Todd Macaluso Todd Macaluso was first thrust into the national
spotlight in 2009 when he served on the legal defense team for Casey Anthony during her
now-infamous run-in with the law.
For those who need a little refresher, Anthony was a Florida woman who got arrested and criminally
charged after her daughter was kidnapped and later found deceased.
Following a contentious 6-week-trial, the jury ultimately found her not guilty, a decision
that was met with public outcry comparable to the OJ Simpson case.
We all know they did it, but money and good lawyers can go a long way.
Macaluso wasn’t Anthony’s lead attorney, but his close involvement with the case did
raise his public profile quite a bit.
The man primarily responsible for Casey Anthony’s defense in court was Jose Baez, whose resume
also includes defending such high-profile clients as Aaron Hernandez, Mark Nordlicht,
and Harvey Weinstein.
Casey Anthony What made Macaluso’s involvement with Casey
Anthony such a boon for his career?
Well, to answer that question, it’s important to understand just how significant the case
was on a legal and cultural level.
There’s a reason it’s so often compared to the OJ verdict.
By the time the actual trial had gotten underway, Casey Anthony was already a villain in the
eyes of the general public.
The court of public opinion had made its final verdict on her long before an actual judge
presided over her case.
You can call it a media assassination - as Casey herself did - but whatever the reason
was, people really didn’t like her to begin with.
They wanted her locked up, preferably for the rest of her life.
The general consensus was “this woman hurt her own daughter and is trying to cover it
up”.
The way the media was portraying it, you’d think it was going to be a cut-and-dry case
with an inevitable guilty verdict for the defendant.
Casey’s daughter, Caylee, hadn’t been seen by her grandparents in a month, and Casey’s
car smelled like there’d been a body in it.
As if that wasn’t suspicious enough, Casey later said she hadn’t seen her daughter
in a month, either.
She tried to blame a woman named Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez, whom she claimed to be Caylee’s nanny.
But it ultimately emerged that Fernandez-Gonzalez had never met the Anthony’s.
Even if the nanny did kidnap her daughter, why didn’t she contact the authorities immediately,
you might ask?
That’s an excellent question, and one the prosecution sought to drive home to the jury.
Macaluso and the rest of the defense team had a tall task on their hands.
They had to plant a seed of doubt in the jury’s heads when it already felt like the case had
been decided by the public.
What they ultimately argued was that Caylee had accidentally fallen in the family’s
pool and Casey’s father told her she was going to jail for the rest of her life if
anybody found out.
They claimed that Casey had been traumatized by years of turmoil at the hands of her father,
and that her emotional scars clouded her better judgment.
It was a slick way to spin what many thought to be an open-and-shut case.
It’s exactly the type of sleazy approach Macaluso continued to use in his legal practice.
In the end, it worked.
Casey Anthony got off, and Macaluso became a household name.
Not quite akin to Johnnie Cochran, but still pretty famous.
Claims to Fame Despite the notoriety that the Anthony case
developed over the years, Macaluso saw it as an opportunity to propel himself and his
career to new heights.
There were pictures of him at Anthony’s side plastered on every newspaper and magazine
across the country.
You know what they say: all press is good press.
Macaluso got into a bit of trouble of his own before the Anthony case went to trial.
He ended up withdrawing from her team after allegations surfaced that he’d misappropriated
huge sums of investor money.
Macaluso became the subject of an investigation by the California Bar Association, and that
was the end of his involvement with Casey Anthony.
Macaluso did have other claims to fame, most notably when he represented NFL stand-out
Shawne Merriman.
The former San Diego Chargers linebacker was accused of domestic abuse by his girlfriend,
who was none other than reality TV star Tila Tequila.
The charges against Merriman were dismissed less than a week later, but that still provided
Macaluso with plenty of facetime.
Just as his career as a high-profile defense attorney gained some steam, the fraud allegations
hit and he was ultimately disbarred in California.
Fraud What exactly happened there?
Well, as it turns out, Macaluso took part in a scheme to defraud his clients and investors
out of millions of dollars.
As was later revealed by the FBI, the shady defense attorney reached agreements with prospective
investors that used his client’s personal injury cases as collateral.
The real kicker was that none of his clients consented to this, and Macaluso even went
so far as to forge notary stamps and signatures in an elaborate effort to convince investors
to hand over millions of dollars.
He actually funded his entire personal injury law practice with these fraudulent investments,
which were given under the false pretense that investors would be awarded a portion
of clients’ future recoveries in court.
Basically, if Macaluso was your lawyer and you won money in a lawsuit, he’d get his
cut and his investors would get theirs, leaving you with whatever was left over.
Reports say Macaluso defrauded his clients out of $70,000.
He also ended up owing upwards of $1.5 million to his investors.
Once he caught wind that he was under investigation, he started paying that back little by little.
In 2015, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and ordered to pay a $100,000 fine plus $150,000
in restitution to those he defrauded.
He was also sentenced to 5 months behind bars.
As the cherry on top of Macaluso’s bad news sundae, he was officially out of a job after
the California Bar Association revoked his law license.
Aviation Relation Before he’d made a name for himself backing
big-name clients in high-profile cases, Macaluso cut his teeth on a specific subset of legal
cases: aviation-related cases.
He was supposedly a pretty good pilot himself, and he eventually became well-known for securing
high-award verdicts for his various aviation clients.
Court records indicated that Macaluso used his aviation expertise in less legal capacity.
In October of 2016, a drug trafficking organization in Haiti came to the States looking for a
plane.
They need it to transport their product from Ecuador to Honduras.
Apparently, this is a pretty common practice for traffickers.
They’ll oftentimes utilize planes that are registered in the US because they assume they’ll
attract less attention from the authorities.
Macaluso got in contact with a couple of these traffickers, who were later identified as
Carlos Almonte Vasquez and Humberto Osuna Contreras.
They obtained an aircraft from Florida that they planned to use for their venture.
However, a few days after getting a hold of it, they learned that it couldn’t leave
the US.
So, the search was on for another plane that could do the job.
And they needed one fast.
That’s where Macaluso came in.
In November of 2016, Vasquez and Contreras found a Falcon 10 registered in the US that
fit the bill perfectly.
Who was going to pilot this vessel?
Macaluso himself, of course.
Flight records showed that Macaluso flew the plane from Orlando to Port-au-Prince on November
13th.
The following day, he met with the smugglers to outline a plan for transporting the product
and to discuss his compensation.
In the end, they settled on $35,000 as an initial deposit, followed by an additional
$150,000 at a later time after the deed was done.
Not a bad haul for a day’s work, but it was actually an extremely small piece of the
overall pie.
The aircraft Macaluso was piloting was going to be carrying 1,500 kilos of drugs.
That’s more than 3,000 pounds of product.
How much was it all worth?
Try $13 million.
The Insider Let’s take a minute to talk about the people
Macaluso got himself mixed up with.
Carlos Vasquez represented a man named Victor Pena, who brokered the deal between the supplier
of the illegal product and the supplier of the airplane.
His co-conspirator, Humberto Contreras, represented the traffickers overseeing the whole operation.
One of the other key cogs in the scheme was Alex Duffis, who was the individual supposedly
supplying the others with the actual product itself.
In conversations between Pena, Duffis, and Contreras, Macaluso’s name was brought up
several times in connection to the smuggling conspiracy.
While Macaluso was undoubtedly honored to be considered a vital member of the team,
in the end, those conversations were the final nail in the defense attorney’s coffin.
As it happened, the Colombian drug supplier known as Alex Duffis was actually a government
informant using his communications with the traffickers to build a case for their eventual
prosecution.
This was really bad news for Macaluso, because, as we mentioned, his name had come up quite
a few times during said communications.
He’d also been recorded by Duffis instructing his co-conspirators about the makeup of the
aircraft he’d be using to carry out the smuggling.
Busted The FBI built a concrete case against him,
taking him into custody before his plane ever left the runway in Haiti.
He was arrested by Haitian law enforcement, as were the others involved in the illegal
plot.
They were all expelled from the country and transported back to New York for prosecution.
This ended yet another colorful chapter in Macaluso’s storied history of getting in
trouble with the law.
He was ultimately sentenced to 15 years in federal prison as a consequence for his latest
criminal venture.
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And let us know in the comment section whether or not you’d take the chance to pilot a
plane for a cartel ONE time for $10 million dollars but there’s a 40% chance of going
to prison?