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Simels heads to jail after failed bail application
Robert Simels’s new home for the next 14 years.
Yesterday, the three-judge panel in a US Appeals Court formally denied Robert Simels’s application for bail. As a result he is to have reported to the Big Springs Federal Correctional Institution in Texas today for the start of his sentence in keeping with the decision handed down by Eastern District Court Judge, John Gleeson last December.
On Monday, his lawyer, Barry A. Bohrer, of Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason, Anello & Bohrer of New York, presented oral bail application to the three-judge panel in the Second Circuit court.
The court had said it would make its decision known on Wednesday or Thursday.
But on Wednesday, Bohrer, in a letter to sentencing judge, John Gleeson, requesting that the sentencing date be deferred from January 8 to January 15, 2010, wrote that “ this extension is necessary to allow the court of appeals to decide Mr. Simels’s motion for bail pending appeal before his surrender date.”
He said that if the application for bail was unsuccessful Simels would have had to leave for the Big Springs facility by yesterday.
Judge Gleeson in his reply told Bohrer that since the matter was being heard in the Second Circuit court the application for the extension is best sent there.
On Monday, Bohrer contended that Simels’s appeal contained several “substantial questions” entitling Simels to bail under 18 U.S.C. 3143(b), including at least three issues of first impression for the 2nd Circuit.
Most of the 20-minute arguments focused on Gleeson’s decision to allow the government to impeach Simels with jailhouse recordings the judge earlier suppressed as violating Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968.
Bohrer noted that the circuit has never addressed the admissibility of such evidence, and that although the prosecution may now downplay the evidence’s significance, it once argued it was essential.
“The evidence in this case from the beginning of the trial went to the defendant’s credibility,” Bohrer told the panel, which consisted of Second Circuit Judges Wilfred Feinberg and Robert A. Katzmann, and sitting by designation, Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia.
On December 4, last, Justice Gleeson sentenced Simels to 14 years in jail and fined him US$250,000 on 11 felonies committed in August and related to his role in a plot to threaten and bribe witnesses while he represented, self-confessed Guyanese drug trafficker, Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan.
Then, too, Judge Gleeson declined Mr. Simels’s motion for bail pending appeal, ordering him to report to prison today.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons denied Mr. Simels’s request to be assigned to the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, Orange County, instead assigning him to the Big Spring Correctional Institute, about 300 miles west of Dallas.
The 62-year old Simels, of Westbury, New York, and dubbed as the flambouyant New York lawyer to the mob, had appealed the conviction on December 9.
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