I can’t help myself, I do peek in on older threads, all sorts of interesting things turn up. bmaz, EW, or any of our lawyer chums can do a better job of this than I can, but the question you ask above is the heart of the puzzle. Apparently, Special K has been helping out the feds doing something (what that is exactly, we don’t know). As a result, he’s been handled with kid gloves by the legal system, in spite of his chronic law breaking. Meanwhile, he’s been involved with USAs in both NY and San Diego, and it appears that those two sets of lawyers haven’t been keeping tabs on each other with respect to Special K, which allowed him to take a swanky little trip to Greece, while his passport was hypothetically confiscated. This has evidently frosted Judge Burns who appears to be feeling ill-used and is ready to throw the book at Special K. Apparently those who have covered SK’s keister all these years have either withdrawn their support or run out of plausible excuses, so our favorite convict appears to be headed for the inside of a cell. We’ll see… I hope this helps, but if I were you, I’d pop back over to TNH and peruse the archives. bmaz, Mary, and LHP iirc discussed the legal ins and outs of cooperating witnesses pretty thoroughly there.

2. the times on the posts are in any old order for me. unless some are EST and PST.

anyway, this is for anyone who is still here.
and pfred, hi, if you are one of them.

BTW, was there an electoral thing in Queens NY that he was involved in as well.

Thomas Kontogiannis, an international businessman who admitting laundering bribe money for Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, will be going to jail as soon as he is medically cleared after heart surgery last week, a federal judge ordered Monday morning.

Raising concerns that the Greek immigrant might be a flight risk, U.S. District Judge Larry Alan Burns issued a no-bail warrant for Kontogiannis’ arrest, pending his sentencing hearing.

Burns said prosecutors – who want Kontogiannis jailed for 10 years for his role in the Cunningham scheme – had presented “clear and convincing evidence” that Kontogiannis had continued running an unrelated $100 million mortgage fraud scam well after he’d pleaded guilty in the Cunningham case.

“If he’s out of the hospital, he’s going to be in some type of federal custody,” Burns said in court. “He’s not going to go home, and he is not going to be left to his own devices.”

Well at least somebody reported on K’s contribution to the shitpile correctly- maybe he reads your blogs, Marcy.

Kontogiannis’ attorney, Gregory O’Connell, said he was shocked by the government’s most recent evidence and asked the judge for time to speak with his client. The judge allowed Kontogiannis to stay in federal custody in New York until a hearing Dec. 17.

The surgery delayed Monday’s sentencing for Kontogiannis, who pleaded guilty in February to laundering bribes to Cunningham from defense contractors Brent Wilkes and Mitch Wade. He faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

Burns questioned the timing of last week’s surgery, which doctors had recommended for two years.

“I think it’s more than coincidental,” the judge said. “It causes me to raise my eyebrows a little bit.”