Florida lawyer and lobbyist Alan Koslow was charged Thursday with a federal money-laundering conspiracy after prosecutors said he and a friend laundered what they believed was cash linked to illegal gambling and drug dealing, according to a report in the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale.

The report says the manner in which Koslow, 62, and Susan Mohr, 57, of Delray Beach, were charged suggests both have already reached plea agreements with prosecutors.

The criminal charges are linked to an undercover FBI sting that began more than three years ago, in which Koslow allegedly accepted $220,000 in cash that he agreed to launder for the undercover FBI agents between December 2012 and August 2013, according to court records. In exchange, he was paid $8,500, investigators wrote.

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The suspicious death of a Dallas attorney has triggered tighter security inside in a downtown Dallas courthouse, and a Dallas County District judge has made a direct connection between the defendant in an ongoing civil lawsuit and the possible murder of attorney Ira Tobolowsky, reports NBC 5 TV in Dallas.

In a recent suit, Steven Aubrey asked for more than $500,000 from Tobolowsky and wrote that: “Tobolowsky must be punished with sanctions for his outrageous abuse of the judicial system and his violation of statutes, codes and rules.”

“I think at this point with the allegations which have been made related to Mr. Aubrey and his implication in the death of Mr. Tobolowsky and related issues, I don’t think that it is unreasonable for a judge other than myself to hear this case,” said Dallas County District 14 Judge Eric Moye. “And so I’ve conferred with Judge Murphy and we have agreed that a voluntary recusal is appropriate at this time.”

Tobolowsky , a prominent Dallas attorney, died in a house fire last week. Investigators say that fire may have been arson.

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A former Skadden Arps lawyer who cheated friends and relatives of life savings in a Ponzi scheme and then tried to kill himself was sentenced in New York to five years in prison Thursday, reports the Associated Press and the New York Post.

His crime was revealed when he wrote a long suicide note and jumped into the Hudson River in a 2014 suicide attempt that ended with his rescue by police divers.

A U.S. District Court judge gave Bennett a sentence at the high end of federal sentencing guidelines. She announced it after hearing several of the 58-year-old’s friends describe giving hundreds of thousands of dollars for a supposedly safe investment. Some of them told the judge he is a “pathological liar.”

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A federal judge sentenced the leader of digital currency company Liberty Reserve to 20 years in prison for running a global money-laundering scheme that prosecutors said was unprecedented in size and scope, reports Reuters.

Arthur Budovsky, 42, had earlier pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to launder money related to his role in Liberty Reserve, which allowed cybercriminals to conceal and move their illegal proceeds anonymously through a digital currency. Authorities shut down the company in 2013.

“Liberty Reserve operated a widely used digital currency, processing more than $8 billion in financial transactions and earning Budovsky over $25 million, prosecutors said,” according to the report. “Much of its business came from criminals seeking to launder proceeds from Ponzi schemes, credit card trafficking, identity thefts and computer hacking, prosecutors said.”

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The former chief digital officer of the Epix cable television network was arrested on Tuesday on charges that he defrauded the company of more than $8 million, reports Reuters.

FBI agents arrested Emil Rensing, 42, at his Manhattan home and charged him with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, authorities said.

“He was released on a $500,000 bond following a court hearing later in the day. His lawyer, Henry Mazurek, in a statement said Rensing disputed the allegations and ‘did not steal any money or identities from anyone.'” the report says.

Rensing worked at Epix from April 2010 to August 2015, and is alleged to having contracted with vendor companies he owned to perform digital media services. The complaint says he hid the scheme by using false and stolen identities.

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A disbarred lawyer who swindled clients on Staten Island and in Brooklyn is on the hook for nearly $1 million in restitution and will spend up to a dozen years in prison, according to a report on silive.com.

“According to authorities, Robert Fontanelli helped himself to more than $1 million owed a client from a real-estate sale and to more than $155,000 from another client in an unrelated property deal,” the site reports.

A judge in state Supreme Court sentenced Fontanelli to one to three years in prison and ordered him to pay $55,760 to a Staten Island client whose personal-injury settlement the ex-barrister pocketed. The report says the sentence will run concurrently to a separate sentence of four to 12 years in prison and $933,245 in restitution imposed on Fontanelli last week in Brooklyn state Supreme Court for grand larceny and fraud-related convictions.

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Harvey Newkirk, a former lawyer at Bryan Cave LLP was sentenced to six months in prison for lying to lenders as part of a failed scheme to buy Maxim Magazine through impersonation, a false e-mail and stolen money, reports Bloomberg BNA.

New York prosecutors wanted the judge to sentence Newkirk, 39, to a “significant term of imprisonment,” describing him as “a facile liar lacking shame, remorse or sympathy for his many victims.” Newkirk’s lawyers sought probation, saying he was a “precocious only child born into a family of God” who lost his job and suffered from the shame of a criminal conviction.

Newkirk, while not part of the most “despicable aspects” of the scheme, “was a knowing and willful perpetrator of fraud in his own part,” U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan said Thursday at his sentencing. “The jury’s verdict was amply deserved.” He could have been sentenced to more than 17 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, the Bloomberg report says.

A recently disbarred Kansas City lawyer pleaded guilty Wednesday to embezzling more than $1.2 million from St. Luke’s Health System, reports The Kansas City Star.

Alan B. Gallas, 64, previously worked for a law firm that collected from patients who were behind on payments to the hospital system. He waived his right to a grand jury and pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Kansas City to mail fraud.

“Gallas admitted that from 2009 to July 2015, he defrauded St. Luke’s Health System out of $1,224,264,” the report says. “He must pay that amount in restitution as part of Wednesday’s plea agreement.”

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Now that Marco Rubio is out of the race, for the first time in U.S. political history, every presidential candidate — of both parties — supports at least states’ rights to do as they please with regard to marijuana legalization, according to a report in Rolling Stone.

Bernie Sanders, who pledges to end the drug war, is the most progressive on marijuana policy. And fellow Democrat supports states’ rights to legalize, but proposes to reschedule instead of deschedule cannabis, the newspaper says.

Donald Trump believes there should be more research on cannabis. Ted Cruz says he would not support legalization, but he believes states have a right to determine the legality for themselves. John Kasich also is opposed to marijuana use, but would defer to states’ rights, the report says.

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A federal judge in Houston sentenced an Austin attorney to 17 years in prison for harboring and concealing his client who was a fugitive in Mexico and for conspiring to commit wire fraud in the client’s stock sale scam, reports The Houston Chronicle.

Patrick Lanier, 67, represented Harris Dempsey “Butch” Ballow, of Tiki Island in Galveston County, during proceedings before the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 and during the criminal case that led to Ballow to flee the country. The report says Ballow was indicted in 2003 on fraud and money laundering charges stemming from misrepresentations he made in connection with the sale of stock, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“A jury convicted Lanier on 16 counts in February 2014 for helping sell shares of stock purchased by Ballow’s corporation while Ballow was on the run,” according to the report.

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“Those who aspire to a life of white collar crime, and there are always a few misguided business-people out there, believe they have a full-proof scam that will go undetected, ” writes Walter Pavlo on Forbes.com. “Even in the unlikely event that their crime is discovered, they have an escape plan that includes some exotic, warm destination where they will live happily ever after.”

Pavlo tells the story of once-fugitive Lawrence “Larry” Hartman, a U.S. citizen and a Columbia Law School graduate who once thought himself a king of penny stocks.

“Hartman and some other scammers created empty-shell companies that had the appearance of being publicly traded, after which they cold-called elderly investors in the UK and Ireland to buy shares in the companies. The scam operated between July 2004 and March 2008.  According to his indictment, the group brought in $132 Million into a Costa Rican bank account” Pavlo writes.

The story describes Hartman’s  life on the run and his eventual downfall.

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The former president of Pilot Flying J, the $31 billion truck stop company run by the family of Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, has been indicted in connection to a rebate fraud scheme, reports The Tennessean.

In the latest round of indictments — released Tuesday — related to the years-long Pilot investigation, former president Mark Hazelwood and seven other high-ranking employees were indicted this month.

They are accused in “a scheme and artifice to defraud certain interstate trucking companies and for obtaining money from certain interstate trucking companies by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representatives and promises.”

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