Winning a Public Corruption Jury Trial Against All Odds

• Pages: 4-63
• Date: 01 July 2025
• Published date: 01 July 2025
• Author: Nina Marino
• Subject Matter: Derecho Público y Administrativo

4

CRIMINAL JUSTICE | SUMMER 2025

The case you are going to read about is true. It was tried in Honolulu over the

course of 10 weeks. The government called 41 witnesses. The jury took less

than 12 hours to fully acquit all six defendants. But throughout the course of

the proceedings, events unfolded that strained imagination, and situations arose

that are rarely seen in a jury trial, particularly in a white-collar criminal matter. As

you will see, that is not an exaggeration. Only f‌irst names are used, and witnesses’

names have been changed.

The Main Players and Basic Facts

Keith was the elected prosecutor for the City and County of Honolulu. He won

the election in a landslide and was well respected by the Honolulu public. He ran

on a platform of tough on crime.

MAI was a prominent structural engineering and architectural f‌irm in Honolulu

well known for being a big player on the political scene. MAI was a family-run

business started 50 years ago by Dennis. The company was powered by those

values that exist most prominently in a family-run business: trust and loyalty. The

company took care of its employees, and, in return, the company expected its

NINA MARINO is a partner

at Kaplan Marino, PC,

a white collar criminal

defense boutique law rm

based in Los Angeles.

She is the First Vice

Chair of the Section.

Winning a Public

Corruption Jury Trial

Against All Odds

BY NINA MARINO

Published in Criminal Justice, Volume 40, Number 2, Summer 2025. © 2025 by

the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in

any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database orretrieval system

without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

5

CRIMINAL JUSTICE | SUMMER 2025

employees to be honest and committed to the work

the company did.

Laurel was a talented and valued architect and inte-

rior designer at MAI who had been with the company

for 15 years before she was terminated for poor

performance. During the time Laurel was employed

by MAI, Dennis was kind to her, sending her Christ-

mas cards, giving her extra money, and paying for

plane tickets and car repairs. When she was sexually

harassed by a coworker, Dennis personally saw to it

that she was compensated in the manner that she

wanted—which was a gas card and priority parking.

This became a signif‌icant fact upon which the de-

fense cross-examined Laurel because her choice of

a gas card and priority parking, in lieu of a raise, was

due to the fact she did not want additional income,

which would translate into additional child support

payments. Not a great look for her.

Laurel had always directly contacted Dennis when

she wanted a raise or wanted to call to his attention

some area in which the company was lacking. She

received a raise every time she had written him a let-

ter expressing her personal or her coworker’s dissat-

isfaction at work. Months before she was terminated,

she did the same thing—she wrote a letter asking for

a raise. Dennis did a little investigation and learned

that she was frequently absent from the of‌f‌ice, she

was tardy on projects, and it appeared that there

were irregularities in her timekeeping. Nevertheless,

he wrote back to her—in a scathing letter—that he was

giving her a raise but that she needed to improve.

Meanwhile, her supervisors were noting her de-

f‌iciencies and the problem it was causing with MAI

projects and clients. The VP of the company (also a

co-defendant) made the dif‌f‌icult decision to termi-

nate her. On the day she was f‌ired, Laurel submitted

a responsive letter to the scathing letter Dennis

had sent to her, where she defended herself and

essentially said he was wrong. It is unclear whether

Dennis ever received that letter, but hours after she

left it with Dennis’s other mail, she was f‌ired. Accord-

ing to Laurel, Dennis’s mail had been picked up, and

that’s why he f‌ired her. The company attorney (also

a codefendant) had an intern f‌ilm Laurel’s departure.

The video depicted Laurel packing up and loading a

ton of stuf‌f, including about a dozen boxes and two

f‌ile cabinets, into the hatchback of her small car. Who

would have known that this video would be the f‌irst

piece of evidence introduced in the federal criminal

trial to come a decade later?

Days after Laurel was f‌ired, she f‌iled for unemploy-

ment benef‌its claiming she was terminated for lack of

work. The company took this as an af‌front because it

was not true and vigorously opposed the unemploy-

ment claim. After protracted litigation that included

exhaustive exhibits, testimony, and appellate pro-

ceedings, Laurel prevailed and got her unemployment

benef‌its.

A week after Laurel was f‌ired, MAI was served with

notice it was being sued for structural defects on a

project. The company did not understand why it was

being sued since the project that was the basis for

the impending lawsuit was not an MAI project. Those

questions were answered quickly—the f‌irm learned

that Laurel had performed work on the project

without obtaining company approval and that she had

used her MAI email and contact information in her

communications.

The company launched an internal investigation—to

determine the extent of Laurel’s side jobs—that lasted

nearly 12 months. While that internal investigation

was proceeding, the company received notice that

Laurel had received authorization from the Equal

Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to

f‌ile an age and gender discrimination lawsuit against

the company. Meanwhile, the internal investigation

revealed that Laurel had been working dozens of side

jobs while collecting her full salary for years. For the

company, these unauthorized side jobs explained

Laurel’s poor work performance and timekeeping

irregularities. Feeling fully victimized by Laurel, MAI

f‌iled a police report for theft against Laurel for steal-

ing company time and resources.

Honolulu Police Department (HPD) took the report.

Detective Steve was assigned to investigate. It was his

f‌irst assignment as a detective, having recently been

promoted from patrol. When the HPD investigation

was going nowhere, Dennis used his political connec-

tions to get a meeting with Keith in the hopes of mov-

ing the investigation forward. The meeting took place

during Keith’s reelection campaign and was just two

weeks before the election. After the meeting, Den-

nis, his C-suite executives, and the company lawyer

(the MAI group) made donations to Keith’s reelection

campaign. After those donations, phone records

ref‌lected that Keith and Dennis had a 1-minute

8-second phone call. After Keith won reelection, Den-

nis and Keith had lunch at an upscale restaurant in

Honolulu. After that lunch, the MAI group made more

campaign donations to the Keith reelection campaign.

Published in Criminal Justice, Volume 40, Number 2, Summer 2025. © 2025 by

the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in

any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database orretrieval system

without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

6

CRIMINAL JUSTICE | SUMMER 2025

In total and over the course of several years, the MAI

group donated approximately $50,000 to Keith.

The attorney for the company had many meetings

with the Honolulu Prosecutor’s Of‌f‌ice and was the

sole source of information that supported the crimi-

nal charges. Keith assigned the case for investigation

to his top white-collar prosecutor. After investigation,

that prosecutor determined there was no crime and

declined prosecution. Keith reassigned the case.

That prosecutor, a self-described “cavalier” kind

of guy, did not conduct any investigation, adopted

the MAI internal investigation, and f‌iled four felony

counts against Laurel for theft in the second degree.

MAI was the alleged victim in two of those counts

and Rudy, a long-time friend and business partner of

Dennis, was the stated victim in the other two counts.

Laurel was booked, processed, and arraigned. That

prosecutor later left the prosecutor’s of‌f‌ice, and the

case was again reassigned, this time randomly, to

another prosecutor. Years later, a judge dismissed the

charges with prejudice in a scathing oral and written

opinion stating that Keith’s of‌f‌ice did no independent

investigation and f‌iled the charges based solely on in-

formation received from MAI and that the complaint

wholly lacked probable cause. The ruling was widely

publicized.

The Prosecution Team

Years before Dennis, MAI, or Laurel was on anyone’s

radar, a team of f‌ive special prosecutors from USAO

Southern District California (San Diego) were as-

signed to Honolulu to investigate and prosecute a

public corruption matter emanating from the Pros-

ecutors—Keith’s—of‌f‌ice. That grand jury investigation

was wide-ranging. Keith’s number two deputy in the

of‌f‌ice was the target, and Keith was not keen to assist

the federal investigation. The case that was ultimately

charged and tried was United States v. Kealoha,

and the government won easy convictions and long

sentences. It was that investigation into the Kealoha

matter and Keith’s of‌f‌ice that led the San Diego team

to Dennis, MAI, and Laurel.

The Indictment,

Protective Order, and

No Contact Order

Keith, Dennis, three

MAI executives, and the

company lawyer were

charged with two counts

of conspiracy. Count

1 charged an 18 U.S.C. § 37 1 conspiracy to violate

wire fraud and honest services wire fraud (18 U.S.C.

§§1343 , 1346) and federal programs bribery (id.

§ 666). Count 2 charged conspiracy to violate Laurel’s

civil right to f‌ile a lawsuit and be free from unreason-

able search and seizure pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 241.

This obscure statute, whose genesis was protecting

people’s voting rights from getting trampled by the

Ku Klux Klan, was oddly unearthed by the govern-

ment in the charging of this white-collar corruption/

bribery case.

The court issued a protective order mandating

that all discovery and related grand jury material

were subject to strict nondisclosure requirements.

As a condition of release, all the defendants were

prohibited from contacting all 22 people appearing

on a no-contact list—the “No Contact Order.” One of

those people was Rudy, whom we’ll return to shortly.

Pretrial Motions

In pretrial motions and oppositions, the government

argued that the campaign donations, amounting to

approximately $50,000, were bribes to have Laurel

investigated and prosecuted and that the police

report was f‌iled in retaliation for the civil suit Laurel

f‌iled against MAI. The defense argued that the cam-

paign donations were just campaign donations and

not bribes and that the MAI people had a good faith

belief that Laurel had stolen from the company and,

therefore, they had f‌iled the police report.

One pretrial motion f‌iled by the defense was a

2,500-page motion to dismiss for prosecutorial mis-

conduct. The motion was based on the government’s

conduct in the grand jury in obtaining the indictment,

including calling more than 80 witnesses, many of

whom were recalled multiple times in what the de-

fense argued was an attempted perjury trap. Caselaw

provides the government with tremendous latitude in

how they conduct the af‌fairs of the grand jury, so the

caselaw in support of this motion was not great. We

f‌iled it anyway, a huge lift at 2,500 pages, to educate

the judge by way of example of the shenanigans this

e court ruled that the government was

required to show a quid pro quo for the federal

programs bribery conspiracy.

Published in Criminal Justice, Volume 40, Number 2, Summer 2025. © 2025 by

the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in

any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database orretrieval system

without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.