Court Opinion

ID: 9491577
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:17:49.174411+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:49.580128
License: Public Domain

JACOBS, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the majority opinion and accept its reasoning. I write separately to add a couple of observations provoked by the difference in result between this case and United States v. Rossomando, 144 F.3d 197 (2d Cir.1998).
The two cases are arrestingly similar: both involve recipients of New York City Fire Department disability pensions who earned non-pension income above the Pension Fund’s Safeguard Amount and were convicted of mail fraud for falsely representing on disclosure forms filed with the Pension Fund that their level of income was below the Safeguard Amount. The sole difference in conduct and circumstance between this case and Rossomando is the defendants’ explanations of their state of mind when they completed the disclosure forms: (a) Gole conceded that he understood his income was above the Safeguard Amount as promulgated by the Pension Fund but argued that the Fund’s interpretation was inconsistent with the governing regulation; (b) Rossomando claimed that he believed, based on conversations with union personnel, that his income was so far below the Safeguard Amount that the actual dollar amount was immaterial to the Pension Fund and its deliberation's.
The majority opinion distinguishes Rosso-mando on the ground that Rossomando knew “the immateriality of the false statements he made,” while “Gole admitted to knowing that lying on his income report would affect the NYCFD Pension Fund’s calculation of his pension.” Majority op. [at 168-69]. Rossomando is thus limited to the quite peculiar facts that compelled the Rossomando result under the only holding that Rossomando will support: a defendant’s belief that information is immaterial to a disbursement decision amounts to a defense to mail fraud only if the disbursement is mechanical as opposed to discretionary, see Rossomando, 144 F.3d at 201 n. 5, and a jury finds that such a belief is reasonable, guided by a charge that presumably gives guidance on the (in part legal) question of what is reasonable and what is not.
A troubling feature of this case and Rosso-mando — and in my view, the circumstance that places strain on the intent element of the mail-fraud prosecutions in both cases — is that the defendant union members were caught up in a larger dispute over the Safeguard Amount. The regulation governing the Safeguard Amount requires that the pension payments be reduced to the extent that the total of outside earnings and pension exceed the “current maximum salary for the title next higher than that held by” the firefighter at retirement. N.Y. City Admin. Code, tit. 13, §§ 356-57.
The use of the word “salary” (under any normal usage) would seem to rule out consideration of overtime pay. No reference to “overtime” appears in the regulation, and no definition is given (an odd omission if overtime were intended to be payable to persons no longer working as firefighters).
Nevertheless, the Pension Fund trustees have agreed to supplement the Safeguard Amount to reflect the overtime hours of the disabled firefighter in the year prior to his disability (paid at the rate of the next highest rank). And prior to 1996, the trustees supplemented the Safeguard Amount with the average overtime from the disabled firefighter’s three years of highest overtime. The union has taken the even more aggressive position that the Safeguard Amount should be calculated by reference to the actual salary and overtime of the highest paid firefighter in the next highest rank in the given year *170(■i.enot the disabled firefighter). That position, if adopted, would have resulted in a much higher Safeguard Amount in each of the years in question. Understandably, the union has elected not to present its position in an arbitration, and instead appears to have represented to its members that the Pension Fund’s calculations were incorrect and that the pensioners were being cheated.
A charitable view of the union’s role is that an undetermined number of the disabled members, after consulting with union officials, understood the union’s advice as an implicit suggestion that they misstate their non-pension income information to get their due. A review of this case and Rossomando justifies the conclusion that the Pension Fund trustees and the union tolerated or inspired a raid on pension funds for which the firefighters are the only ones being held accountable.