California
Former attorney for solar firm sentenced in $1B fraud scheme
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — An attorney for a California solar power company has been sentenced to 11 years and five months in prison for helping orchestrate a $1 billion fraud scheme, federal prosecutors said.
Ari Lauer, 61, pleaded guilty in October to 23 felony counts including bank fraud and wire fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement. He was sentenced on Monday.
Lauer was outside counsel for DC Solar, based in Benicia in the San Francisco Bay Area. Between 2011 and 2018, the company marketed mobile solar generator units. The firm touted the trailer-mounted units as being able to provide emergency power for cellphone companies or lighting at sporting and other events.
But executives started telling investors they could benefit from federal tax credits by buying the generators and leasing them back to DC Solar, which would then provide them to other companies for their use, prosecutors said.
In reality, DC Solar sold more generators than it made, used phony financial statements and lease contracts to conceal the fraud and in a classic Ponzi scheme repaid early investors with money from later ones, prosecutors said.
About 9,000 of the approximately 17,000 generators that DC Solar claimed to have made didn’t exist, according to prosecutors.
“Without the participation of Lauer, the DC Solar fraud scheme would never have been operational,” U.S. Attorney Eric Grant said in a statement Monday.
Among those suckered by the business were Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
DC Solar founder Jeff Carpoff was sentenced in 2021 to 30 years in prison and ordered to pay $790.6 million in restitution for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.
Since then, five other people, including Carpoff’s wife, Paulette Carpoff, were sentenced to prison in connection with the fraud.
California
Microsoft backs Anthropic, urging a judge to halt Pentagon’s actions against AI company
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Microsoft is throwing its weight behind Anthropic in asking a federal court to block the Trump administration’s designation of the artificial intelligence company as a supply chain risk.
Microsoft, in a legal filing, is challenging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s action last week to shut Anthropic out of military work by labeling its AI products as posing a threat to national security.
The Pentagon took the action against Anthropic after an unusually public dispute over the company’s refusal to allow unrestricted military use of its AI model Claude. President Donald Trump also said he was ordering all federal agencies to stop using Claude.
“The use of a supply chain risk designation to address a contract dispute may bring severe economic effects that are not in the public interest,” Microsoft, a major government contractor, said in its Tuesday filing in the San Francisco federal court, where Anthropic sued the Trump administration on Monday.
The Pentagon’s action “forces government contractors to comply with vague and ill-defined directions that have never before been publicly wielded against a U.S. company,” Microsoft’s legal brief says.
It asks for a judge to order a temporary lifting of the designation to allow for more “reasoned discussion.”
The Pentagon declined to comment, saying it does not remark on matters in litigation.
Microsoft also sided with Anthropic’s two ethical red lines that were a sticking point in the contract negotiations.
“Microsoft also believes that American AI should not be used to conduct domestic mass surveillance or start a war without human control,” Microsoft said. “This position is consistent with the law and broadly supported by American society, as the government acknowledges.”
The software giant’s court filing followed others supporting Anthropic, including one from a group of AI developers at Google and OpenAI, and another from a group of organizations such as the Cato Institute and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
South Carolina
‘Ship of Gold’ treasure hunter released from prison, but 500 gold coins remain unaccounted for
A former deep-sea treasure hunter who made one of the greatest shipwreck discoveries in American history and spent the past decade in prison after refusing to disclose the whereabouts of some of its missing gold coins is now free, federal records show.
Tommy Thompson, who in 1988 located what was known as the Ship of Gold off the coast of South Carolina, was released last Wednesday, according to federal Bureau of Prisons records reviewed by The Associated Press.
Thompson, an Ohio-born research scientist, was hailed as a hero after finding the S.S. Central America and its thousands of pounds of sunken treasure that sat at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for more than 150 years.
But in the decades that followed, he battled with investors who accused him of cheating them out of millions and then spent years on the run as a fugitive before being sent to prison over rebuffing court orders while contending he didn’t know what happened to 500 coins minted from the ship’s gold.
The Central America was filled with a big haul from the California Gold Rush when it sank in a hurricane in 1857. Four hundred and twenty-five people drowned, and thousands of pounds of gold were lost, contributing to an economic panic.
Investors who backed Thompson’s venture sued him in 2005, saying they had yet to receive any money from the $50 million sale of more than 500 gold bars and thousands of coins — just part of the ship’s booty.
Thompson, who was living in Florida, went into seclusion and then later became a fugitive when an Ohio federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest in 2012 after he failed to show up in court.
Authorities tracked Thompson to a Florida hotel three years later. The judge then held him in contempt and sent Thompson to prison at the end of 2015 for refusing to answer questions about the location of missing coins.
Thompson, now 73, maintained that the coins — valued then at $2.5 million — were turned over to a trust in Belize and said the $50 million from the sale of the first batch of gold mostly went toward legal fees and bank loans.
He remained locked up even though federal law generally limits jail time for contempt of court to 18 months. A federal appeals court in 2019 rejected Thompson’s argument that the law applied to him, saying his refusal violated conditions of a plea agreement.
The following year, Thompson appeared by video for another hearing where U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley again asked whether he was ready to address the whereabouts of the gold.
“Your honor, I don’t know if we’ve gone over this road before or not, but I don’t know the whereabouts of the gold,” Thompson responded. “I feel like I don’t have the keys to my freedom.”
Just over a year ago, Marbley agreed to end Thompson’s sentence on the civil contempt charge, saying he was no longer convinced that keeping him in prison would produce an answer. The judge then ordered Thompson to immediately start serving a two-year sentence for skipping the 2012 court hearing.
Dwight Manley, a California coin dealer who bought and sold nearly the entire fortune, said Monday that Thompson paid a heavy price over what he said amounted to a business dispute.
“Going to prison for 10 years over a business dispute is not America,” Manley said. “People kill people and get out in half the time.”
Sentences in civil contempt cases are somewhat indefinite, but they shouldn’t go on forever, said Ryan Scott, a University of Florida law professor who researches contempt law and worked to secure Thompson’s release.
“It’s very unusual to go on 10 years,” Scott said.
He said Thompson should have been freed years ago — since at least 2018, after the court dismissed the underlying case — calling it a “miscarriage of justice for this to have gone on this long.”
Missouri
Jury awards $667K to Muslim men who were pepper-sprayed while praying
ST. LOUIS, Mo. (AP) — A federal jury on Monday awarded $667,000 in damages to a group of Muslim men incarcerated in Missouri who were pepper-sprayed by state correctional officers while praying.
The lawsuit in eastern Missouri’s U.S. District Court alleged that the men had been allowed to pray together many times in their prison housing unit after the chapel was locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The money will be distributed among eight men who were handcuffed, pepper-sprayed and placed in solitary confinement after praying in the housing area at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre on Feb. 28, 2021.
Those who were placed in solitary confinement at the 2,684-bed facility were left without access to soap or running water to wash off the pepper spray, and some resorted to washing their faces with toilet water, according to the lawsuit.
The men were initially charged with a major conduct violation for “acts of organized disobedience” by three or more offenders. That was later reduced to a minor violation. They were found guilty and released from segregation on March 10, 2021.
The CAIR Legal Fund and the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Missouri filed a civil lawsuit against Missouri correctional officers in 2023, saying they used excessive force and violated the men’s constitutional right to practice their religion, then showed deliberate indifference to serious medical needs.
The jury ruled in favor of the incarcerated men on all counts.
The Missouri Department of Corrections did not immediately return a request seeking comment on the judgment early Monday evening.
New York
Jeff Perconte promoted to general counsel of MLB players’ union
NEW YORK (AP) — Jeff Perconte was promoted to general counsel of the Major League Baseball Players Association on Wednesday in another move following the forced resignation of union head Tony Clark.
Perconte, 48, is the No. 3 person on the union’s legal team behind interim executive director Bruce Meyer and interim deputy executive director Matt Nussbaum, who had been general counsel.
The union’s leadership is preparing for the start of collective bargaining to replace the five-year labor contract that expires Dec. 1. Management is expected to propose a salary cap, which the union has vowed to fight, and a lockout appears likely to start on Dec. 2.
A former captain of Notre Dame’s baseball team, Perconte was a lawyer at Winston & Strawn from 2005-08, an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago from 2008-14 and a lawyer at Faegre Drinker before he was hired by the union in 2017 as assistant general counsel.
He was promoted to deputy general counsel in 2022 at the same time Meyer was elevated to deputy executive director.
Perconte becomes the seventh general counsel in the union’s history after Dick Moss (1966-77), Donald Fehr (1977-2004), Michael Weiner (2004-13), David Prouty (2013-17), Ian Penny (2017-22) and Nussbaum (2022-26).
Clark, a former All-Star first baseman, led the union from 2013 until he quit on Feb. 17 after an investigation by the union’s outside counsel discovered evidence that Clark had an inappropriate relationship with his sister-in-law, a union employee since 2023.
Meyer and Nussbaum were promoted by the union’s executive board the following day.
Former attorney for solar firm sentenced in $1B fraud scheme
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — An attorney for a California solar power company has been sentenced to 11 years and five months in prison for helping orchestrate a $1 billion fraud scheme, federal prosecutors said.
Ari Lauer, 61, pleaded guilty in October to 23 felony counts including bank fraud and wire fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement. He was sentenced on Monday.
Lauer was outside counsel for DC Solar, based in Benicia in the San Francisco Bay Area. Between 2011 and 2018, the company marketed mobile solar generator units. The firm touted the trailer-mounted units as being able to provide emergency power for cellphone companies or lighting at sporting and other events.
But executives started telling investors they could benefit from federal tax credits by buying the generators and leasing them back to DC Solar, which would then provide them to other companies for their use, prosecutors said.
In reality, DC Solar sold more generators than it made, used phony financial statements and lease contracts to conceal the fraud and in a classic Ponzi scheme repaid early investors with money from later ones, prosecutors said.
About 9,000 of the approximately 17,000 generators that DC Solar claimed to have made didn’t exist, according to prosecutors.
“Without the participation of Lauer, the DC Solar fraud scheme would never have been operational,” U.S. Attorney Eric Grant said in a statement Monday.
Among those suckered by the business were Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
DC Solar founder Jeff Carpoff was sentenced in 2021 to 30 years in prison and ordered to pay $790.6 million in restitution for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.
Since then, five other people, including Carpoff’s wife, Paulette Carpoff, were sentenced to prison in connection with the fraud.
California
Microsoft backs Anthropic, urging a judge to halt Pentagon’s actions against AI company
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Microsoft is throwing its weight behind Anthropic in asking a federal court to block the Trump administration’s designation of the artificial intelligence company as a supply chain risk.
Microsoft, in a legal filing, is challenging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s action last week to shut Anthropic out of military work by labeling its AI products as posing a threat to national security.
The Pentagon took the action against Anthropic after an unusually public dispute over the company’s refusal to allow unrestricted military use of its AI model Claude. President Donald Trump also said he was ordering all federal agencies to stop using Claude.
“The use of a supply chain risk designation to address a contract dispute may bring severe economic effects that are not in the public interest,” Microsoft, a major government contractor, said in its Tuesday filing in the San Francisco federal court, where Anthropic sued the Trump administration on Monday.
The Pentagon’s action “forces government contractors to comply with vague and ill-defined directions that have never before been publicly wielded against a U.S. company,” Microsoft’s legal brief says.
It asks for a judge to order a temporary lifting of the designation to allow for more “reasoned discussion.”
The Pentagon declined to comment, saying it does not remark on matters in litigation.
Microsoft also sided with Anthropic’s two ethical red lines that were a sticking point in the contract negotiations.
“Microsoft also believes that American AI should not be used to conduct domestic mass surveillance or start a war without human control,” Microsoft said. “This position is consistent with the law and broadly supported by American society, as the government acknowledges.”
The software giant’s court filing followed others supporting Anthropic, including one from a group of AI developers at Google and OpenAI, and another from a group of organizations such as the Cato Institute and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
South Carolina
‘Ship of Gold’ treasure hunter released from prison, but 500 gold coins remain unaccounted for
A former deep-sea treasure hunter who made one of the greatest shipwreck discoveries in American history and spent the past decade in prison after refusing to disclose the whereabouts of some of its missing gold coins is now free, federal records show.
Tommy Thompson, who in 1988 located what was known as the Ship of Gold off the coast of South Carolina, was released last Wednesday, according to federal Bureau of Prisons records reviewed by The Associated Press.
Thompson, an Ohio-born research scientist, was hailed as a hero after finding the S.S. Central America and its thousands of pounds of sunken treasure that sat at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for more than 150 years.
But in the decades that followed, he battled with investors who accused him of cheating them out of millions and then spent years on the run as a fugitive before being sent to prison over rebuffing court orders while contending he didn’t know what happened to 500 coins minted from the ship’s gold.
The Central America was filled with a big haul from the California Gold Rush when it sank in a hurricane in 1857. Four hundred and twenty-five people drowned, and thousands of pounds of gold were lost, contributing to an economic panic.
Investors who backed Thompson’s venture sued him in 2005, saying they had yet to receive any money from the $50 million sale of more than 500 gold bars and thousands of coins — just part of the ship’s booty.
Thompson, who was living in Florida, went into seclusion and then later became a fugitive when an Ohio federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest in 2012 after he failed to show up in court.
Authorities tracked Thompson to a Florida hotel three years later. The judge then held him in contempt and sent Thompson to prison at the end of 2015 for refusing to answer questions about the location of missing coins.
Thompson, now 73, maintained that the coins — valued then at $2.5 million — were turned over to a trust in Belize and said the $50 million from the sale of the first batch of gold mostly went toward legal fees and bank loans.
He remained locked up even though federal law generally limits jail time for contempt of court to 18 months. A federal appeals court in 2019 rejected Thompson’s argument that the law applied to him, saying his refusal violated conditions of a plea agreement.
The following year, Thompson appeared by video for another hearing where U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley again asked whether he was ready to address the whereabouts of the gold.
“Your honor, I don’t know if we’ve gone over this road before or not, but I don’t know the whereabouts of the gold,” Thompson responded. “I feel like I don’t have the keys to my freedom.”
Just over a year ago, Marbley agreed to end Thompson’s sentence on the civil contempt charge, saying he was no longer convinced that keeping him in prison would produce an answer. The judge then ordered Thompson to immediately start serving a two-year sentence for skipping the 2012 court hearing.
Dwight Manley, a California coin dealer who bought and sold nearly the entire fortune, said Monday that Thompson paid a heavy price over what he said amounted to a business dispute.
“Going to prison for 10 years over a business dispute is not America,” Manley said. “People kill people and get out in half the time.”
Sentences in civil contempt cases are somewhat indefinite, but they shouldn’t go on forever, said Ryan Scott, a University of Florida law professor who researches contempt law and worked to secure Thompson’s release.
“It’s very unusual to go on 10 years,” Scott said.
He said Thompson should have been freed years ago — since at least 2018, after the court dismissed the underlying case — calling it a “miscarriage of justice for this to have gone on this long.”
Missouri
Jury awards $667K to Muslim men who were pepper-sprayed while praying
ST. LOUIS, Mo. (AP) — A federal jury on Monday awarded $667,000 in damages to a group of Muslim men incarcerated in Missouri who were pepper-sprayed by state correctional officers while praying.
The lawsuit in eastern Missouri’s U.S. District Court alleged that the men had been allowed to pray together many times in their prison housing unit after the chapel was locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The money will be distributed among eight men who were handcuffed, pepper-sprayed and placed in solitary confinement after praying in the housing area at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre on Feb. 28, 2021.
Those who were placed in solitary confinement at the 2,684-bed facility were left without access to soap or running water to wash off the pepper spray, and some resorted to washing their faces with toilet water, according to the lawsuit.
The men were initially charged with a major conduct violation for “acts of organized disobedience” by three or more offenders. That was later reduced to a minor violation. They were found guilty and released from segregation on March 10, 2021.
The CAIR Legal Fund and the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Missouri filed a civil lawsuit against Missouri correctional officers in 2023, saying they used excessive force and violated the men’s constitutional right to practice their religion, then showed deliberate indifference to serious medical needs.
The jury ruled in favor of the incarcerated men on all counts.
The Missouri Department of Corrections did not immediately return a request seeking comment on the judgment early Monday evening.
New York
Jeff Perconte promoted to general counsel of MLB players’ union
NEW YORK (AP) — Jeff Perconte was promoted to general counsel of the Major League Baseball Players Association on Wednesday in another move following the forced resignation of union head Tony Clark.
Perconte, 48, is the No. 3 person on the union’s legal team behind interim executive director Bruce Meyer and interim deputy executive director Matt Nussbaum, who had been general counsel.
The union’s leadership is preparing for the start of collective bargaining to replace the five-year labor contract that expires Dec. 1. Management is expected to propose a salary cap, which the union has vowed to fight, and a lockout appears likely to start on Dec. 2.
A former captain of Notre Dame’s baseball team, Perconte was a lawyer at Winston & Strawn from 2005-08, an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago from 2008-14 and a lawyer at Faegre Drinker before he was hired by the union in 2017 as assistant general counsel.
He was promoted to deputy general counsel in 2022 at the same time Meyer was elevated to deputy executive director.
Perconte becomes the seventh general counsel in the union’s history after Dick Moss (1966-77), Donald Fehr (1977-2004), Michael Weiner (2004-13), David Prouty (2013-17), Ian Penny (2017-22) and Nussbaum (2022-26).
Clark, a former All-Star first baseman, led the union from 2013 until he quit on Feb. 17 after an investigation by the union’s outside counsel discovered evidence that Clark had an inappropriate relationship with his sister-in-law, a union employee since 2023.
Meyer and Nussbaum were promoted by the union’s executive board the following day.
