United States v. Nathaniel Brown and Willie King

71 F.3d 1352, 1995 U.S. App. LEXIS 35350, 1995 WL 744030
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
DecidedDecember 15, 1995
Docket94-3504, 94-3556
StatusPublished
Cited by12 cases

This text of 71 F.3d 1352 (United States v. Nathaniel Brown and Willie King) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Nathaniel Brown and Willie King, 71 F.3d 1352, 1995 U.S. App. LEXIS 35350, 1995 WL 744030 (7th Cir. 1995).

Opinion

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge.

Nathaniel Brown, Willie King, and their associates were, for a period of time, in the truck leasing business. Theirs was no ordinary business, however, because the tractors and trailers that they leased to their customers were vehicles that had been stolen, furnished with new, fraudulent Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN), re-titled, and re-tagged. After a jury trial, Brown was convicted on one count of conspiring to receive and possess stolen semi-tractors and trailers that had traveled interstate, and conspiring to remove, obliterate, and alter their VIN, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371. The jury convicted King on the same conspiracy charges, and in addition it found King guilty of offenses relating to the receipt and possession of the stolen vehicles in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2313 and 2315. Before this court, both defendants raise elaims about the sufficiency of the evidence to support the jury’s verdict. Brown also complains about his sentencing, and King asserts that he received ineffective assistance of counsel and that the district judge should have barred certain testimony. Because we find that the evidence adequately supports the verdicts, and that the district court did not otherwise err, we affirm both convictions and Brown’s sentence.

I.

When the question on appeal is the sufficiency of the evidence to support a criminal conviction, we must uphold the jury’s verdict if “after viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.” Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 319, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 2789, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979) (emphasis in original); United States v. Saadeh, 61 F.3d 510, 525 (7th Cir.1995); United States v. Pulido, 69 F.3d 192 (7th Cir.1995). From that perspective, the following story of a sophisticated enterprise to receive and take advantage of valuable stolen tractors and traders emerges.

A. The Stolen and Re-tagged Vehicles

The prosecution focussed on four specific stolen vehicles: a 1988 Utility Trailer, a 1989 *1355 Peterbilt Tractor, a 1987 Western Star Tractor, and a 1984 Fruehauf Trailer. In each case, as we detail below, other individuals actually stole the vehicles. King and Brown worked together to sanitize the relevant documentation and to create an income stream through leasing.

In April 1989, truck thief Michael Pagano stole a 1988 Utility Trailer from a trucking company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Following an earlier agreement, Pagano then drove it to Chicago and sold it to a Mr. Arthur Veal (originally a co-defendant of Brown and King, who entered a guilty plea to the conspiracy charge before the trial started) for $2,500, well below its estimated value of $42,000. Some time later, the 1988 Utility’s VIN was removed and replaced with the VIN tags from a 1982 Utility Trailer, which Veal had recently purchased in wrecked condition. On May 10, 1989, Veal sold the re-identified Utility to King for $8,000. A representative of Country Supply, Inc., which was financing King’s purchase, examined the vehicle and pronounced that it was in “pristine condition.” (Individuals in the trucking business can tell by looking at a VIN when a vehicle was manufactured. Witness Richard Elliott, from the Cincinnati dealership Kerry Ford, testified that the eighth character from the right indicated year, with A designating 1980, B 1981, and so on.) King then obtained a vehicle identification card for the Utility. Brown’s involvement with this vehicle appears to have been limited to the leasing arrangement, described below.

Next, Pagano stole a 1989 Peterbilt Tractor from a Grand Rapids, Michigan, truck dealership, drove it to Chicago, and sold the $80,000 vehicle to Veal for $4,000. As before, the legitimate VIN was removed and replaced, in this instance with a wholly fictitious number — “obviously hand-stamped,” according to one of the government’s witnesses. The VIN affixed to the 1989 Peterbilt matched the VIN on a title that King had obtained through Linda Croom, a clerk-typist with the Indiana License Bureau who helped him create a fraudulent Indiana title in the name of Robert Maeklin for an imaginary 1987 Peterbilt.

The title that was found in the Peterbilt when it was recovered by police showed Nathaniel Brown as Macklin’s transferee. The Peterbilt also contained an Illinois apportionment card and plates in Brown’s name, which had been issued through the AABLE Licensing Consultants in Westchester, Illinois. The jury had conflicting testimony before it on the question whether Brown personally applied for the apportionment cards and plates at AABLE. AABLE’s owner, Sharon Leiss, testified that she assumed that Brown had applied personally for the documentation, because the individual in front of her had displayed three documents showing Nathaniel Brown’s name: an Illinois voter’s card, an Illinois Bell telephone bill, and an Illinois driver’s license (which, we note from the exhibits admitted in the district court, was a photo ID). She had no personal recollection of seeing Brown at her agency, some four years before the trial. No one disputed the existence or nature of the documents, because copies remained in AABLE’s files, and Brown had the opportunity to examine them when the copies were admitted as Government Exhibit 64B at trial. At no time did Brown dispute that the documents were genuine; instead, he commented that if AABLE had his identification documents, it must have been because he had given them to King to use.

Following the same pattern, Pagano absconded with a 1987 Western Star Tractor from a Ford dealership in Wyoming, Michigan and sold it to Veal the next day in Chicago. Again, the VIN was removed and replaced with a fake number. Veal then transferred the tractor to King, who arranged to have the title sanitized through the Indiana License Bureau, again with Croom’s help. This title too eventually showed a transfer to Brown.

Although the details differ for the last vehicle, the theme is by now familiar: unknown thieves stole a 1984 Fruehauf Trailer from a trucking company yard in South Holland, Illinois, in July 1987; the VIN was obliterated and replaced with a false number; fraudulent title documents (this time from West Virginia) were prepared showing Brown as the owner, and the title reflected a *1356 lien that actually corresponded to a different vehicle owned by Veal.

B. The Leasing Business

In 1989, King approached Brown and proposed that the two start a trucking firm. Brown agreed to set up a company called Vision Transportation and to handle the finances of the company. Brown accordingly opened a checking account at South Chicago Savings Bank.

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Bluebook (online)
71 F.3d 1352, 1995 U.S. App. LEXIS 35350, 1995 WL 744030, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-nathaniel-brown-and-willie-king-ca7-1995.