FROM Northern Virginia | June/July-2006
Alexandria
With his specialties ranging from serious traffic misdemeanors to tax evasion, Fred Sinclair gets a lot of calls from people who went looking for trouble—and found a great lawyer.
But what if trouble comes looking for you? Suddenly it’s not a criminal defender you need. It’s something slightly different. Say you’ve been robbed but you’re accused of a crime and facing trial. Or you checked into a hotel room but now you owe $100,000 downstairs in the casino.
Or maybe you’ve never been issued a passport or owned a business, but you’re wanted in Georgia (the one next to Armenia) because that hotel on the Caspian Sea that you bought with your partner in Turkmenistan just went bust. You owe laris and manats. That’s short for big bucks.
It’s civil defense meets white collar crime with a twist. “I represent the legal source income people.” he says.
Sinclair teamed up with high-powered criminal defender Jonathan Shapiro on a cutting-edge identity fraud case that’s scheduled for trial in June. Sinclair and Shapiro will argue that the accused were victims of perpetrators caught because they were buying things with stolen credit cards in Arlington county. “I’m still learning all this stuff,” but here’s what Sinclair can tell you right now about the sophisticated scams that have found their way to Northern Virginia.
“They go into gym locker rooms. They take out your card, scan your number, your information, and put it back in your purse. You don’t even know that it’s been stolen. Or they pull a card that doesn’t look like it’s used very often.” It can be months before you even realize it’s gone.
“With the appropriate equipment they can remag cards and change the numbers stored on the magnetic strip. That’s why cashiers are checking the name against the bar code. They don’t match up.” In New Jersey and Nevada, Sinclair’s working on cases where stolen credit cards are paired with stolen numbers to get cash advances at casinos. Stolen numbers can be bought on Internet sites. “In Eastern Europe thousands and thousands of credit card numbers are for sale right now.”
“An Arlington detective told me that your personal and credit information is often stored on the strip on the back of that credit-card style hotel room key.” Sinclair’s advice: “Turn it back in or just cut it up.”
Sinclair says he couldn’t defend the clueless if he didn’t understand the criminal mind. Same goes for defending the criminally bewildered (who are among Sinclair’s clients in tax cases where he’s well-known for settling disputes with the IRS). Sinclair is good at determining if clients were trying to avoid paying taxes, versus trying to evadepaying.
Sinclair got to know his share of shady characters a couple years out of law school at Georgetown.
“I was working with a small firm, but that was no fun. So I got a job as a state prosecutor in Arlington, and that was where I got motivated.”
He liked “thinking on your feet, working with detectives. Obviously gaining a different perspective on society.”
After two years he served as an Assistant U.S. District Attorney where, “I did a lot of bank robberies. Narcotics first got me interested in tax fraud. The IRS was one of the best agencies to work with because of how thorough the CID agents were.” Sinclair went back to school for a masters in tax. “But I never put it to use in private practice.”
Instead he stuck with criminal defense. Many of his clients are accused of skim operations, false deductions, off-shore tax frauds, tax schemes.
“I used to prosecute criminal tax cases. The IRS’s theory is, reduce the case to the utmost simplicity so that the frauds are evident. The government wants to tell the jury: ‘If you believe this happened, there was no legitimate purpose for it,’ so convict the defendant.”
Fair enough, but Sinclair asks: “is there really an attempt to evade taxes? If that’s not crystal clear, a criminal defender gets his or her experts on and confuses the jury. Complexities in the tax law are heaven for somebody like me,” he says affably.
In some cases, he’s happy to say, Sinclair defends people who don’t deliberately lie. They earn money and fail to report it. Or tax preparers come up with bogus deductions. What’s his advice when the IRS comes knocking? First of all, put on a bathrobe. “IRS Special Agents tend to turn up at six a.m. and confront you with documents. They’re not there for a social visit. Say nothing. Call a lawyer.”
Some of Sinclair’s notorious clients have been accused of heinous crimes, like Iyman Faris, the Ohio truckdriver who pled guilty in 2003 to plotting with al Qaeda to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge and launch a simultaneous attack in Washington. A twist in the case came recently following reports that Faris was spied upon illegally by the NSA.
Faris has employed tactics similar to Zacarias Moussaoui, filing motions that denigrate Sinclair just as Moussaoui has denigrated his lawyer Ed MacMahon (see profile on page 83).
“People always ask me how I can defend people accused of crimes like terrorism, espionage and possession of child pornography. I’m not a moral arbiter. My job is to provide a competent and zealous defense.”
“We’re the buffer between the government and the individual. Our job is to evaluate the weight of the evidence and stand behind our client if the government can’t prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The stakes are higher now than ever, Sinclair says. Legislatures and Congress are enacting statues that impose mandatory minimum sentences with no parole.
“In state courts, you’re subject to jury verdicts.” The down side of going to trial in federal court can be Draconian because of federal sentencing guidelines where, “if convicted, 85% of the time is to be served. The Supreme Court has not yet ruled them (FSGs) to be unconstitutional. Congress is taking away sentencing from the court and giving it to the executive. In many cases putting it in the hands of a young prosecutor. These are powers I never had when I was a U.S. attorney. It’s a lot of power.”
With those kinds of stakes, Sinclair’s work is intense.
“Lou Koutoulakos once told me, ‘any time you try a case in the courtroom, you leave a little piece of yourself in the courtroom.’ How many cases are overturned on appeal? Very, very few. Ten percent or less.”
Sinclair foresees a constitutional law battle over FSGs. “The balance of power could be upset.” He predicts debates will center around due process or cruel and unusual punishment as well as the separation of powers issues.
Why take on the stress and rigors of criminal trials? Sinclair’s a married father of teenage sons.
He’s definitely not a big firm like Williams and Connolly, where “you can probably match the U.S. government tit for tat. In my small practice, you have limited resources to bring to bear against a giant.
You have to be innovative to counter that. You do it because it’s a challenge, and it’s getting more and more challenging now.” The oarsman tries to counter the stress of his practice with exercise. “Every case is different. It’s not repetitive routine or mundane. It invigorates you.”