Don’t mess with the IRS
The rendezvous that established Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with high-priced prostitutes occurred last month in one of Washington’s grandest hotels, but the criminal investigation that discovered the tryst began last year in a nondescript office building opposite a Dunkin’ Donuts on Long Island, according to law enforcement officials.
There, in the Hauppauge offices of the Internal Revenue Service, investigators conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor of New York, several officials said.
The money ended up in the bank accounts of what appeared to be shell companies, corporations that essentially had no real business. The transactions, officials said, suggested possible financial crimes — maybe bribery, political corruption, or something inappropriate involving campaign finance. Prostitution, they said, was the furthest thing from the minds of the investigators.
Soon, the I.R.S. agents, from the agency’s Criminal Investigation Division, were working with F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors from Manhattan who specialize in political corruption.
Because the focus was a high-ranking government official, prosecutors were required to seek the approval of the United States attorney general to proceed. Once they secured that permission, the investigation moved forward.
The investigators learned that the money was being moved to pay for sex and that the transactions were being manipulated to conceal Mr. Spitzer’s connection to payments for meetings with prostitutes, the official said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/nyregion/11inquire.html?ref=nyregion

Currency reporting
The Currency Transaction Report (CTR) came into existence with the passage of the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act, better known as the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), in 1970.
http://www.irs.gov/compliance/enforcement/article/0,,id=113003,00.html

Monitoring of banking transactions
When opening a bank account, the bank will look for your name on lists of suspected terrorists, criminals and powerful political figures. All transactions, big or small, will be monitored to look for patterns.
Interview with a banking software company employee on NPR March 12, 2008

Eliot Spitzer’s status as a prominent government official appears to have opened the door to investigation into the matter. Many banks now examine transactions involving so-called “politically exposed persons” — politicians, judges, prosecutors and their families — to ensure they’re not used to hide ill-gotten gains. At least one bank used by Mr. Spitzer, Capital One Corp.’s North Fork unit, flagged his transactions to federal regulators as a potential sign of corruption, people with knowledge of the transactions said.
Public corruption cases are on the rise. For years, the WSJ writes, the financial industry has complained about the burden of complying with federal rules, adopted post-9/11, that require banks to file reports on transactions exceeding $10,000, or any other suspicious activity that suggests money laundering.
It might be paying off. From 2001 through 2006, public corruption prosecutors in the districts, working in tandem with the 30-lawyer public integrity section in Washington, say they’ve charged 365 defendants and gained 332 convictions, a large increase over the 286 defendants charged and 287 convictions in the eight years from 1993 through 2000.
Wall Street Journal Law Blog March 13, 2008

Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions by Federal Reserve DistrictSource: Federal Reserve Board (via Federal Reserve Bank of Boston)
Reports from the twelve Federal Reserve Districts suggest that economic growth has slowed since the beginning of the year. Two-thirds of the Districts cited softening or weakening in the pace of business activity, while the others referred to subdued, slow, or modest growth. Retail activity in most Districts was reported to be weak or softening, although tourism generally continued to expand. Services industries in many Districts, including staffing services in Boston, port activity in New York, and truck freight volume in Cleveland, appeared to be slowing, but activity in services provided some positive news in Richmond and Dallas. Manufacturing was said to be sluggish or to have slowed in about half the Districts, while several others indicated manufacturing results were mixed or trends were steady.
Residential real estate markets generally remained weak; reports on commercial real estate markets were somewhat mixed, but also suggest slowing, on balance, in many Districts. Most Districts reporting on banking cite tight or tightening credit standards and stable or weaker loan demand. Districts reporting on the agriculture and energy sectors said activity is generally strong.
Upward pressure on prices from rising materials and energy prices was noted in almost all the District reports, but Philadelphia said increases in input costs and output prices had recently become less prevalent, and San Francisco indicated pressures were limited for products other than food and energy. By contrast, wage and salary pressures were generally said to be modest, as the hiring pace slowed in various sectors and labor markets loosened somewhat in many Districts.
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How Do I Love Thee, Let Me Count the Days: Deathbed Marriages in AmericaSource: Kentucky Law Journal (via SSRN)
Should you be able to marry someone who has only days to live? If so, should the government award the surviving spouse the many property rights that ordinarily flow from marriage?
In almost every state, the only person allowed to challenge the validity of a marriage (or, by extension, the property consequences thereof) after the death of one of the spouses is the surviving spouse! Seems incredible, does it not? The expectant heirs of a dying man (or woman) who marries on his (or her) deathbed cannot challenge the marriage post-death. Ironically, the one person allowed to challenge is the only person who has absolutely no motivation to do so.
How did this rule come about? What, if anything, should we do to change it?
This article explores these and other related questions, including a proposed theoretical framework for a model act giving heirs and beneficiaries standing to sue in order to negate the property consequences that flow from marriage, depending on the level of mental capacity at the time of the marriage.
Several options available for retrieval of full text (PDF; 309 KB).
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The skeleton of a 150-pound person weighs only about 23 pounds. Your skin is a flexible, protective organ that covers your body. An adult’s skin is about 16 square feet and weighs about 6 pounds.
http://ewe.springbranchisd.com/academics/science/newsletters/EWEScienceNewsletterNov.2004.pdf

"Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts" is an 86-page summary, printed on 50 percent post-consumer recycled paper and full of charts about fiber, endangered forests and carbon footprints. The news: The book world, which uses up more than 1.5 million metric tons of paper each year, is steadily, if not entirely, finding ways to make production greener.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/03/10/arts/Books-How-Green.php
A turning point came in 2006 when Random House, Inc., said that it would dramatically increase its use of recycled paper, saving more than 500,000 trees a year. Virtually all of the major publishers have taken some steps, from Hyperion switching to soy-based ink, to Penguin Group (USA) using wind power, to Scholastic, Inc. printing the deluxe edition of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" on 100 percent post-consumer waste fiber.

March 12 is the birthday of the writer and editor Dave Eggers, (books by this author) born in Boston (1970). He grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois, a city that was famous when he was growing up for having been the setting for the movie Ordinary People.
While he was in college at the University of Illinois, his mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Then, just after his mother went through severe stomach surgery, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Six months later, both of his parents were dead. Eggers was just 21 years old.
Of the experience of losing both of his parents so suddenly, Eggers later said, "On the one hand you are so completely bewildered that something so surreal and incomprehensible could happen. At the same time, suddenly the limitations or hesitations that you might have imposed on yourself fall away. There's a weird, optimistic recklessness that could easily be construed as nihilism but is really the opposite. You see that there is a beginning and an end and that you have only a certain amount of time to act. And you want to get started."
Eggers had to drop out of college to become the guardian of his 8-year-old younger brother. They moved to San Francisco, and Eggers used the insurance money from his parents' deaths to start his own magazine with some high school friends. They called their publication Might Magazine, because the liked the fact that the word "might" conveyed both strength and hesitation. The magazine developed a cult following for the way it satirized the magazine format. Each issue included an erroneous table of contents, irrelevant footnotes, and fictional error retractions.
The magazine only lasted for 16 issues, but Eggers used the group of writers he got to know to start a new literary quarterly called Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. Eggers wanted to experiment with graphic design and printing techniques, so he changed the format of the journal for every issue. One issue consisted of 14 individually bound pamphlets. Another issue included a music CD with a different piece of music composed specifically to accompany each piece in the journal.
All the while that he was starting up these magazines, Dave Eggers was staying up late at night trying to write a book about the death of his parents and the effect that it had on his life. But as he wrote it, he began to include all his own doubts about whether writing about his parents' deaths was an act of vanity. That book grew into his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a big best seller in 2000.
The Writer’s Almanac