James Brooks was a carnie, a worker at a traveling carnival that moved from one Southern State to another. Carnivals often winter in Florida, which was fine with Brooks, who was on the run from some unpleasantness in New Jersey.
Brooks had a fake driver’s license, a steady job and a part-time hustle for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He was far from a top producer for the DEA, but regularly reported to his DEA special agent handler who was able to turn Brooks’ leads into arrests.
Feeling almost like a respected member of his carnival community and given Florida’s lack of public transportation, Brooks decided to buy a car. Unfortunately, he did not have enough money to purchase the car of his dreams. A person with his background and position would be expected to steal a car, but Brooks did no such thing: instead, he applied for a bank loan at SunTrust Bank. SunTrust was heavily advertising their auto loans and one of their advertisement caught Brooks’ attention. He went to a branch, told the bank officer all about the dream car and how excited he was too purchase this automobile.
The bank officer told Brooks that the interest rates were higher for used cars, but this should present no problem. He handed Brooks a loan application which Brooks began to fill out. “You need a steady job,” the officer said.
Brooks hesitated. The carnival wouldn’t gear up for th4 season until April or so, there would be no paychecks until then. Brooks thought for a moment and decided to put his side hustle front and center. Under the section for “Employment,” Brooks wrote, “DEA.”
“What do you do for them?” The officer asked.
“I really don’t want to discuss it,” Brooks replied.
The loan was funded, the car was still available and Brooks purchased the car, a 1982 Ford Escort. He received a payment book from the dealer and each month ripped a page out of the payment book, went to the post office and bought a money order, and mailed his payment in.
There wasn’t a lot of DEA work and Brooks’ special agent handler told him that he would have to produce, otherwise, his informant’s gig would be at an end. To get information, Brooks would have to befriend those who used and sold drugs. In the carnival scene, this was primarily meth. Brooks did his best and from time to time informed on people in the scene he came across.
In April, Brooks left Florida in his Ford Escort and followed the carnival from state to state. A routine traffic stop—aren’t they all?—quickly morphed into something else when the record of his driver’s license couldn’t be found. Despite the warrant, New Jersey didn’t want to come for Brooks who happened to be with the carnival in Ft. Lauderdale when the traffic stop was made.
The arresting officer was with Oakland Park police and was cross-designated with the DEA. The DEA didn’t require its agents to have a college degree and used local police departments as their minor leagues, a a recruitment pool of young officers who might be tempted to leave their local departments for better federal pay and benefits. The Oakland Park police officer had this in mind and referred the matter to the US Attorney.
A grand jury then indicted Brooks for bank fraud. Never mind that he had faithfully and regularly paid the loan. Never mind hat the loan was current. He had told two lies. Brooks lied about his name. This was understandable, given the warrant from New Jersey. The false name had no credit score and the bank had not relied on someone else’s credit when deciding to fund Brooks’ used car purchase. The second lie was that Brooks was employed by the DEA. Brooks regularly received money from the DEA, but in the days before the rise of the gig economy, you were either employed or you were not. A side hustle, no matter how regular, did not qualify as employment.
Brooks went to trial, confident in his belief that a jury of his peers would acquit him. After all, he was practically law enforcement and had helped put drug dealers in jail. The jury indictment was a cruel joke. Brooks tried to find his special agent DEA handler to ask for assistance, but the DEA rebuffed all his efforts.
Federal trials almost always result in convictions. The percentage of convictions is in the high 90th percentile. An acquittal is an aberration that almost never happens. The Palm Beach county federal jury did not take pity on Brooks because when the judge charged them with the law, they were to consider one and only one question: did Brooks lie to the bank? If the answer to that question was “yes,” they had to convict.
They were to ignore the fact that he was current on the loan. The jury was to consider a letter from the DEA, put into evidence by the prosecution, that stated a research of DEA records was conducted and “no evidence of an employee by the name of James Brooks could be found.” The jury followed the judge’s instructions.
When it came time for sentencing, the learned federal judge took into consideration all the factors he had told the jury to ignore. Brooks had paid the loan. He was arguably an adjunct law enforcement officer in that turkey drug world. The bank could not be said to have been defrauded except in some technical sense. The DEA had probably gotten into some kind of argument with Brooks and that is what had led to the indictment.
The judge sentenced Brooks to a little more than a year in jail. By doing so, he insured that Brooks would get the full 55 days of good time off his sentence. Brooks would be eligible for halfway house and work release after just four months, a just result.
Lisa Cook is one of the governors of the Federal Reserve. When she applied for a bank loan, she claimed that the money would be used to purchase an owner-occupied single family home, the safest kind of mortgage for the simple reason that everyone needs to sleep.
Cook lied to the bank. She already had an owner-occupied primary residence. This new property was an investment, a second home. But not the first.
Cook lied to the bank. Like it or not, this is a federal crime. It doesn’t matter if she is current on her loan. It doesn’t matter if she never intended to defraud the bank. All that matters is that she lied to the bank.
This is not a Donald Trump issue. It is not about Trump’s war on the bureaucracy. It is about one simple question:
Why should Brooks go to jail but Cook be given a pass?