked knowledge of their ‘structured nature,’ ” applies rightly to the alleged $100,000 “scheme,” but I believe it assumes the point here, rather than answers it. Here, strictly, the bank did have “knowledge,” and a duty. Defendant could be found to have acted in an artificial manner in order that, through hoped-for inadvertence, the bank would fail to perform it.
The government, however, having improperly obtained a conviction on a more appealing (had it been correct) $100,000, “twelve phony checks” basis, one trial seems enough, and, as a minority judge, I am content not to pursue whether defendant’s single November 13th conduct was punishable.