Just pull them little strings and I’ll sing you a song, I‘m your puppet
Make me do right or make me do wrong, I’m your puppet.
Treat me good and I’ll do anything
I’m just a puppet and you hold my string

It is becoming increasingly obvious that Alvin Clay is just one in a long list of people who were scammed by Ray Nealy and his sidekick, Donny McCuien.   Mortage lenders, title companies and sellers all believed that Nealy and McCuien were operating in good faith.  So did Alvin Clay. 

 

Clay was repeatedly told that rehab work was being done on the five real estate transactions Ray Nealy was brokering.  On that understanding, the Little Rock attorney submitted invoices to title companies stating that the work was being performed.  When he received a check from the title companies, he immediately paid Donny McCuien, his subcontractor, the lion’s share of the funds, keeping a small portion for Clay Construction.  Finally, he issued an IRS 1099 to Mr. McCuien to ensure that a complete paper trail of the these transactions was on record. 

This should have been a simple case to prosecute.  If the government had gone after Ray Nealy and Donny McCuien they could have obtained easy convictions without setting foot in a courtroom.  The documentary evidence against Nealy is overwhelming.  The buyers and the sellers were all recruited by Donny McCuien.  Ray Nealy filled out five fraudulent loan applications.  Go after these two men and the tax payers would be several hundred thousand dollars ahead.

The government wanted to prosecute Clay and Nealy together.  Then, two weeks before trial, Nealy’s attorney withdrew from the case and Judge Leon Holmes ruled that it was in the legal interest of both defendants that the cases be severed.  Jurors must be asking themselves why all these witnesses are testifying about Ray Nealy when Alvin Clay is the guy standing trial.

In the normal course of events, Alvin Clay would never be prosecuted on such flimsy evidence.  A natural reading of documented facts suggests that Clay was duped along with everyone else.  Driven by a weird desire to render an unnatural reading of the facts, the government embarked on a five-year quest to manufacture a case out of thin air.

Donny McCuien was the key to their plans. 

The former Burger King manager took the stand today and the results were deeply embarrassing for the federal government.  That the US attorney’s office chose to associate itself with a grotesque individual like McCuien proves that this has been a vindictive and warrantless prosecution from the start.

McCuien didn’t want to lie for the government, but they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.  The pathetic street hustler has already been convicted of wire fraud, but he has yet to be sentenced.  The government has told him that, so long as he tells the story their way, he will get the olive branch at his sentencing hearing.  If he sticks with the story he originally related to FBI agent Rodney Hayes, he will get the arrows–straight through the heart.

So Donny decided to sing in harmony with the feds.  Unfortunately, he didn’t know the tune. 

He got off to a pretty good start; he had been well coached by agent Hayes and he had his mantra down cold.  “Clay would give me a check, then me, Ray and Clay woudl go to the bank, I’d cash the check, and we’d split it up.”

That’s hasn’t always been McCuien’s story.  Originally, he said he suspected that Ray and Alvin had split up the money–now he saw them do it.

Then George Hairston asked Donny to provide jurors with a step-by-step description of how the money was divided, Mr. Burger king was suddenly at a loss.  With no actual memory to fall back on, he couldn’t describe the scene in concrete terms.

Worse still, McCuien was so desperate to please the feds, he actually invented a real estate deal the feds didn’t know about.  According to a statement defense counsel received two days ago, McCuien claims that Clay and Nealy did a did with a woman named April Flowers and cut him out of the action.

Unfortunately for McCuien and his handlers, the government seized Ray Nealy’s completge financial records.  You can’t do a real estate deal without leaving a copious paper trail, and there is no documentary record of a deal involving April Flowers.

Caught in a lie, McCuien would ask, “Where did you get that?”  When it became clear that Mr. Hairston was reading from agent Hayes notes, Donny said, “If it is in black and white, that’s what I said.”

Presumably, if it hadn’t been in writing, he didn’t say it.  McCuien seems to be suffering from an acute case of amnesia; unless we are talking about Alvin Clay.

McCuien admitted that, at Nealy’s suggestion, he incorporated as McCuien Property Management and Construction, Inc.  That fact, however, was meaningless.  He never did any rehab work, he never hired anyone to do rehab work, and he never agreed to act as Alvin Clay’s subcontractor, even though the checks Alvin write to Donny clearly stipulate that Donny was being paid as a subcontractor.

McCuien accused Clay of giving him a 1099 for far more money than he actually received.  All the documentary evidence backs up Clay’s story.  Nothing reinforces McCuien’s account.  And yet the government, desperate to convict Clay, has chosen to go with the hamburger man.

The presumption of innocence is often derided as “a legal fiction”.  We don’t really consider defendants to be innocent until guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.  Regretably, there is a great deal of truth to this position.

A second kind of legal fiction that is even more sinister: the use of arrows and olive branches to mold testimony to the government’s will.  By promising leniency and threatening dire consequences, people like Rodney Hayes and US Attorney Steven Snyder can line up witnesses willing to say virtually anything.   If they choose to abuse the power vested in them, they can create a virtual world completely dissociated from the bricks and mortar, flesh and blood world you can touch and taste and smell. 

Today in the courthouse, playing Pinnochio to the government’s Gepetto, Donny McCuien created a legal fiction so bizarre it will inevitably come back to haunt the corrupt public officials driving this inane prosecution.

There was some truth mixed in with the fiction, of course, and some of it was quite revealing.  McCuien admitted to paying the buyers a kind of honorarium after the deals closed–sort of a thank you gift for allowing themselves to be defrauded.

It seems that McCuien promised his marks that they could make good money flipping the properties they were buying.  He also admitted that Ray Nealy was completely responsible for filling out and submitting fraudulent loan applications. 

Alvin Clay’s only crime was trusting a couple of two-bit hustlers.  He has plenty of company in that regard, including some of the most prominent lending institutions in the nation.  The lending industry is learning some painful trust-and-verify lessons; so is Mr. Clay.  Naivete is not a crime; suborning perjury is.

Donny McCuien will return to the stand next week as a defense witness.  It will not be an easy ride for the prosecution.