Back in February, U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton of the Western District of Washington told AdSurfDaily story figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming that “all the fancy legal-sounding things” Leaming had “read on the internet are make-believe.”
Another way to put that is, “Garbage in, garbage out” — or, in shorthand, GIGO.
Leighton’s observations appeared in an eve-of-trial order exempting federal prosecutors from responding to certain “gobbledygook” Leaming had filed as part of his self-argued defense on charges of filing bogus liens, possessing weapons as a convicted felon and harboring two federal fugitives from Arkansas wanted in a home-business fraud scheme separate from the $119 million ASD Ponzi scheme broken up by the U.S. Secret Service in 2008.
Leaming, 57, was convicted. In April, several weeks after his trial and conviction, Leaming sent Leighton a purported “Invoice” that claimed the judge owed him 208,000 ounces of “fine silver,” according to the docket of the case.
It is against this backdrop that purported “sovereign citizen” Cherron Marie Phillips is going on trial in Chicago on charges of filing bogus liens against Former U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald and other court officials, including federal judges.
Like Leighton in Tacoma to “sovereign” defendant Leaming, U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur in Chicago made some remarks to “sovereign” defendant Phillips on the eve of her trial.
“I hesitate to rank your statements in order of just how bizarre they are,” said veteran U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur, who at one point attempted to explain to Phillips the meaning of the phrase, “garbage in, garbage out.” As Phillips continued to press him on his allegiance to the Constitution, Shadur finally cut her off.
Phillips earlier had rejected Shadur’s advice not to represent herself, according to the paper.
Leaming, who had a previous felony conviction for piloting an aircraft without a license, was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Among the targets of his false liens were a federal judge, at least two federal prosecutors and the Secret Service agent who led the ASD Ponzi investigation.
Purported “sovereigns” in multiple states have engaged in acts that have been described as “paper terrorism” designed to hamstring judges, prosecutors and litigation opponents.
ASD operator Andy Bowdoin was sentenced last year to 78 months in federal prison. He is 78.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was updated at 9:37 a.m. EDT on May 13 and again on May 17 at 2:24 p.m. to reflect that Kenneth Wayne Leaming is demanding payment from a federal judge in ounces of silver, not dollars . . .
Devitoe Farmer, the purported Tennessee “sovereign citizen” indicted last year on charges of stealing government property in a “quit-claims” caper, has pleaded guilty to three counts of theft.
Meanwhile, Kenneth Wayne Leaming — the AdSurfDaily figure and purported “sovereign citizen” in Washington state jailed after convictions for possessing firearms illegally and filing bogus claims against government officials involved in the prosecution of the ASD Ponzi scheme — now has sent a bill to the federal judge who presided over his criminal trial.
The bill demands payment of 208,000 ounces of “99.9% fine silver” from the judge.
First, the Farmer story . . .
“In the Mid-South, we have witnessed first-hand the potential threat posed by those claiming to be sovereign citizens,” said U.S. Attorney Edward L. Stanton III of the Western District of Tennessee.
Farmer, 46, apparently decided he wanted to own homes — and apparently came up with a paperwork confection in which he transferred three properties owned by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to himself.
From a statement by prosecutors (italics added):
According to an indictment filed on March 21, 2012, and facts of the case revealed during the plea hearing, Farmer took possession of three HUD-owned properties in the city of Memphis during February and April of 2011. His scheme was discovered when employees with a property management firm contracted by HUD to care for the properties discovered that Farmer had filed quit claim deeds to himself with the Shelby County Register of Deeds Office on the properties and placed tenants in them. HUD-contracted real estate agents also noticed that “for sale” signs had been removed from the properties and that locks had been changed.
One of the properties was rented to an individual, who supplied investigators with copies of the lease agreement made with Farmer. Another property was occupied by a relative of Farmer. When asked by Memphis Police Department officers for proof of his ownership of the properties, Farmer presented documents declaring that he was a sovereign citizen.
There have been some very strange events in the Memphis region, including the bizarre case of Tabitha Gentry. Gentry is accused of licensing herself to occupy an East Memphis mansion she did not own.
NewsOne.com has a report on Tabitha Gentry. The site reports that Gentry calls herself Abka Re Bey and claims to have taken over the mansion “in the name of Allah, the most high.”
Also see KSLA report on Gentry, a purported “Moorish American” who allegedly mouthed off to a judge after the eviction from the property and claimed lawyers are “Communists.”
Leaming, 57, was found guilty in the Western District of Washington earlier this year of possessing firearms as a convicted felon and filing bogus liens for billions of dollars against public officials involved in the prosecution of the AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme. One of the targets was a U.S. Secret Service agent.
Both before and after his conviction, Leaming filed blizzards of paperwork. Among his most recent filings is a claim that U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton owes him 208,000 ounces of fine silver. Leighton presided over Leaming’s criminal trial.
AdSurfSaily figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming now claims a federal judge owes him 208,000 ounces of fine silver. Source: Federal court files.
UPDATED 12:46 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) The evidence against AdSurfDaily figure Kenneth Wayne Leaming was “overwhelming” and led to the purported “sovereign citizen’s” conviction on three counts of retaliating against a federal official by filing false claims, one count of concealing a person from arrest and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm, a federal judge wrote in court filings.
While making a veiled reference to the ASD Ponzi case brought by the U.S. Secret Service in 2008 in the District of Columbia, U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton of the Western District of Washington wrote in an order dated March 14 that evidence showed Leaming “admitted to filing liens against a group of federal officials for absurd sums, $225 billion in one case.”
“The only link any of these officials had to each other was their participation in the prosecution of a Ponzi scheme on the east coast,” Leighton wrote. “The evidence demonstrated that Defendant was ‘helping,’ as he put it, certain individuals who were aggrieved by the prosecution of the Ponzi scheme.”
Leighton’s order did not identify the individuals Leaming was said to he helping. The order was issued in response to a bid by Leaming, 57, to be acquitted post-verdict amid assertions the evidence against him was insufficient to sustain the convictions.
But Leaming, according to the order, “admitted on the stand that he knowingly possessed the firearms in question because he wanted to challenge the law at the Supreme Court.”
And, Leighton wrote, the evidence “overwhelmingly supported Defendant’s conviction of concealing a person from arrest. The Government established that Defendant knew certain individuals were sought in relation to a postal-scam, that Defendant allowed them to stay in his home, helped them trade cars, and otherwise supported them.”
Those individuals have been identified in court filings as onetime fugitives Timothy Shawn Donavan and Sharon Jeannette Henningsen of Arkansas. They were found with Leaming in Washington state in November 2011. Donavan and Henningsen later were convicted of mail fraud in a home-business caper that gathered more than $2 million, prosecutors said.
ASD was a $119 million Ponzi scheme opearting from Florida over the Internet. ASD’s business model was similar to the model of the Zeek Rewards “program,” which the SEC described in August 2012 as a $600 million Ponzi- and pyramid scheme operating from North Carolina.
ASD and Zeek are known to have had members in common. Some ASD members said that Leaming was providing them counsel, despite the fact he is not an attorney.
The PP Blog reported in November 2010 that Cornell University Law School, Justia.com and Oyez.org removed online profiles of Leaming. The sites previously had listed Leaming as an attorney who practiced law and advertised a fee structure of up to $250 an hour from Spanaway, Wash.
Leaming was arrested by an FBI terrorism task force a year later in Spanaway.
Also see Nov. 13, 2010, PP Blog report on a disturbing email some ASD members received that asserted they could be sued for filing a remissions claim in the ASD Ponzi case.
In October 2011, the PP Blog reported than some ASD members had received an email that encouraged them to file documents at the “county” level and “name” federal officials as “thieves.”
Court filings suggest that Leaming already was under investigation by the FBI when some ASD members were trumpeting him as the answer to their problems.
URGENT >> BULLETIN >> MOVING: AdSurfDaily figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming has been found guilty in the Western District of Washington of filing false liens against public officials, harboring fugitives and being a felon in possession of firearms, federal prosecutors said tonight.
Leaming associate David Carroll Stephenson also was found guilty of filing false liens.
The PP Blog will have a full report when more information becomes available. The case was prosecuted by the office of U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan.
Kenneth Wayne Leaming, aka “Kenneth Wayne,” aka “Keny,” now is calling himself a “live abortion” — apparently in “defense” of home-based businesses.
UPDATED 12:28 P.M. (FEB. 27, U.S.A.) Kenneth Wayne Leaming, a figure in the AdSurfDaily Ponzi-scheme story and a purported “sovereign citizen,” is scheduled to go on trial today in federal court the Western District of Washington with co-defendant David Carroll Stephenson. Leaming is charged with filing false liens against public officials involved in the ASD prosecution. Among his alleged targets were a federal judge, at least two federal prosecutors — and the U.S. Secret Service agent who cracked the ASD Ponzi case in 2008.
Leaming, 57, also is charged with assisting Stephenson in the filing of false liens against two federal-prison officials. Stephenson was in federal prison for a tax scheme at the time the liens allegedly were filed. Records strongly suggest that Stephenson, also 57, would be a free man today were it not for his association with Leaming, given that Stephenson’s prison term in the tax case had been scheduled to end early this year. Instead, he’s facing new charges and potentially more jail time.
But the false-liens charges are just the beginning for Leaming. He also is charged with harboring two federal fugitives wanted in a multimillion-dollar home-business fraud in Arkansas, being a felon in possession of firearms and passing a bogus “Bonded Promissory Note” for $1 million.
If you’re new to the PP Blog and new to the ASD case, a brief review is in order: The Secret Service raided ASD in August 2008, alleging the Florida-based firm operated by Andy Bowdoin was a massive Ponzi scheme operating over the Internet. Bowdoin reacted to the raid and the seizure of tens of millions of dollars by comparing the U.S. government to “Satan” and the Secret Service to the 9/11 terrorists. Now 78 and in federal prison, Bowdoin came out of the gate after the seizure by assuring ASD investors that “God” was on the company’s side.
Some MLMers were quick to accuse the government of targeting a fine Christian man who was helping the United States create jobs with a “program” that purported to pay participants back 100 percent of their investment and a profit of 25 percent in only months. (Ten-thousand dollars in ASD purportedly fetched $12,500 within 90 to 125 days, purportedly more if members “compounded” their “earnings,” kept 80 percent of their money in a continuous state of “roll over” and never fully cashed out.)
Essentially there was only one chance that ASD was not a Ponzi scheme during its approximately 18-month run — and that single chance required nearly a complete suspension of logic to destroy the government’s Ponzi case and get ASD off the hook: Had a crazy billionaire or exceptionally well-heeled financier (who also was crazy) given convicted-felon Bowdoin more money than ASD’s rapidly accruing liabilities — basically an enormous line of credit that didn’t have to be paid back and could be tapped on demand for ASD to pay out $1.25 for every dollar it took in until the line was exhausted — ASD would not have been a Ponzi scheme. Absent a benevolent madman-billionaire and the kind of capital it would take to build a nuclear-power plant and operate it indefinitely with zero concern for profit, however, ASD could be one thing and one thing only: a Ponzi scheme using money from “new” members to fund the redemption requests of “old” members or a Ponzi scheme that sustained itself by simply recycling money among members of a closed group.
No madmen-billionaires sufficiently liquid to bankrupt themselves by funding Bowdoin’s stated plan of creating 100,000 ASD millionaires in three years while at once financing the “profits” of tens of thousands of average people seeking to expand the ranks of ASD millionaires well beyond 100,000 appeared to testify on ASD’s behalf at an evidentiary hearing it requested in the fall of 2008.
Here is just one of the reasons MLM has a miserable reputation: Notwithstanding the fact that Bowdoin already was a convicted felon for an Alabama securities swindle in the 1990s and that one of his business partners was a man implicated by the SEC in the 1990s in three prime-bank swindles, some MLMers decided to improve the already bizarre narrative that the government was picking on a grandfatherly Christian.
Petitions were started to paint prosecutors as the bogeymen. (The shorthand for this in MLM’s HYIP Ponzi land is “evilGUBment.”) ASD critics were derided as “maggots.” A “prayer” went out calling for prosecutors to be struck dead from the heavens. A theory was advanced that a Florida TV station should be charged with Deceptive Trade Practices for carrying news unflattering to ASD. A companion theory held that the Attorney General of Florida should be charged with the same offense and that AARP, which lobbies for senior citizens, should lobby for ASD. Meanwhile, some MLMers tried to enlist the U.S. Senate to turn the focus of the investigation away from ASD and Bowdoin and put it on the prosecutors who brought the Ponzi case. One MLMer called for the government’s lead prosecutor to be placed in a medieval torture rack, with ASD members at large drawing straws to determine who got the honor of making the prosecutor’s time in the rack as painful as possible.
Very few people in MLM had anything to say about the circus surrounding ASD. The few who did — perhaps most notably Rod Cook of MLM Watchdog — were excoriated for dismissing the narrative advanced by Bowdoin and other MLMers. All of this was occurring while ASD was provably insolvent. When Bowdoin failed to take the witness stand at the evidentiary hearing he requested, it was explained that he was “too honest” to testify. Both before and after the hearing, some of his most notable Stepfordian apologists advanced a theory that the government secretly had admitted ASD was not a Ponzi scheme and was clinging to the case in a bid to save face.
One ASD member advanced a narrative that the government had taken about $80 million in seized proceeds and invested it in a secret fund to pay for black-ops. It was from this caldron of conspiracy theories and fantastic idiocy that Kenneth Wayne Leaming emerged.
Like other “sovereigns,” Leaming to date hasn’t focused much of his attention on the actual charges against him, even though his conviction could result in considerable jail time. Rather, Leaming mostly has focused on creating a blitz of paperwork on the apparent theory his best “defense” is to keep the Feds and even local officials scurrying to guard all flanks. Since his November 2011 arrest by an FBI Terrorism Task Force, Leaming has sued the President of the United States, the Attorney General of the United States, various officials (including purported “Does”) and a county sheriff in Arkansas.
Members of Zeek Rewards and other MLM schemes should pay attention to the Leaming trial. There can be no doubt that Leaming-like figures existed within the Zeek enterprise. Like ASD before it, Zeek was a magnet to willfully blind MLM hucksters and actual criminals. Both “businesses” best are viewed as racketeering enterprises that posed an untenable risk to the United States and the rest of the world.
For the remainder of this column, the PP Blog will focus on just one crime alleged against Leaming: the filing of a false lien against the U.S. Secret Service agent — not that the other alleged bogus liens are any more palatable or acceptable. The word “disgraceful” hardly covers Leaming’s alleged actions, and yet some MLMers saw Leaming not only as an inspirational figure, but as the wisest man of all.
The Secret Service guards the lives of the President of the United States and the Vice President of the United States and their families. It also guards the lives of former Presidents and international dignitaries and political figures visiting the United States. As the agency is doing this, it also protects the U.S. financial system.
It is unthinkable — so far beyond the pale that it almost defies description — that Leaming, let alone any other American, ever would target a Secret Service agent in a harassment campaign. The Secret Service is a smallish agency by federal standards, yet it is arguably the most important: Markets become unglued when world figures are assassinated or targeted in assassination attempts. Beyond that, history now has shown that an event such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks actually can close markets and restrict freedom, the very things Leaming purports to be upholding.
People of good will are appalled that Leaming apparently thought it somehow his duty to Democracy and Constitutional government to harass a Secret Service agent. Given the critical duties of the Secret Service and its role in both national security and economic security, no American of good will wants to see an agent’s attention divided by the Kenneth Wayne Leamings of the nation and world.
If Leaming is convicted, he should be sentenced to the longest jail term permissible under the law. Never again should MLM or any MLMer stay silent when an obvious fraud scheme surfaces and is “defended” at the exclusion of all logic.
In both form and substance, Zeek was virtually identical to ASD — and yet ASD members and other MLMers joined Zeek. That’s a problem for MLM. whether it admits it or not.
Those ASD members who joined Zeek? They did so even as Kenneth Wayne Leaming allegedly was targeting public officials, including a U.S. Secret Service agent, in campaigns designed to destroy the thin blue line that protects citizens from anarchy. The most dangerous Zeek members are the ones who hoped he’d succeed.
On Feb. 13, the PP Blog reported that a federal judge who was quoting from a pleading by AdSurfDaily figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming had referenced a domain styled peoplestrust1776.org.
U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton declared Leaming’s filing, which apparently cited the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), “undecipherable.” The judge exempted prosecutors from responding to a series of recent bizarre pleadings from Leaming, who is jailed near Seattle on charges of filing false liens against public officials in the AdSurfDaily Ponzi case. Leaming, 57, also is accused of other crimes.
Like other purported “sovereigns,” the judge observed, Leaming is “fascinated” by capital letters.
Some “sovereign citizens” appear to believe that pleadings that include capital letters or make UCC claims provide defenses or remedies for everything from murder charges to charges of targeting public officials in harassment campaigns.
Less than two days after the PP Blog published its most recent story about Leaming’s strange defense efforts in the Western District of Washington, the Blog received a would-be comment it is treating as spam because it purported to be in response to a reader who left a comment on the PP Blog nearly two years ago on a different subject. Received at 2:55 a.m. ET today, the unpublished, would-be comment included a link to a post on a Blog whose URL was formed in part with the words “the-full-details-of-kidnapping-of.”
One had to visit the site to determine who allegedly was kidnapped.
The PP Blog visited the link and found a post about Patrick Cody Morgan, a purported Texas “sovereign” who was convicted last year of conspiracy and nine counts of bank fraud in a real-estate swindle involving repeated bids to scam residential mortgage lenders and FDIC-insured banks between 2004 and 2007. The scam involved “trust accounts” and “straw buyers,” prosecutors said. The PP Blog wrote about the Morgan convictions on Nov. 2, 2012. No readers left comments in the thread below the story.
In any event, the would-be commentator apparently wants to generate discussion about the Morgan case and to enlist support for Morgan. Notably, the spammed link received by the PP Blog includes references to the same peoplestrust1776.org domain Leaming cited in an apparent defense bid in his criminal case.
Content on the site whose post link was spammed to the PP Blog overnight appears to be designed to paint government officials or agencies involved in the Morgan case as “the Accused.” Apparently among the purported “Accused” are U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller, U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes of the Southern District of Texas and others. The site also published florid legalese attributed to Morgan that, like Leaming’s prose, made liberal use of capital letters.
Legalese attributed to Morgan asserts he is “Patrick-Cody: Family of Morgan”; Leaming’s legalese asserts he is “Kenneth Wayne, born free to the family Leaming.”
Some “sovereigns” appear to believe that using exceptionally formal prose, capital letters and/or specific forms of punctuation in court filings somehow provide for a winning defense.
Leighton characterized Leaming’s prose as “gobbledygook.”
Morgan — in his apparent defense — appears to claim he was the victim of criminals working for the government. Leaming has made similar arguments in Washington state.
Precisely what role, if any, peoplestrust1776.org is playing in the Morgan and Leaming cases is unclear.
Back in February, U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton of the Western District of Washington told AdSurfDaily story figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming that “all the fancy legal-sounding things” Leaming had “read on the internet are make-believe.”
