Tax Attorneys and Lawyers

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit yesterday to shut down what it said was a fraudulent scheme to take the corporate concept of acquiring a mailbox in Bermuda to avoid taxes and apply it to individuals.

Corporations can, by complex maneuvers, in effect renounce America to avoid taxes on profits earned in the United States. Individuals can do the same if they leave the country. Congress taxes all individuals living in the United States, with minor exceptions, and American citizens regardless of where they live.

According to the suit, filed in Federal District Court in Denver, the Take Back America Foundation in Fort Collins, Colo., engaged in tax fraud by selling several thousand Americans packages that the foundation said allowed them to renounce their citizenship, stay in the United States and then restore their citizenship in a way that freed them from owing income, Social Security and Medicare taxes.

The price was $1,595 plus annual fees for a trust that supposedly put assets beyond the reach of the Internal Revenue Service.

The foundation is run by Austin Gary Cooper of Fort Collins and his wife, Martha, the suit said.

Mr. Cooper said last night, ”I can prove that the government, judge and prosecutor are guilty of treason and I am not selling fraud.”

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James Coyne, who was Albany County Executive for 16 years, was found guilty on bribery charges today for accepting $30,000 from an architect hired to design the Knickerbocker Arena.

Mr. Coyne was convicted on six of seven counts. The jury in Federal District Court announced its verdict this afternoon after almost two days of deliberations.

Mr. Coyne, 48 years old, was charged with two counts of bribery and conspiracy and one count each of extortion, mail fraud and tax fraud. He was acquitted of the tax-fraud charge.

His first trial ended in a mistrial in May when another Federal court jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict.

Sentencing was scheduled for Oct. 14.

“The life was not taken away from me,” Mr. Coyne said outside the courthouse. “I’ll survive and move on. I’m still young yet.”

Mr. Coyne, a Democrat, was County Executive from 1975 to 1991. He led the effort to get the 18,000-seat Knickerbocker Arena built in downtown Albany. The arena opened in 1990.

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Harvey Myerson, a prominent lawyer who was earlier convicted of defrauding clients, was found guilty yesterday of conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and filing a false income-tax return.

The prosecution contended that he charged some of his corporate clients for legal work that was never done, disguised the payments as fees for other lawyers and surreptitiously obtained more than $1 million for himself without paying taxes on it.

Acting as his own lawyer, Mr. Myerson told the jury that he had indeed used a series of checks to conceal some of his income between 1980 and 1986, but he said he had been hiding the money from his former wife, not from the I.R.S.

At the end of the four-day trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, the jury convicted him of all the charges — conspiracy, filing a false return that failed to report $162,500 of income in 1986 and causing his law firm to file a false return improperly deducting the $162,500 as an expense.

Mr. Myerson, known for expensive tastes and bitter disputes, said he would appeal his tax conviction, as well as his fraud conviction in April.

“As an experienced trial counsel,” he said, “I know that when you go before a jury, you roll the dice. This time the dice rolled against me. But I do believe we will prevail on appeal.”

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Leona M. Helmsley, who nearly collapsed on Wednesday outside a Manhattan courthouse after a Federal judge ordered her to prison for tax fraud, was released from New York Hospital yesterday in improved condition.

Mrs. Helmsley, the self-styled hotel queen whose lawyers had argued that a jail term for her would kill both her and her husband, left her private room in the cardiac care unit at 10:45 A.M. She has been instructed to surrender on April 15 to begin a four-year jail term, probably at a Federal medical prison in Lexington, Ky.

Mrs. Helmsley did not suffer a heart attack when she stumbled on her way to her limousine outside court, a hospital spokeswoman, Kathleen Robinson, said. Mrs. Helmsley, who is 71 years old, was admitted to the hospital with elevated blood pressure, complaining of palpitations and chest pressure.

Mrs. Helmsley has suffered several small strokes in recent years, her lawyers said. They argued that a prison sentence would be a “life sentence” for her and a “death sentence” for her ailing 83-year-old husband, Harry, who Mrs. Helmsley said could not live without her. But Judge Thomas P. Griesa upheld her original four-year sentence.

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Harvey Myerson, a swashbuckling corporate lawyer charged with a tax- fraud conspiracy, told a jury yesterday that he had merely concealed some of his income to hide the money from his former wife.

Acting as his own lawyer in his tax-fraud trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Mr. Myerson told the jury that “it never entered my mind” to defraud the Internal Revenue Service of income taxes.

Checks totaling about $275,000 were used to mislead his former wife about his true income, he said in his opening statement. Mr. Myerson, who is remarried, told the jury of six men and six women that his former wife was a greedy, bitter woman who had tricked him into “a sexless marriage.”

“This is a case that is a trumped-up case,” the 52-year-old defendant asserted, responding to the prosecution’s charges that he had conspired to defraud the I.R.S. and filed a false tax return that failed to report $162,500 of income in 1986. Brother-in-Law Involved

The prosecutor, Sean F. O’Shea, said in his opening statement that Mr. Myerson had charged clients for legal work that was never done and used a series of checks made out to his present brother-in-law to conceal hundreds of thousands of dollars of income from the I.R.S.

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About 40 students at a private college in Virginia and 50 of their friends are being investigated on suspicion of committing a new kind of fraud that was created when the Government introduced its electronic income-tax filing system seven years ago.

Officials say the students were taught how to defraud professional tax-preparation services and banks by filing phony returns, complete with forged wage statements and other supporting documents, and then pocketing bank loans arranged by the services in anticipation of tax refunds.

The scheme worked for a while because of an Internal Revenue Service policy that allows taxpayers filing electronically to mail supporting documents later, so by the time the returns are found to be fraudulent, the bank checks have been cashed.

In Virginia, officials said, most people in the group learned how to participate from a student who, in turn, had heard about it from a relative. The officials did not say what the source of the forged documents was. But as more and more students and others became involved, it became what investigators say is one of the largest fraud cases of its kind. Trying to Keep Up

“Our challenge is to not only keep up with the technology but to keep up with the crooks,” said the prosecutor in the case, Richard Cullen, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

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With Leona Helmsley quietly sobbing in the front row and her lawyer arguing that a jail term would be a death sentence for Mrs. Helmsley and her husband, Harry, a Federal judge warned yesterday that the self-styled hotel queen would get no special treatment from him.

“It’s time for you to get realistic,” said the judge, Thomas P. Griesa of Federal District Court in Manhattan. “There is a nation out there, and a community, and my job is to take into account the nation and the community in the enforcement of the law.”

“I urge you to prepare Mr. Helmsley for the probable need to be separated from you,” he added during a hearing yesterday.

But her lawyer, Alan M. Dershowitz, who claims to have new evidence that would undercut Mrs. Helmsley’s conviction and has asked for a new trial, told Judge Griesa yesterday that Mrs. Helmsley “is in immediate risk of death” from acute arterial disease and that any incarceration would be a “death sentence for both of them” because Mr. Helmsley had become so dependent on his wife.

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Harvey Myerson, a flamboyant lawyer known for his expensive tastes and bitter controversies, was sentenced last night to almost six years in prison for defrauding clients and filing a false tax return.

Judge Edward R. Korman imposed a prison term of 70 months for Mr. Myerson’s convictions in two trials in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.

Mr. Myerson, who is 53 years old and now lives in Key West, Fla., said at the sentencing that he had been “a lawyer at the top of his profession” but that now he was “ruined professionally and personally.”

Leaning on a lectern in front of the judge’s bench and speaking in a hoarse voice, Mr. Myerson urged the judge to give him a sentence less severe than the range of 70 to 87 months provided by Federal sentencing guidelines for his convictions.

A prosecutor, Sean F. O’Shea, urged the judge to impose a more severe sentence than provided by the guidelines because Mr. Myerson had abused his “privileged position” as a successful lawyer, had cheated his clients at three law firms and had become “a one-man crime wave.” Also Faces Disbarment

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Still defiant, John Gotti stood up and smiled, saying nothing, as he was sentenced yesterday to spend the rest of his life in prison.

As hundreds of chanting, flag-waving Gotti supporters protested in front of the Federal courthouse in Brooklyn, Judge I. Leo Glasser sentenced the convicted boss of the Gambino crime family in a courtroom so packed that James M. Fox, the head of the New York office of the F.B.I., was wedged next to Joseph DeCicco, a reputed Gambino associate.

Judge Glasser imposed life sentences with no possibility of parole on Mr. Gotti and his co-defendant, Frank Locascio, for their racketeering-murder convictions.

In a court session that took less than 10 minutes, with the lawyers for both sides choosing not to make statements, the judge asked Mr. Gotti if he had anything to say before the sentence was imposed. The 51-year-old Mr. Gotti, wearing a dark double-breasted suit, white shirt and bright yellow tie flecked with burnt orange, shook his head in silence. His longtime lawyer, Bruce Cutler, spoke for him, saying simply, “No, your honor.”

Judge Glasser, citing Federal sentencing guidelines adopted in 1987, told Mr. Gotti that “the guidelines in your case require me to commit you to the custody of the Attorney General for the duration of your life.”

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Luciano Pavarotti has paid an undisclosed sum to a German court to settle a tax evasion case arising from a lucrative world tour by the so-called Three Tenors in 1996, the prosecutor’s office in Mannheim, Germany, has announced. Placido Domingo reached a similar settlement last week.

Mr. Pavarotti, Mr. Domingo and the third tenor, Jose Carreras, were placed under investigation for possible tax fraud last December as a result of a parallel case in which Matthias Hoffmann, the promoter of the 1996 tour, was found guilty of evading some $10 million in taxes and was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison. Mr. Hoffmann is free on bail pending an appeal.

The prosecutor’s office, which said last week that Mr. Domingo had settled his case without giving a figure, said on Monday that Mr. Pavarotti had now also been dropped from the investigation after he made a payment — a six-figure sum, The Associated Press reported — to cover outstanding taxes. Mr. Pavarotti’s New York-based lawyer, Elliot Hoffman, said there was no question of tax fraud. ”The issue was simply over whether certain transactions were or were not taxable,” he said in a telephone interview.

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