Back in 2012 there was a raid on the mansion rented by Kim Dotcom. Rather than just send a police car and knock on the door, it seems various people within the NZ Police were flattered by working in conjunction with the FBI and felt they were now ‘big time’. The scene that was replayed over and over on television and the internet was puzzling to the average New Zealander. It all appeared rather over the top: many people found the raid rather uncomfortable and felt it went against New Zealand sensibilities.
Unfortunately it resulted in a great deal of sympathy towards ‘the jolly German’. This poor, unfortunate person was a victim of American imperialist overreach and those childish rotters in the police were doing the bidding of the US Department of Justice without so much as a brief hesitation.
Not everybody was taken in by Kim Dotcom, however. I sensed almost immediately he was a ‘wrong ’un’ if for no other reason than the DoJ never invokes the RICO Act without an ironclad case (there is no such thing as being ‘acquitted’ in a RICO trial). The RICO law was enacted to combat ‘racketeering’ – i.e., running a business which commits a crime – and has been an outstanding success in cracking down on gangsters and their activities.
However, it is standard procedure – an actual requirement – for the Attorney-General to play ‘devil’s advocate’ with his staff before agreeing to sign the warrant initiating a RICO indictment. If you are a US attorney and have put together a RICO case, then you are going to be put through the wringer by the Attorney-General. The AG will suggest all manner of ‘innocent explanations’ for this, that, the other and you have to ‘prove’ (so to speak) your case. There are occasions when an Attorney-General has asked ‘well – so what?’ 500 times to claims by a US attorney that ‘Gangster X’ bought a mansion or new sports car or whatever and demanding to see bank statements showing the purchase was funded by the proceeds of crime (e.g., ‘Show me on this bank statement where this transaction was dirty money and not from his wife’s housekeeping money.’). By all accounts, this process is not for the fainthearted.
My point in this is to demonstrate that back in 2012 the Feds didn’t just pop down to NZ to visit Rotorua and Milford Sound and, to make it look good on their expenses claim, decide to arrest some German dude. They had an ironclad case to which nobody with even half a brain would consider pleading ‘not guilty’ to.
Instead of becoming a celebrity, charming the average New Zealander and foolishly entering politics, Mr Dotcom, if he wasn’t such a narcissist, should have been smart. He should have retained the best US criminal lawyer he could find and cut a deal – a quick guilty plea in return for, say, seven years, $10 million in fines and restitution and been out of prison in 2019. But he didn’t and so his US legal problems are just beginning rather than having ended ‘way back yonder’ as could well have been the situation. The DoJ likes quick cut-and-dried guilty pleas from white-collar miscreants, so the sort of sentence described above was quite feasible. Oh, and he would have been held in ‘Club Fed’ and played golf all afternoon. Now he faces a very unsympathetic federal justice system with no reason to cut a deal, so it’s probably 25 years. Idiot.
