The Associated Press is reporting that two attorneys with a prominent Alabama law firm and a coal company executive have been indicted on charges of bribing a state legislator to oppose an environmental cleanup plan, federal court documents showed Thursday.

Two partners in prominent Alabama law firm Balch & Bingham have been placed on indefinite leave after named on charges including conspiracy and bribery. They are Joel Gilbert and Steven McKinney, both of whom handled environmental litigation for the firm.

AP reporter Jay Reeves writes that Drummond Co. vice president David Roberson, 66, was charged with the same crimes.

“The three are accused of bribing former state Rep. Oliver Robinson, who pleaded guilty earlier this month to accepting $360,000 in payments,” according to the AP report.

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Bloomberg is reporting that top-tier college basketball programs were thrown into turmoil Tuesday as federal prosecutors unveiled criminal charges against 10 coaches, managers, financial advisers and representatives of sportswear companies including Adidas AG, accusing them of making illicit payments to cash in on the vast riches generated at the sport’s highest levels.

“The alleged schemes include illicit payoffs to steer young athletes to powerhouse schools and into clothing contracts and financial advisory deals,” write Christian Berthelsen and Bob Van Voris. “Among those charged were current and former coaching staff members at Oklahoma State University, the University of Arizona, the University of Southern California and the University of South Carolina.”

The case followed allegations that an executive at an apparel company bribed students to attend universities where the company sponsored athletic programs.

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The judge overseeing the bribery trial of Sen. Robert Menendez ripped into prosecutors Thursday for trying to focus on what he called “tabloid’’ details — an unusual description for dry testimony about a series of emails about a hotel reservation, reports The Washington Post.

“U.S. District Judge William Walls stopped testimony for 20 minutes in which he tongue-lashed prosecutors for their painstaking recounting of emails used to book a luxury hotel in Paris for the New Jersey Democrat in 2010,” writes reporter Devlin Barrett. “The three-day hotel stay is a central part of the Justice Department’s case.”

At one point, the judge sent the jury out of the courtroom and then began chewing out Justice Department lawyers.

“Whether these defendants engaged in bribery does not depend on whether the senator chose a more expensive room. We’re not talking about Days Inn,’’ he said.

Read the Washington Post article.

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Hughes Hubbard & Reed announced that Laura N. Perkins has joined the firm as a partner in its Anti-Corruption & Internal Investigations practice and White Collar & Regulatory Defense group.

Perkins was most recently an Assistant Chief for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement in the Fraud Section of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. In her career at DOJ, she led or supervised hundreds of FCPA investigations and tried nearly two dozen cases involving a variety of frauds and other federal crimes.

In a release, the firm says:

In addition to her FCPA credentials, Perkins is an experienced trial lawyer and investigator who brings extensive insider knowledge of how DOJ investigates and prosecutes criminal cases and what DOJ expects from internal investigations, cooperating companies, and corporate compliance programs.

As an Assistant Chief of the FCPA unit, Peerkins supervised and directed hundreds of complex investigations and prosecutions of companies, business executives, and others for violations of the FCPA and associated statutes. She assisted in the management of the FCPA unit and the FCPA program, formulating enforcement priorities and policies, determining whether potential violations warrant criminal investigation and prosecution, advising domestic and foreign law enforcement and regulators on questions of law and departmental policy, and coordinating and conducting training for domestic and foreign partners.

Perkins was closely involved in the development of the FCPA pilot program, which was designed to motivate companies to voluntarily self-disclose FCPA-related misconduct, fully cooperate with the Fraud Section, and remediate flaws in their controls and compliance programs.

She worked closely within the Fraud Section to develop internal policies regarding the training and oversight of corporate monitors in order to ensure that companies develop compliance programs that meet DOJ’s expectations. By the end of her tenure at the Fraud Section, Perkins was supervising a majority of the section’s corporate monitorships.

Perkins was previously a senior counsel in the Criminal Division’s Office of the Assistant Attorney General; prior to that she was a senior trial attorney in the Fraud Section. As senior counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, she advised the Assistant Attorney General and other DOJ leaders and assisted in developing policies for the Criminal Division with regard to economic criminal prosecution. She has extensive experience as a trial lawyer – both at DOJ and in private practice. At DOJ alone, she handled nearly two dozen federal jury trials and bench trials, prosecuting FCPA, complex securities fraud, accounting fraud, health care fraud and other federal criminal cases.

Perkins represented the United States in international fora regarding global anti-corruption efforts, including in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and worked closely with foreign authorities to investigate and prosecute cross-border criminal cases.

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A South Korean court on Friday convicted Lee Jae-yong, the heir to the Samsung business empire, of bribery and embezzlement and sentenced him to five years in prison, in a dramatic break with the country’s history of dealing light penalties to major business figures, The New York Times reports.

Reporters Jeyup S. Kwaak and Paul Mozur write that the verdict presents new challenges for the huge Samsung organization.

“The court ruled that Mr. Lee and four other Samsung executives paid $6.4 million in bribes and other inducements to ensure that the country’s disgraced former president, Park Geun-hye, supported a complicated corporate deal that strengthened Mr. Lee’s grip on Samsung Electronics, the conglomerate’s crown jewel,” according to the Times.

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Reuters is reporting that U.S. authorities announced insider trading charges accusing seven people of generating more than $5 million of profit based on tips from a Bank of America Corp. employee about dozens of pending corporate transactions.

The alleged tipster, Daniel Rivas, who later worked at Royal Bank of Canada, and James Moodhe, the father of Rivas’ girlfriend, both pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, conspiracy, and making false statements to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, report Brendan Pierson and Jonathan Stempel.

“Prosecutors said Rivas, who worked in Bank of America’s capital markets technology group, leaked material nonpublic information about potential mergers, acquisitions and tender offers involving clients and prospective clients more than 50 times to co-conspirators, who then traded on the tips,” according to the report.

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Disgraced South Florida lawyer Jose Camacho — suspected of forging more than 100 judicial signatures on financial settlement cases — was sentenced Thursday to 364 days in jail, plus 10 years of probation, reports the Miami Herald.

Camacho claims he didn’t make any extra money off the illegal shortcuts. Instead, Camacho claimed, he was overwhelmed with work and merely wanted to avoid waiting for backlogged judges to sign off on the paperwork, writes David Ovalle.

Broward Circuit Judge Marina Garcia-Wood — who appeared not on the bench but at the podium as a victim of Camacho’s forgeries — put it more bluntly: “He was lazy. He was purely lazy.”

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A former Fiat Chrysler executive has been charged with looting a training center for blue-collar workers by giving $1.2 million through a variety of ways to a UAW leader, his wife and other senior union officials, according to an Associated Press report.

The ex-exective is Al Iacobelli, who was indicted in an alleged conspiracy involving the late United Auto Workers vice president General Holiefield and Holiefield’s widow, Monica Morgan.

“The indictment describes a multiyear scheme to reward Holiefield and Morgan with first-class travel, designer clothing and jewelry. A $262,000 mortgage on their home in suburban Detroit was paid off, according to the grand jury,” write Ed White and Tom Krisher. “Iacobelli treated himself to more than $350,000 for a Ferrari, the government alleged.”

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A defense lawyer says former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli would lose a $65 million stake in a drug company he founded if he’s convicted at his securities fraud trial, reports the Associated Press through ABC News.

The lawyer told jurors that a drug company official who testified against Shkreli was biased because the company would benefit financially if Shkreli is convicted of a felony.

“Shkreli is best known for raising the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000 percent and trolling his critics,” the AP reports.

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The Philadelphia Business Journal is reporting that the former general counsel of an New Jersey timeshare consulting service was sentenced to a year in prison for conspiring to obstruct justice in a federal criminal case tried in 2013, federal prosecutors in New Jersey said.

Joshua L. Gayl, 37, was GC of the Vacation Financial, which offered phony consulting services to owners of timeshares, reports Jeff Blumenthal.

Gayl pleaded guilty in March 2016 to a criminal information charging him with one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice.

“Gayl admitted that he misled a witness after learning that the witness told the FBI about being defrauded by VO. Prosecutors said he contacted the witness, hoping to obtain statements favoring the defense at trial. He offered the witness assistance in exchange for the information given to authorities” writes Blumenthal.

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The former chief financial officer of American Realty Capital Properties Inc was convicted on Friday of deceiving investors by inflating the real estate investment trust’s financial statements, Reuters reports.

A three-week trial in federal court in New York ended with Brian Block guilty of fraud and conspiracy.

American Realty shares lost about $4 billion in market value on one day in 2014 after the company said employees intentionally concealed accounting errors.

“Block was charged with securities fraud and conspiracy last year,” writes Brendan Pierson. “Prosecutors said that in July 2014, he plugged fake numbers into a spreadsheet that was used to prepare the company’s financial report for the second quarter of that year in order to disguise a calculation error in a previous report.”

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Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli is a liar who ripped off his clients, a prosecutor told jurors, according to a Bloomberg report.

Reporters Patricia Hurtado and Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou write that his lawyer said the former fund manager may be nuts, but he’s also a genius who made millions for his investors.

Shkreli is accused of fraud in relation to his control of two hedge funds he ran as well as Retrophin Inc., a pharmaceutical company he founded in 2011. Prosecutors characterize him as a con man.

The defense paints Shkreli as an investment genius, prosecutors point out that he repeatedly lost money for investors and lied to them.

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Former Minnesota Tax Court Judge Diane Kroupa is headed to prison for tax fraud, reports Minnesota Lawyer. Her husband, a self-employed lobbyist and political consultant, also received a shorter sentence.

Judge Wilhelmina M. Wright in U.S. District Court in St. Paul sentenced Kroupa to 34 months in prison and Robert Fackler to 24 months. They must pay $457,104 in joint restitution, writes reporter Barbara L. Jones.

Both defendants entered guilty pleas, admitting to conspiring to obstruct the IRS by claiming personal expenses as business expenses. Those expenses included vacations, Pilates classes, upkeep and renovation and utilities for their home, and more.

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A disbarred Georgia lawyer accused of stealing client money was arrested last weekend in Florida after going missing for at least 18 months, reports the ABA Journal.

Douglas J. Mathis was scheduled to appear in a Georgia court in late 2015 on a theft charge for allegedly transferring client money into his own account, the Florida Times-Union reports.

“Six months later, the original charge of theft by deception was combined with eight other theft by conversion charges in a racketeering indictment, according to the article. He is accused of using his law office to embezzle clients’ money,” writes Debra Cassens Weiss.

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A California federal jury convicted Manhattan Beach lawyer and former Body Glove employee James R. Miller on Monday of embezzlement and tax evasion for stealing more than $300,000 from the internet sales company he oversaw as president from 2009 to 2012, reports The Beach Reporter.

Miller, 68, could be sentenced up to 20 years in prison and fined $250,000.

“Miller was convicted of writing dozens of checks for personal gain during his time as president of MWRC Internet Sales LLC and failing to account for that income on his federal tax filings. He was convicted of five counts of wire fraud and filing false taxes,” writes reporter David Rosenfeld.

The investigation began after the then-president of Body Glove notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation about her suspicions.

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At the time he was arrested for defrauding taxpayers of $600 million, disability attorney Eric Conn spoke multiple languages, had crossed the border 140 times in the past decade and had told at least six people he would flee the country instead of going to jail, reports the Associated Press.

A federal judge released Conn on $1.25 million bail last year, and then on Saturday, one month before a judge was supposed to sentence him to prison, Conn removed his electronic monitoring device and disappeared, writes the AP’s Adam Beam.

Some of his former clients who lost their primary source of income because of his scheme said their only surprise was that the system that let him leave.

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Bloomberg reports an exasperated federal judge who sentenced an Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC consultant to prison posed a question that prosecutors have yet to satisfactorily answer: Why has no one else been charged in a sprawling bribery case?

“I’m sick and tired of lawyers from white-shoe law firms marching into my courtroom and getting a deferred-prosecution agreement for their clients,” said U.S. District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis in his Brooklyn court. “We have a law, so someone should go out and enforce it.”

He sentenced Samuel Mebiame, the 43-year-old son of the former prime minister of Gabon, to two years behind bars for paying bribes and acting as a “fixer” to help Och-Ziff with lucrative mining deals in Africa, reports Patricia Hurtado.

Garaufis demanded to know why the hedge fund got a deferred-prosecution deal last year that will result in the dismissal of criminal charges if it stays out of trouble for the next three years.

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Soon after prominent Dallas lawyer Ira Tobolowsky died in a fire in his garage, investigators asked his family if he had any enemies. They responded that they could make a long list of people Ira had defeated or angered at one time or another. But among them, one stood out.

D Magazine covers the family’s own inquiries that focused on a former legal foe. Steven Aubrey is the son of one of Tobolowsky’s clients. The client was involved in an inheritance battle with her son, whom she believed had come unhinged, writes Jamie Thompson.

During a contentious legal fight, Aubrey accused Tobolowsky of bribery, witness tampering, and a host of other crimes and at one time compared him to an “ISIS butcher.” The lawyer filed a defamation suit against Aubrey.

“The Tobolowsky family worries whether the Dallas police have the resources to find Ira’s killer. They’ve pinned their hopes on private investigators. Late last year, they learned Aubrey and [his domestic partner] had moved to Florida. The men live in a bungalow surrounded by palm trees,” according to the magazine.

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John Steele, one of the masterminds behind the Prenda Law “copyright trolling” scheme, has been disbarred, reports Ars Technica.

Steele agreed to the disbarment two months after pleading guilty to federal fraud and money laundering charges.

Reporter Joe Mullin writes that Steele said he and a co-defendant, Paul Hansmeier, made more than $6 million over a two-year period with “sham entities” that threatened Internet users with copyright lawsuits.

Steele “conspired to extort settlement funds from thousands of Internet users in a multi-jurisdictional copyright litigation scheme,” Illinois attorney regulators said in a statement of charges. “Specifically, they attempted to exact settlements from users who allegedly infringed on the copyrights of certain pornographic movies, including movies that Mr. Steele himself produced and distributed.”

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Three Chinese stock traders were ordered to pay $8.9 million in fines and penalties for hacking into two law firms and stealing information on upcoming mergers and acquisitions and then leveraging the information to trade stocks, according to a Dark Reading report.

A federal court in New York found that the three hackers installed malware on the law firms’ computer networks, enabling them to view emails on mergers and acquisitions in which the firms were involved. Then they used that information to buy stock in at least three public companies prior to their merger announcements, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The firms aren’t identified in the complaints, but Law360 reports they appear to be Weil Gotshal & Manges and Cravath Swaine & Moore, based on information in charging documents.

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