Hmmmmm......can SPLC produce records on how they spent tax-exempt money? Oh, nevermind. The IRS, SEC, FBI, Congress and the GAO can find out (/snix).
SCAM-A-RAMA Morris Seligman Dees, Jr. is co-founder and chief trial counsel for the tax-exempt Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Dees was one of the principal architects of an innovative strategy of using civil lawsuits to secure a court judgment for money damages against an organization for a wrongful act and then use the courts to seize its assets (money, land, buildings, other property) to pay the judgment.
ANALYSIS SPLC'S modus operandi is amazingly similar to the Milberg Weiss "class action" scam. Read on.
NYP---June 3, 2008 -- Mel Weiss, co-founder and chief trial counsel for the securities law firm Milberg LLP, was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for illegally paying clients to file shareholder suits that prosecutors said earned $251 million in lawyer fees. Weiss pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, admitting he helped secretly pay a stable of plaintiffs to file suits 1979-2005. By using them to sue first, the firm was more likely to lead cases and reap larger fees.
"Weiss was widely recognized as the king of the plaintiffs' securities bar," said Jacob Frenkel, a former federal prosecutor. Yesterday's sentence, along with a similar prison term for Weiss' ex-partner, Bill Lerach, caps a victory for the Justice Department in its effort to combat shareholder litigation and the two men who pioneered the modern securities fraud class action.
Weiss, Lerach and their counterparts engineered cases and paid litigants to sue that forced companies to pay $45 billion.........,and damaged millions of stockholders.
Milberg became so feared by corporations that Congress passed a law making it harder to file such suits. Weiss's former law firm dropped him from its name when he pleaded guilty. Lerach made a plea deal in a scheme prosecutors alleged involved kickback payments to plaintiffs in class action lawsuits he and his former law firm brought. Court papers say that the two employed the scheme for more than two decades in 150 cases that brought their firm more than $200 million in fees (that we know of).
Milberg Weiss, the NY law firm where was indicted on conspiracy, mail fraud and money laundering charges in May 2006. In Lerach's agreement to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge, Justice Department lawyers agreed not to prosecute him over "election, campaign, or other political contributions" related to shady donations to the John Edwards campaign.
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ANIMAL RIGHTS SHAKEDOWN America's farmers, ranchers, hunters, fishermen, research scientists, fashion designers, and restaurateurs have seen for decades how the animal rights movement can behave like a mobbed-up shakedown racket.
A Federal judge ruled the animal rights defendants collaborated to bribe a "barn helper" w/ $190,000 in exchange for his impeached testimony. A "nonprofit charity"---called the Wildlife Advocacy Project was used to funnel the money from a law firm to the bribed plaintiff.
For example, SPLC officers may have committed government fraud and may have integrated schemes such as:
(a) misusing reserve accounts, (b) concealing losses, (c) inflating asset values and (d) improperly accounting for transactions, as well as (e) diverting monies into reserve accounts, (f) improperly shifting govt funding to other projects to hide illegal payments, (g) engaging in money laundering schemes, (h) evading IRS, FEC, and US banking laws, and (i) engaging in illegal conversions)
FBI TIP PAGE http://tips.fbi.gov/ (you may remain anonymous)
IRS TOLL-FREE 1-800-829-0433 (you may remain anonymous when reporting possible tax fraud).
The IRS should relentlessly pursue these individuals to determine if all relevant income was reported and whether all relevant taxes were paid (stolen money is taxable).