Archive for the ‘Linda Pence’ Category

Can Linda Pence Say This About Corruption?

ZOELLER WILL SEEK ENHANCED PUBLIC CORRUPTION AUTHORITY

Priority to restore and retain public trust with transparency

(INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA) - Greg Zoeller, Republican candidate for Attorney General will seek additional authority for fighting public corruption by the Office of the Attorney General. “Fighting public corruption will be a priority in the Office of the Attorney General,” said Zoeller. “Our goal will be to provide greater public confidence in the handling of taxpayers’ money.”

Zoeller noted it is the statutory duty of the Attorney General to collect public funds following the certification of an audit by the State Board of Accounts (SBOA). During 2007 the SBOA certified over 50 audits to the Office of the Attorney General for collection. These include cases of theft and embezzlement of public funds by those entrusted with the responsibility over the money. Other cases involve poor record keeping and mismanagement of public accounts.

Zoeller said the Public Corruption Unit within the office would only handle those cases involving a breach of trust for personal gain and not cases involving accounting errors that required regular collections efforts. Under Zoeller’s proposal the Office of the Attorney General would seek additional authority:

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You just can’t make this stuff up…

Meet “The Yogurt Connection.” In the 1980s, it was the largest marijuana-smuggling ring in history. Started around 1975, it spanned eleven states and shipped 125 tons of marijuana valued at anywhere between $50 and $100 million from Columbia, Jamaica, and Thailand. And it was operated out of (believe it or not) Indianapolis, Indiana.

The drug ring was operated by Linda Leary and her two sons, Richard and Paul Heilbrunn. The Yogurt Connection (a term coined by prosecutors at their trial) got its name from the yogurt franchise that the family owned.

Mrs. Leary and her sons were high class dealers. They sold drugs on the side and circulated, their dealing unknown, at the highest levels of Indianapolis society. Paul Heilbrunn was a broker and a financier. He wrote a column for a local business news magazine (his business acumen helped to launder the gang’s drug money in various Caribbean and Latin American banks). The family made frequent loans to such places as a radio station and a cable company (and even to that ubiquitous hotel room staple, the Indianapolis Dining Guide).

Leary was the head of the Indy League of Women Voters and was president of the local chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women. She held fundraisers for the Indianapolis Zoo and publicly supported the drug enforcement policies and good government campaigns of Dick Lugar, who was then the mayor of Indianapolis.

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Ah, the miracle of Google.

Meet Carl Liebowitz, a lawyer and “promoter of tax shelters.” In 1984, a grand jury started looking into the legalities of Liebowitz’s tax shelters. Two years later, Liebowitz became concerned that his business partner, Gary Van Waeyenberghe, was going to testify against him before the grand jury.

So Carl Liebowitz went to a guy named Donald Wrobel and hired him for a hit on his partner’s life. Wrobel tried to murder the partner, failed, and was eventually arrested. Wrobel and Liebowitz were eventually convicted.

Court documents indicate that Liebowitz lured his partner to a phone booth to receive a call from him at an appointed hour. Wrobel, armed with a rifle and a pistol, was hiding nearby. The phone in the booth rang. Liebowitz, on the call, spoke to his partner, saying, “I hear you’ve been talking to the feds.” At that moment, Wrobel fired at the phone booth, shattering the glass, but missing Van Waeyenberghe.

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Or rather, her firm’s clients.

Wednesday, Linda Pence called on Attorney General Steve Carter to investigate the recent hike in gas prices in Indiana. She blamed price gouging.

Carter responded by pointing to busted pipelines, a hurricane closing almost five hundred oil platforms in the gulf, that big wind storm Pence was apparently oblivious to, and similar gas prices in neighboring states.

Carter then encouraged Pence to be forthcoming with any evidence of price fixing and collusion that might aid in an investigation by his office. Thus far, she hasn’t provided any.

Then Advance Indiana pointed out this:

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Linda Pence had a press conference demanding that Attorney General Steve Carter investigate allegations of gasoline price gouging in the wake of the remnants of Hurricane Ike battering much of Indiana.

Steve Carter’s response is priceless.

From the Courier-Journal, she asks:

“It is the job of the attorney general not to turn a blind eye to big oil,” Pence said. “In this situation, the attorney general should actively investigate the pricing practices in Indiana and why our consumers are treated differently.”

Steve Carter answers:

Carter said there are good reasons for some of Indiana’s increases. The wholesale price that Hoosier stations were paying for gas recently spiked higher than their retail prices, although the wholesale price has dropped in the past two days. Also, many crude-oil operations in the Gulf, where Indiana gets much of its gas, remain shuttered and a major pipeline to the region is not pumping gas.

After laying out the market situation, which sort of makes Pence’s claims and demands look absurd, Carter suggests that all of those facts might still be wrong, and says that Linda Pence can provide any information she might have to aid with an investigation:

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It seems that Linda Pence was just too shady a character for them, having spent so much time defending the folks that the members of the Fraternal Order of Police spend an awful lot of effort catching.

Zoeller Receives Backing of Indiana F.O.P.

(INDIANAPOLIS) Republican Candidate for Indiana Attorney General, Greg Zoeller, has received the Indiana Fraternal Order of Police Endorsement.

The organization announced the names of the candidates it voted to support in the upcoming November 4th Election. “…we need your help to elect those candidates at the state and national levels,” the announcement on the F.O.P. website said. There are 14,000 members of the Fraternal Order of Police in Indiana.

“I am honored to receive the endorsement of the Indiana State F.O.P.,” said Zoeller. “Their support can be seen as an affirmation of the work I have done with law enforcement officers across the state over the past 8 years as Chief Deputy Attorney General.”

“These officers recognize the important role of the Attorney General’s Office in law enforcement to protect the people of Indiana. I pledge to continue to earn the support of those in law enforcement by supporting them in all they do.”

If elected, Zoeller has pledged to work with Indiana prosecutors, sheriffs and law enforcement to protect our children against online sex predators, continue the fight against telemarketers and public corruption and to defend our teachers in nuisance litigation to help them restore discipline to the classroom.

The NWI Times has an article about the AG race:

Democrat Linda Pence on Friday accused the Republican Indiana attorney general and his chief deputy, Greg Zoeller, of dragging their heels on a region corruption case in furtherance of their political careers.

Pence, who is battling Zoeller to become the state’s next top lawyer, sharply criticized the progress GOP Attorney General Steve Carter has made in a 2004 federal civil lawsuit he filed to hold former East Chicago officials financially responsible for a 1999 sidewalks-for-vote scheme.

“If there’s a corruption case in Indiana, it will not take me nine years and still not have it done,” Pence said in a meeting with The Times. “I could have had this done in two years, easy.”

Linda Pence either just doesn’t get it, or she’s deliberately trying to be misleading. I’m disinclined to think she is stupid, so the latter must be operative here.

The East Chicago corruption case, involving Democrat Bob Pastrick’s “sidewalks-for-votes” scheme, has 27 defendants and is being pursued under the RICO statue. That’s a lot of defendants, and RICO cases tend to be more complex than the sort of average case that can be solved in an hour on Law & Order or be the subject of pithy snark by William Shatner on Boston Legal.

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First came the whole thing about her being the lawyer for a defendant in the East Chicago sidewalks-for-votes corruption case.

Then came the fundraising at the law firm of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Then came the news that she defended a state senator who was close to corruption in the Build Indiana Fund and pled guilty on tax charges.

Now comes word that Linda Pence is hiring a Chicago media shop, Adelstein Liston, to do her ads for her.

Among Adelstein Liston’s notable clients listed on their website? Alexi Giannoulias, the Illinois state treasurer.

When Giannoulias ran for office, Barack Obama was one of the few elected officials in Illinois willing to back him in the Democratic primary. This was one of the only times in Obama’s career that he endorsed someone that was not backed by the Illinois establishment and the Chicago machine. Giannoulias, it seems, was too dirty for them. Broadway Bank, where he was an executive (and where Obama’s senate campaign kept its accounts), had apparently been loaning money to mafia figures.

David Fredosso, in The Case Against Barack Obama, writes of Giannoulias:

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Just think, they’re all so smart and interesting…

I guess that makes everyone else so stupid and boring…

Isn’t it funny how people who are smart and interesting invariably turn out to be Democrats? That was the reaction I had when I found out that Linda Pence was the Democratic candidate for Attorney General of Indiana.

Let me say a couple of disclaimers right off. I’m not from Indiana. I don’t know what the issues are in this race. I don’t know anything about what’s going on in this campaign.

But I do know Linda Pence. I’ve known her as a lawyer for many years. She is really smart and tough as nails. She just seems like the kind of lawyer’s lawyer any state would want to have as its Attorney General.

I never really knew anything about her partisan political affiliations until I recently found out she was running as a Democrat for the Indiana AG. Again, all I knew was that she is a great lawyer and a smart, funny, and interesting person. It should have been obvious that she was a Democrat.

She’s no relation to the right-wing nutjob Mike Pence who is a Congressperson in Indiana. And I see that the Wall Street Journal recently took a swipe at her for being a “trial lawyer” who would be tough on corporations. Sounds like a pretty good endorsement to me.

Anybody who is in Indiana should know that they’ve got a great AG candidate in their state.

Only lefty crazies would think that a trial lawyer with a reputation for defending corrupt Democrats would make a good attorney general.

Now, I haven’t posted much about Linda Pence lately (something for which I intend to remedy soon with yet more information on her shadiness), but let’s review her record for a bit.

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                                                                                                            Republican Candidate for Attorney General Greg Zoeller was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal today. You can view the editorial here or read below.

Challenging Spitzerism at the Polls
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
August 1, 2008
wsj

Take one part ego, one part ambition and one part lawyer, mix it with an office that has few restraints on power, and you’ll end up with the worst sort of state attorney general. Take Dan Greear, and you’ll have a man at the front of a nascent electoral movement to change the formula.

Mr. Greear is the 40-year-old Republican lawyer working to unseat West Virginia’s entrenched top prosecutor, Darrell McGraw. His quest has become a case study in the opportunities, and pitfalls, of an upstart reformer challenging an incumbent attorney general who, like New York’s Eliot Spitzer, has cemented his position through populism and political patronage.

It’s also an insight into a new wave of reformist candidates across the country. As state attorneys general have become more brazen with their power, and as outside groups have started shining a light on their backroom practices, voters have become uneasy. It’s this sense of disquiet that candidates like Mr. Greear are tapping into as they promise to refocus lawsuits, rein in the tort bar and restore a sense of justice to prosecutorial office.

In Indiana, Greg Zoeller, the chief deputy for the current attorney general, is running for the top slot and touting the fact his office has never been close to trial lawyers. His opponent, Democrat Linda Pence, is a trial attorney. In Missouri, GOP state Sen. Michael Gibbons is fighting for an open seat and promising transparency in office. In North Carolina, in a strange twist, a pro-business Democrat is defending his seat against a trial-lawyer Republican. Ethics is also figuring in attorney general races in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

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Linda Pence has built her campaign to be Indiana’s next attorney general on her supposed skills as a lawyer and, most recently, on her claims that she will fight corruption more vigorously than Steve Carter has or Greg Zoeller will.

Her skills as a lawyer were not enough to save her client from having to make a $625,000 settlement with Carter’s AG office; it would seem that she is not a better lawyer than Zoeller (Steve Carter’s chief deputy) after all.

Her protestations that she will fight corruption sort of ring hollow when compared to how she tried to hide from Hoosiers her work for a codefendant in the East Chicago sidewalks for votes RICO case, the most notable corruption case in Indiana this decade.

Then she went to the Chicago offices of Greenberg Traurig, the former law firm of a certain convicted corrupt lobbyist by the name of Jack Abramoff, to raise money for her election campaign.

Pence then went on to say that she could not talk about the East Chicago RICO case, because of attorney-client privilege. It turned out that her client waived attorney-client privilege as a part of its settlement with the AG’s office.

Linda Pence has even put forward some rather comical quotes.

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From the NWI Times:

The two candidates for Indiana attorney general are sparring over the role a public construction contractor could play in the upcoming racketeering trial against former East Chicago city officials.

Chief Deputy Attorney General Greg Zoeller, whose office is prosecuting the civil case, said employees of the contractor will play a “critical” role in the trial — which could mean company officials probably will want their attorney, Linda Pence, at their side during the case.

Pence is the Democratic candidate for attorney general, and Zoeller is the Republican candidate. The election is in November, and a trial date for the case has not yet been set.

“If you’ve been involved in a specific case … you can’t represent both sides,” Zoeller said.

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Posted in Attorney General Race, Elections, Greg Zoeller, Indiana Politics, Linda Pence, Shady Democrat Doings | 3 Comments » | Read more..