Recent court documents suggest that the US Federal criminal trial of disgraced former GPB Capital CEO David Gentile and his codefendants Jeffry Schneider and Jeff Lash will likely occur in March 2024.
The main reason cited for the delay is the time and difficulties defense lawyers have had in receiving and sorting out millions of documents seized by the FBI during the execution of search warrants on GPB Capital’s NYC and Long Island offices in 2019.
The headquarters of GPB Capital’s waste management company in NYC area was also the target of an US DoJ search warrant and documents were seized at that location.
These recent filings state that David Gentile is now a resident of Florida. Gentile is known to have a residence in Clearwater very near to the Church of Scientology’s Flag Land Base.
The documents:
Categories: GPB Capital Holdings
Drum roll….justice is always served one way or another 😏
The technical issues around production of seized documents are interesting. We in Global Capitalism HQ have some familiarity with legal software, and it seems odd that in this day and age, the government can’t produce color versions of everything. I’d wonder if the attorneys for Schneider are kicking up this issue to buy some time. Yes, it could be that the government is doing a crappy job of producing material. But it could be something else entirely.
The bit about raising privilege issues sounds like the real defense strategy — they may think they can get some incriminating documents that were seized excluded from testimony if they can get the time to write up justifications for why those documents are privileged. And if there are a lot of those documents, it’ll take up a long time because you have to justify each document. Last time I researched this, you can’t just say that any documents to any lawyer are privileged, you have to justify each one.
It should be noted that searching a document corpus of 8.6 million documents is not a big deal these days with the specialized legal document management systems that are available these days. But the search functions only work if you have good scans of data and the OCR software in the legal document management application can understand a high percentage of the characters. Thus, if you want to delay, you can’t really complain about the quantity of documents to review (nobody actually reads them). You can only complain that the quality of the input is resulting in searches that miss responsive documents.
It’ll be interesting to see if the government tells the court that Schneider’s attorneys are full of it, or if they merely say that they have worked out their differences.