Welcome to Court Watch #133. It’s Independence Day, where we celebrate Will Smith’s underdog win over space invaders who were surprisingly overdependent on technology. Though, like most seminal moments in U.S. history, we know the real hero was the American farmer (editor’s note: R.I.P., Russell Casse). The dockets also gave us some surprising moments, including a new judicial definition of safe spaces, a major media organization folding a seemingly winning legal hand against the Administration, Bill O’Reilly allegedly smuggling Irish immigrants through the Canadian border, a court losing key trial exhibits, and one guy in Texas who wants the feds to be chill about his T-Rex skull. For the record, you can pry our prehistoric, priceless fossils from our cold, dead hands, DHS. Plus, it wouldn’t be a week in the dockets without at least one lawyer falling on their sword for misusing ChatGPT.
But before all that, let’s talk about the Queen.
International Drug Ring Revealed
An arrest in Nevada reveals international and American law enforcement are chasing a sophisticated drug network that shipped hundreds of pounds of meth around the globe and into the U.S. The charging documents, which haven't been previously reported, show that the operation is targeting smugglers in China, Australia, Vietnam, Turkey, Ireland, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, and the United States.
The investigation, according to court records, began in Ankara in June 2022, when the DEA’s attaché office in Turkey recruited a confidential source in a major drug trafficking organization. The source, identified only in court records by the alias “Queen,” played a central role in helping undercover DEA agents infiltrate the transnational trafficking network. At the behest of DEA agents, Queen reportedly embedded herself within the organization, earning the trust of one purported leader, a Canadian man named Opinder Singh Sian, after she promised to help the traffickers move shipments through Los Angeles.
In his conversations with Queen, Sian came across as well-connected in the criminal underworld, allegedly mentioning his various ties to the Italian mob, a prominent Turkish drug kingpin who has been on the run since 2018, and the Kinahan Family, a powerful Irish organized crime syndicate. Queen reported their discussions back to the DEA, which arranged for her to introduce an undercover agent to Sian at a lunch meeting in Southwest L.A. On March 28, 2023, the three met at a restaurant on Manhattan beach, where the undercover agent – posing as one of Queen’s family members – reportedly told Sian that he could help smuggle shipments of meth by recruiting a cousin who worked at the Port of Long Beach.
Beginning in June 2023, Queen and Sian coordinated with the undercover agent to purportedly move hundreds of pounds of meth through the port in L.A. to a final destination of Sydney, Australia. According to the criminal complaint, the undercover agent, Queen, and Sian planned for Sian’s lieutenants, including one who went by “Darth Vader,” to meet with a second undercover DEA agent and Queen’s courier, “Lalo,” to handover the shipments of meth at a residence in nearby Pomona. Yet, instead of smuggling the meth to Australia, Lalo and the undercover agent acted as interceptors, giving the hundreds of pounds of meth to law enforcement, who sent it to a DEA lab for testing.
The DEA also enlisted the help of Australian law enforcement, which went so far as to concoct a fake batch of drugs to look like the meth seemingly bound for Sydney. An Australian undercover law enforcement officer then delivered the fake batch, which contained a tracking device, to Sian’s alleged associates based in Australia. The sting reportedly led Australian police to a stash house, which law enforcement eventually raided.
As the DEA’s investigation went on, Sian reportedly introduced Queen to multiple of his associates in the trafficking network, giving agents an unfettered window into the smuggling operation and its participants. Sian purportedly used the encrypted messaging app Threema, a competitor to the more well-regarded app Signal, to chat with Queen and to add her to groups with other reported traffickers in order to introduce them. A filing in the case indicates law enforcement was able to identify many of the alleged traffickers Queen messaged, including the ones who used pseudonyms as their usernames.
Court records also detail how Sian agreed to a plan with Queen to expand the network’s trafficking operations by shipping chemicals to produce fentanyl in the U.S. According to the complaint, Sian told Queen he could procure shipments from China of the precursor chemicals and arranged for a sit-down in a Vancouver coffee shop between Queen and two of his associates who run a Canadian trucking company. At the sit-down, the two men allegedly offered to help Queen smuggle the Chinese-made chemicals by receiving the shipments in Vancouver and moving them over the U.S. border. One of the truckers reportedly confided in Queen that he wanted to make money as a smuggler because his wife was “greedy” and wanted him to earn more money for their family.
Last week, law enforcement netted at least one of the key players in the purported trafficking ring when it arrested Sian in Nevada. A filing in the case revealed that law enforcement allowed him to enter the U.S. from Canada so they could arrest him to face prosecution. On Monday, a judge ordered for him to be detained pending trial, noting Sian “is alleged to have been involved in a large-scale drug operation involving approximately 520 pounds of Fentanyl. The defendant is alleged to be a member of a criminal gang and is alleged to have ties to international hitmen.” He is currently scheduled to be transferred on July 21st to face charges in the Central District of California.
The U.S. Attorney’s office of the Central District of California, which is prosecuting the case, had no comment on the charges. A lawyer for Sian did not respond to an inquiry from Court Watch. The Australian Embassy in D.C. directed us to their Department of Foreign Affairs, which did not respond.
The Docket Roundup
A Maryland lawyer admitted to using ChatGPT to create a filing that then hallucinated a citation. The lawyer, writing in the standard court filing third person, “embarrassed by the oversight, she offers no justification or cause for the erroneous citation—only the resolve that she will never again cite to a case that she has not personally reviewed.”
Scammers impersonating President Trump’s Inaugural Committee stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting donors.
A Texas man wants the feds to definitively note they won’t take his prehistoric T-Rex skull. Classic Texas.
A group of NGOs is suing over the cuts to hate crime grants.
Our favorite pedantic court filing from the week is a guy who’s upset about a Republican fundraising operation he’s suing, not liking that he uses a P.O. box.
Brad Spafford, the Virginia man who was arrested on gun charges after the FBI reportedly made the “largest seizure of homemade explosives in FBI history,” is set to plead guilty. Here’s our exclusive article from December about his arrest.
If you like Big Law drama, with a Paul Hasting touchpoint, there’s a New York filing for you.
Pour one out this weekend for the defense attorney in this case of a man accused of going on Instagram Live with a converted automatic handgun.
A man living in Texas is suing the state over a new law that prohibits land ownership by Chinese nationals.
A North Dakota man was arrested for threatening the U.S. Attorney there.
Law enforcement is getting into the crypto game to catch drug traffickers.
We’re not really sure if this Massachusetts judge is mindful of what “safe spaces” means in today’s parlance, though we take his point: “For 235 years of continuous sittings, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts has been that ‘safe space.’ We shall not falter.”
A disturbing cyberstalking case out of Florida.
Looks like Elon Musk will get his trial about the expansive nature of Section 230.
In honor of Tyler Childers’ next album dropping this month, his newest single wins this week’s song of the week. He’s an all-time redhead and plays one hell of a show.
The FBI says a Washington man tried to build a bomb to avenge his father’s death after he was killed in a tragic port accident. According to the complaint, the man believes his father was actually murdered by a conspiracy involving the National Security Agency.
Judge Wollmann of South Dakota keeps rubber-stamping every redaction requested by the Justice Department, but the Judicial Conference doesn’t seem to care about the public’s inherent right to court records, so it’ll no doubt continue unabated.
Bill O’Reilly was arrested for smuggling Irish criminals into the U.S. (editor’s note: Ok, fine, it’s not that Bill O’Reilly.)
We picked up two UK reporters as free subscribers this week, if you’re reading this, google the name of the company and go do your thing. If it shakes out, upgrade to paid.
A Massachusetts man pleaded guilty to cyberstalking a federal agent who lives in South Carolina. Prosecutors say the man joined Kik using the username “connecticut12345” to talk about the federal agent and their spouse in anti-law enforcement group chats.
Thousands of people’s data were stolen and used in a pandemic unemployment fraud scheme.
A new lawsuit argues that Minnesota’s Social Media Manipulation Act is censorship.
A pro-se litigant named Unique Truth is suing President Trump, requesting that he “stay away from my family and friends in this life and the afterlife.”
A pardoned January 6 rioter was sentenced by a judge to life in prison for a foiled assassination plot to kill the FBI agents who investigated him.
The feds clawed back a couple million dollars lost in a fake URL email scam.
A bunch of healthcare companies are suing a company that they accused of providing non-existent health care benefits and insurance cards. It’s kind of sad to read the lawsuit and then check out the Reddit thread on the company a few months back, where people kept asking if it’s legit.
A federal judge told a state judge that her pro-se filing was too wordy. Writing in an opinion, “The first indication of this appears in its excessive length. It is 151 pages long with 1,127 paragraphs. Doc. No. 12. This is longer than her initial complaint, which is 145 pages long with 1,089 paragraphs. Doc. Nos. 1; 1-1; 1-2; 1-3. Plaintiff’s proposed second amended complaint is even longer—163 pages with 1,194 paragraphs. Doc. No. 28-2. It is questionable whether complaints extending to such prodigious lengths could ever be fairly described as “short,” as Rule 8(a)(2) requires" (hattip to Court Watch Subscriber, Matt)
We know there's not a lot of us left, but for terrorism scholars still tracking this stuff, buried a bit on page 8 of the detention memo on the new Terrorgram arrest today, feds say for the first time publicly that Nikita Caspan (Wisconsin kid accused of murdering his parents) was connected to them. Also, in an exhibit that accompanies that same detention memo, we get the far too common Turner-Diary-In-Dresser-Picture.
A judge rules that a plaintiff can use Elon Musk’s words against him.
A Tennessee artist says some realtors borrowed his paintings, commissioned forgeries, and then staged them in million-dollar houses for sale.
13-year-old us really enjoyed seeing the band, Live, file a lawsuit. Enjoy the throwback rabbit hole we went down after that.
It’s awkward when you lose the trial exhibits.
The CBS/Trump settlement is officially on the docket.
Dive into the fascinating world of Chinese espionage.
Vanity Fair is being sued by a Canadian news publisher for a story about her losing her mansion.
Everyone covered this because it involved President Trump, but we were more struck by the determination that a state anti-SLAPP law doesn’t hold any sway in federal court.
There’s a lawsuit against the State Department’s Global Engagement Center about social media censorship. Given that Secretary Rubio disbanded the unit, it’ll be interesting if the Justice Department decides to settle.
Here’s a billion-dollar cryptocurrency scam that no one noticed.
Customers of a number of Michigan banks, including one with the tagline, “the best place for financial success,” were targeted in a large-scale scam.
A judge spends 28 pages lamenting to finally conclude, “Put simply, the Court by no means green-lights DOGE Affiliates’ access to Americans’ most sensitive information. The Court simply cannot step in to enjoin such access at this juncture.”
Oregon is low-key becoming ground zero for federal charges involving individuals messing with ICE. Exhibit 1. Exhibit 2. Exhibit 3 (that one is a doozy). We’d note that the U.S. Attorney’s office there has a history, particularly during the Summer of 2020, of bringing charges and then quietly dropping them a year later when few are watching.
A would-be National Regulatory Commission intern is suing because he didn’t want to sign up for the “male-only draft.”
A California law firm is being sued, with the opening line bringing the heat: “This case implicates the worst parts of the legal professional: lawyers willing to do or say anything for a paying client, including disregard their duties of diligence, file and/or maintain claims that objectively lack probable cause, and cause innocent individuals substantial harm.”
The Daily Beast is facing a lawsuit for copyright infringement.
A fight in a car, a late night at a bar, all prequels to a sexual assault case in Montana.
Friends, we regret to inform you that local news is fighting over what to call the weather.
BabyFace is getting sued over a song called Ron Artest.
Because we grinded through 94 federal districts this week, we can allow ourselves a moment to hold a controversial but nevertheless correct opinion. ‘If’ was a good and underrated movie. You should watch it this weekend.
A Pennsylvania school board is being sued, in part, over hosting President Trump, with the lawsuit arguing that “if any student had spoken the same way that Mr. Trump did while he was at [the school], that student would have been in violation of [the school’s] policies against bullying and discrimination and punished.”
A lawsuit in D.C. may be a test case to whether you can pop a weed gummy and still get a security clearance.
A non-profit that provides legal services to immigrants as part of a Biden-era settlement says they lost their funding in part because their website had a line stating “Black employees must experience an inclusive workplace culture where their lived experience is valued.”
The amended complaint isn’t available on PACER because of the nature of suit code, but just trust us when we say this morning 58 Iranian immigrants are suing the Trump Administration over the new travel ban,
SpaceX is on the receiving end of another lawsuit.
An Oregon judge says immigration enforcement officials played quite fast and loose with a court order.
This walkthrough of how North Korea raises millions of dollars through scams is fascinating.
A DOJ Inspector General report about an FBI agent hiring a call girl overseas got all the news this week, but for our money, we think this other IG report should have gotten equal coverage.
The National Retail Federation doesn’t like that New York thinks using AI to set prices is bad.
Thanks for reading. A last call for any subscriber who takes the paid option, we’re mailing a new round of Court Watch koozies next week. Drop us a note if you want one.
Finally, it’s 6:54am as we put the final touches on this week’s newsletter. We’re sitting on our porch, the air is crisp, our coffee is warm, so enjoy one last song of the week with an mildly long but iconic piano opening (get to the 1:14 minute mark for words) that we’re listening to as we do one last round of edits.