Former United States Attorney Samuel T. Currin Sentenced to Federal Prison

Samuel T. Currin, 58 of Raleigh, North Carolina, served as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina from 1981 to 1987 and a North Carolina Superior Court Judge from 1987 to 1990. On September 5, he was sentenced to 70 months - 5 years and 10 months - in federal prison.

His sentence is the result of him entering a guilty plea to three charges, the first of which is conspiring to use his law firm's client trust account to conspire to launder about $ 1.35 million that he had obtained as the result of a securities fraud scheme. The second one is obstruction of the investigation by a grand jury into both the securities fraud and the money laundering and the third is interfering with the workings of the IRS by not disclosing an offshore debit card account that he had control off and contained thousands of dollars, on his income tax.

In the Bill of Information under which he was charged and pleaded guilty, it states that a group which included on of the clients of his law firm, conducted a scheme to fraudulently manipulate the prices of several publicly traded stocks by the means of spam e mails, mass fax blasts, internet searches,
and voice mail broadcasting.

As a result of this scheme they were able to accumulate literally tens of millions of dollars. Currin entered into a conspiracy with the others in order to launder the money through the firm's account. For is part in the money laundering, he received more than $280,000. It also states that he opened an Anguillan company and then used a foreign bank to open a debit card account in the company's name. He then received thousands of dollars into the account, but he did not bother listing them on his 2004 income tax return.

In December of 2005, he was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury that was investigating the securities fraud and money laundering scheme. Before he appeared, he entered into a conspiracy with a Lawyer in Raleigh, R. Shawn Wellons, to withhold documents from the grand jury and to also give false testimony. The two of them appeared before the grand jury and both committed perjury by denying that he had any offshore dealings.

The investigation was conducted by FBI and IRS-CID and the Securities & Exchange Commission. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Matthew T. Martens and Kurt W. Meyers of the U.S. Attorney's Criminal Division in Charlotte handled the case for the government.

Currin is represented by Mark T. Calloway, Esq. of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Source: FBI http://charlotte.fbi.gov/