Frisco Texas Criminal Defense Attorney Talks about Federal Crime

I do. In fact, I have been handling federal cases since 2011. I’m admitted to both the Northern and Eastern District. I have handled cases from as far away as Amarillo or Lubbock. I have been in Midland as well. It was a Western District case, but I was [Non-English] for that, so I was admitted for the purpose of that one case. I handle cases frequently in Fort Worth, Dallas, Plano, and up in Sherman. 

On a federal case, you are talking about a level of time commitment that is significant. In a state case, you might get a file that is, say, this thick. This is a very thick state case. In a federal case, they don’t give you a file; they give thumb drives and hard drives.

I had one case recently involving the gas pipe where we were given 11 gigabits of discovery to begin with. Then we started having multiple terabit hard drives we had to provide to the government for them to come back and say here are all the things we found. Because it was a case involving everything that ever happened at the gas pipe industry, that means all their records, all their bank records, all of the computer records, and all the sales records. You can imagine how voluminous that gets.  

I handled that case. I handled the largest online pharmacy case that the United States has ever prosecuted. What was happening was people in China were manufacturing a substance, shipping it through directors in Pakistan and Dubai, sending these pills to the United States in bulk where people in the United States would then package them in a little orange bottle with a little white cap and putting it in a padded manila envelope so that when college students logged online and said I’d like to order Adderall, I’d like to order a little Xanax for fun, they could order on this online pharmacy. It would look like it was delivered from somewhere here in the United States. The website itself was actually being manufactured and handled by some people in Russia believe it or not.

They would put these cookies, which is why the federal investigation was called Operation Cookie Cutter. The cookie would go on the student’s computer if the student was logged into a university. As long as the student was a student at the university, the cookie would allow you access to the order form. Without that cookie on your computer, you’d never see the order form. You and me, a regular person on the internet, you’d look at this website, nothing. A college student looks at the website logging in at UNT, logging in at Texas Tech, logging all over the United States actually because this conspiracy was anywhere all the way from California to Florida all the way up to New York, they can log in and just order medicine.

The terrible thing was it wasn’t always the medicine you ordered. Most of the stuff had been produced to look like Xanax, but it was just Valium, or to look like some other downer and it’s just Valium, or to look like Adderall and it’s another controlled substance. I was appointed by the courts to represent one of the primary people in that case and went to trial on the case.

Yes, I handle federal cases. I’ve been to trial on federal cases. I’ve stood in federal court with some of the most interesting, and convoluted, and complicated cases and stood up with my clients to make sure that the government didn’t over prosecute them.