21st Century Data Dumps and the 'Brady' Rule

20th Century Document Dump

At the time there was limited use of computers. In the District Attorney's Office, the only computers were used for word processing. In the yard, a computer did not meet the specific needs of the "connected" business owner, so nothing was computerized. The owner of the yard, a ranking member of one of the five organize crime families that have their headquarters in New York City, had apparently gotten his staff special training in accounting principles from the family-friendly but unlicensed CPA. As a result, when the police executed the warrant, they discovered that "records" of most of the business' transactions and sales receipts were conveniently "stored" in a rather large, sturdy old cardboard box which once contained a brand new washing machine. The yard owner definitely had a sense of humor. Some of those transactions found their way into the required police book (euphemistically called a "police book" because under the law, Vehicle and Traffic Law §415-A, the authorities could enter and request to inspect the book and a sampling of parts for accuracy). Of course, when dealing with an organized crime front, those false ledger entries were usually subsumed under some creative bookkeeping methodology that usually required a forensic document decipher.

At the time of the execution of the warrant, the cardboard box contained thousands of handwritten scribbled notes, many illegible, of transactions and receipts ostensibly to cover the huge amounts of illicit profit from the sale of stolen parts and the trafficking in stolen cars, as well as to deter any pesky auditor from the City's Tax and Finance Department. Adding to the difficulty in making sense of the seized documents were that many of them were "trademarked" with 10W30 art work. After much analysis, the prosecution team decided to copy all the documents found in the box and deliver a copy to the defendants' attorneys. Some of the documents may have been intentionally placed there by the business operators to misguide any would-be auditor.