United States v. Mark Isaacs

Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit·Decided January 25, 2010·No. 08-2876·Published

Opinion

In the

United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

No. 08-2876

U NITED STATES OF A MERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.

M ARK O. ISAACS, Defendant-Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 06 CR 186—Joan Humphrey Lefkow, Judge.

A RGUED M AY 12, 2009—D ECIDED JANUARY 25, 2010

Before K ANNE and SYKES, Circuit Judges, and V AN B OKKELEN, District Judge.Œ

Œ The Honorable Joseph S. Van Bokkelen, United States District Court Judge for the Northern District of Indiana, sitting by designation.

The panel wishes to thank Jason Huber and Travis Kennedy of the Edwin F. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, The University of (continued...)

2 No. 08-2876

V AN B OKKELEN, District Judge. Following a jury trial, Mark O. Isaacs was convicted of fraudulently using unauthorized access devices in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1029(a)(2). He was ordered to serve a prison term of forty months and pay $573,400 in restitution. Isaacs appeals, contending that the district court abused its discretion by denying his motion for a thirty-day continuance after the government turned over a new version of voluminous computer records in the form of compact disks (“CDs”) three days before trial. He further asserts that the district court abused its discretion by admitting the government’s summary exhibits at trial after the government failed to turn over the underlying data at a reasonable time and place as required by Federal Rule of Evidence 1006. Finally, Isaacs avers that the district court abused its discretion by limiting his cross-examination of a key government witness regarding the P2K database or system. Because the district court did not abuse its discretion with respect to these issues, we affirm the judgment of the district court.

I.

PrimeCo Personal Communications, Inc., a former telecommunications provider, was in the business of selling cellular phones, cellular phone service, and prepaid phone or payment cards. Through either a

Œ (...continued) Chicago Law School, for representing Mark O. Isaacs on the appeal in this case.

No. 08-2876 3

PrimeCo store or an authorized PrimeCo dealer, PrimeCo customers could purchase prepaid phone cards and load the value of the cards (minutes or credits) onto their PrimeCo phone accounts. To activate the minutes on a prepaid phone card, PrimeCo customers would call a toll- free number and enter certain information, including the PrimeCo phone number associated with the account, the account number to which the credit was to be applied, and a personal identification number (“PIN”) that was listed on the back of the prepaid phone card. Each prepaid phone card had its own unique PIN and each PIN was associated with one value that was to be credited to only one PrimeCo phone account.

In March and April 2001, a glitch was discovered in PrimeCo’s computer system, which permitted the loading of prepaid phone card values onto multiple PrimeCo phone accounts using a single PIN. As a result, PrimeCo initiated an internal investigation and found that, after a call was placed to the toll-free number and a PIN was entered, it took between forty-five seconds and one minute and fifteen seconds for the computer ’s database to query the system and determine if that particular PIN was available. During that time period, simultaneous calls could be made to the toll-free number to credit the same PIN to multiple PrimeCo phone accounts. The investigation uncovered that certain PrimeCo prepaid phone cards were being used to credit multiple PrimeCo phone accounts, and this problem was isolated to PrimeCo’s Chicago market. Ginny Toepfer, PrimeCo’s Director of Information Technology, compiled three sets of data to analyze the 4 No. 08-2876

problem. First, Toepfer received data files from West Interactive, the company that maintained the computer program for the PIN card activations. That data included the phone numbers used to call and activate the PINs, the PINs that had been activated, the account numbers that were credited, the dollar amounts of the prepaid phone cards, and the dates of the phone calls. Second, PrimeCo’s marketing department provided Toepfer with a listing of customers, who were active and in good standing, in PrimeCo’s billing system. Finally, Toepfer was given a listing of PrimeCo’s indirect dealers.

Toepfer compiled the information she received into one database.1 After analyzing the data, she generated summary exhibits that were admitted into evidence as the Government’s Exhibits 2d and 2e. The summary exhibits were grouped by PIN, and after each PIN the summary exhibits listed the following information: (1) the date and times the PIN was activated; (2) the phone numbers that were used to call the toll-free number to activate that PIN; (3) the dollar amount of the prepaid phone card that was activated; (4) the PrimeCo account number that was credited; (5) the name of the PrimeCo

1 The data from the time period January 2001 through March 2001 was admitted into evidence on a CD marked as the Government’s Exhibit 2. Some of the data relating to PrimeCo’s customers, who were active and in good standing, was admitted into evidence on a CD marked as the Government ’s Exhibit 2A. The data from the time period August 2000 to December 2000 was admitted into evidence on a CD marked as the Government’s Exhibit 2B.

No. 08-2876 5

authorized dealer associated with the phone number, if any; (6) the name of the PrimeCo customer associated with the phone number, if any; and (7) the total number of times the PIN was activated and the total dollar amount for each PIN.

Isaacs was the owner of four wireless telephone stores that operated under the name of Beep Smart. PrimeCo records established that Isaacs had a PrimeCo account number. An analysis of the summary exhibits showed that, during a seven-day sample period in January 2001, in eleven instances, his PrimeCo account number was among those accounts credited multiple times. Another analysis of the summary exhibits showed that, during a different seven-day sample period in January 2001, three phone numbers associated with one of Isaacs’s Beep Smart stores were used fifty-nine times to load credits using PrimeCo prepaid phone cards.

On March 16, 2006, a federal grand jury returned a onecount Indictment against Isaacs, charging him with violating 18 U.S.C. § 1029(a)(2). Section 1029(a)(2) makes it illegal for an individual to “knowingly and with intent to defraud traffic[ ] in or use[ ] one or more unauthorized access devices during any one-year period, and by such conduct obtain[ ] anything of value aggregating $1,000 or more during that period.” Isaacs was also charged with aiding and abetting in the illegal scheme under 18 U.S.C. § 2.2

2 Wayne Mitchell operated cellular phone stores and was indicted as a co-defendant in the PrimeCo phone card scheme.

(continued...)

6 No. 08-2876

Isaacs entered a plea of not guilty to the charges and proceeded to trial. After a number of continuances of the trial date, a jury trial was set to begin on April 21, 2008. Isaacs chose to represent himself at trial with the assistance of stand-by counsel.

On the day the trial was set to begin, Isaacs filed an emergency motion to continue the trial for thirty days. On that same day, before proceeding to trial, the district court heard arguments on Isaacs’s motion.

At the hearing, Isaacs argued that, just three days before trial, his stand-by counsel had received a new set of CDs containing voluminous computer records from the government. He asserted that he needed more time to compare the data on the new set of CDs, which comprised the underlying data used to compile the summary exhibits, to that which had been previously produced by the government on an earlier set of CDs. Isaacs further explained that the new set of CDs contained 25,000 pages of data and because it would take about six or seven hours to print the data, a continuance was warranted.

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