Power never disappears.
It is just transferred from one who has it to another who doesn't.
That's the point of this All-American, F*ck-Your-Buddy tale, literally and figuratively, where everybody loses, by Rick Casey in the Houston Chronicle, 1/19/05.
It also suggests that the demise of the mandatory part of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, which gave the prosecutor more power than the judge, has now flipped that switch. U.S. v. Booker (2005)
The judge now has a sentencing over-ride on the games prosecutors play, taking some of the gain out of the game.
One of the warning signals that should not be ignored in this account is that a borrower was indicted for falsely claiming on a loan application that she would be living in the mortgaged house, when in fact she was helping out her sister who would actually live there.
Since the loan was from a federally chartered lending institution, this lie became a federal felony.
We had a fellow in San Francisco who acquired several hundred apartments in flamboyant real estate operator fashion, borrowing lots of money from banks. Then he began selling units. That's how he created a lifestyle that advertised his new found success.. He asked friends to buy a unit, promising 30% return on investment. He'd even lend you the down payment. How could you turn that down. Some attorneys didn't, including several assistant district attorneys who later sweated it out before a federal grand jury. The 30% return lure that some bit on was the red flag for at least one person he'd approached. If a deal sounds too good, watch out.
All you had to do to acquire this nice apartment in a nice part of town was to check the box, i.e. represent, on the loan application from the bank that you intended to live there, which you didn't. Allegedly.
Lenders regard owner occupants to be better financial risks than absentee landlords who may see the unit not as a home, but an investment that can be let go of when times get rough.
Mr. Real Estate Operator was sentenced to 30 years in the federal penitentiary, by a federal judge who was impressed with the audacity of the man in what the jury found to be a huge fraud. This was, primarily because at sentencing, Mr. REO was decidedly unrepentant, claiming that everybody did this.
If you must stand before a judge for sentencing, particularly a federal judge in the business of making examples of people for the benefit of the rest of the world who might be tempted, the posture you want to adopt, internalize, and display with every appearance of fervent belief, is remorse, a sincere and profound sense of remorse, as in, "How could I have been so foolish? This will never happen again, judge."
As a result, Mr. REO became the poster boy and set the curve for "excessive takings" when the guidelines first went into effect, because a lot of money had gone over the dam.
The best man at his wedding was his title company partner, who got off with only a year in the pen for testifying against him.
Don't mess with those loan applications, especially when someone tells you it's okay, everyone does it. You could wind up in the bucket and lose your law license.
That's what happened to Mr. REO's attorney, the expert in financing development projects, who also did only a year in the pen for testifying against his former client.
It may be tempting, and profitable, at first, to become engaged in client business affairs. Silicon Valley attorneys have been doing something like it for years and have waxed fat. Others have found it the road to perdition.
I once had an investigator who worked for various attorneys. One of them was representing a drug dealer. Mr. P.I. got to know Mr. Dealer, who was a personable guy, as you might expect from a salesman-entrepreneur. Since Mr. P.I. was accustomed to doing all sorts of errands on behalf of the client at the request of the attorney, his guard was down when the client called him directly one day and asked him to pick up a package at the airport. Sure, happy to do so. Just goes on the bill. And off he goes.
When it inevitably turned out that this package represented a controlled delivery of illegal narcotics, guess who was on the hot seat.
It took some doing and the feds eventually accepted that this was what happened. But the lesson for Mr. P.I. was to take instructions only from the attorney who employed him, not from the client who employed the attorney.
There's a difference.
And this illustrates the reason.
I'm not sure they teach you this in law school either.