Men convicted in Miami sweepstakes case want a new trial, claim prosecutor misconduct
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In July of 2017, three South Florida men were found guilty of swindling millions of dollars from thousands of elderly people in an old-fashioned sweepstakes scheme, by tricking the victims into thinking they had to pay a $50 fee to redeem a big prize.
The defendants were supposed to go to prison in January of last year.
But they got lucky.
A federal judge put their incarceration on hold after finding that two assistant U.S. attorneys had done something wrong before the trial and not owned up to it. The prosecutors had flipped a fourth defendant who effectively acted as a spy by infiltrating the inner sanctum of the defendants while they discussed legal strategies — without disclosing he was no longer on their side.
Before trial, the judge said he was reluctant to dismiss the indictment or disqualify the original prosecution team, largely because he was unaware of the depth of the prosecution’s alleged betrayal. After a hearing in 2016, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles let the $25 million sweepstakes fraud case go to trial — although without testimony by the government’s tainted cooperating witness.
Now, the three defendants are armed with even stronger evidence of potential misconduct by prosecutors that was disclosed after the trial. The defendants — Matthew Pisoni, 46, of Fort Lauderdale, Marcus Pradel, 42, of Boca Raton, and Victor Ramirez, 39, of Aventura — want the judge to throw out their convictions or, at the very least, order a new trial.
Gayles recently ordered that dozens of previously sealed documents in the case be made public, revealing new allegations in the case.
“Numerous jaw-dropping cover-ups and misrepresentations that were made to this court during that hearing [before trial] are just coming to light, and necessitate new remedies,” the defendants’ appellate attorney, David O. Markus, wrote in an August 2018 motion, which was among the documents just unsealed.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami declined to comment because of the ongoing legal fight.
Perhaps the most striking evidence disclosed by the prosecution team after trial was that it had provided inaccurate information to the judge about the cooperating defendant, John Leon, 51, of Wilton Manors, just before the three other defendants were to be sentenced in January 2018.
Contrary to previous assertions that Leon gave them no evidence, federal prosecutors H. Ron Davidson and Elijah Leavitt admitted in documents that they had obtained handwritten notes from Leon during the period when he was secretly invading the defense camp. Leon had given the notes to an IRS agent during a debriefing in February 2016 when he began his cooperation.
To the defendants, Leon had double-crossed them after he had joined them in a Joint Defense Agreement, an agreement where all four defendants extended the attorney-client relationship among them to share privileged information. But the other three defendants didn’t learn that Leon had broken ranks with them until his plea deal was publicly disclosed in April 2016. Until then, he had been a mole for the prosecution, the three defendants claim.
With the post-trial disclosures, the two prosecutors, Davidson and Levitt, were removed from the case in 2018. Both prosecutors faced internal Justice Department investigations by the Office of Professional Responsibility, and the defendants’ sentencings were put on hold by Gayles, the judge. (Since his removal from the case, Levitt left the U.S. Attorney’s Office and was appointed as a Miami-Dade County judge last year by Gov. Rick Scott.)
In a federal court filing, Davidson argued there was nothing sinister about the prosecution’s relationship with Leon. “His cooperation was kept covert because Leon was cooperating with the government against a non-charged defendant,” Davidson wrote. “Moreover, the government specifically instructed Leon not to share privileged information.”
But Markus, in his motion for a new trial, claims that was a lie.
“The record establishes unmistakably that with the blessing and approval of the prosecution team, John Leon attended numerous privileged meetings with his co-defendants and their lawyers,” Markus wrote.
“During these meetings, he actively and purposefully sought to obtain as much privileged information as he could, and he then took this information back and reported it in at least six separate debriefing sessions to the very same prosecutors and agents who tried the case against Pisoni and his co-defendants,” Markus said.
Markus argued that the prosecution team violated the constitutional rights of the three defendants, who have a right to privacy in preparing their case and a right to a fair trial.
Markus also urged the judge to force the U.S. Attorney’s Office to turn over more evidence in the sweepstakes case, including witness statements taken by the Office of Professional Responsibility that investigated the two prosecutors’ conduct.
The three defendants convicted at trial in 2017 remain free on bond. Pisoni and Ramirez were sentenced to seven years in prison, and Pradel to 6 1/2 years. The fourth defendant, Leon, who cut a plea deal, is serving 3 1/2 years.
This story was originally published March 9, 2019 at 7:00 AM.
