What do George Santos, R. Kelly and FIFA have in common?
MELBOURNE, FLORIDA, a city on the banks of the Indian river, is a nice place to do business. Just ask George Santos. The impossibly industrious congressman from New York chose Melbourne as the headquarters for his company, Devolder Organisation, LLC, which, federal prosecutors allege, he used to defraud campaign donors. The Middle District of Florida, Melbourne’s federal court, could have lassoed its jurisdictional powers onto this geographical hook. Instead, on May 10th, Mr Santos walked into a courthouse on Long Island. He pleaded not guilty to charges filed by the Eastern District of New York (EDNY), as so many extraordinary defendants have done before him.
EDNY’s jurisdiction covers Brooklyn (where its main courthouse sits), Queens, Staten Island and Long Island—a diverse constituency of 8m people plus an international airport. Home-grown crimes abound. But the court’s striking list of high-profile indictments reveals a prosecutorial wanderlust possibly unmatched by EDNY’s 93 peer district courts.
“There are other prosecutors who will proudly proclaim ‘The eagle doesn’t fly’,” says Seth DuCharme, former acting US attorney for EDNY. Brooklyn’s eagle logs serious miles. Carlos Watson who ran Ozy, a scandal-ridden media company, lives in California. But from an inopportune outing Mr Watson took to the US Open, a tennis tournament in Queens, enterprising EDNY lawyers found legal jurisdiction, or “venue”, to indict him for fraud.
2023-05-17 14:40:49
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