A Baltimore County man is being charged with 31 counts involving fraud and the threatening of two Delaware officials, including the state’s lieutenant governor.
The Baltimore Sun reports that on June 1st, Jeffrey B. Cohen, 39, and the prosecution made their opening remarks in the United States District Court in Baltimore. Cohen, a former bouncer turned businessman, is accused of defrauding regulators and clients in elaborate insurance schemes involving bars, nightclubs, and event planners. Cohen, who is representing himself, made a 36-minute long opening remark refuting the substantial charges against him.
During his remarks, Cohen claimed that nobody he did business with “lost any money,” although he did admit to fabricating assets and misrepresenting the financials of his insurance company, Indemnity Insurance Corp. He also emphatically denied the allegations that he was going to commit acts of violence against two Delaware officials who were investigating his company at the time: Judge J. Travis Laster and Lt. Gov. Matthew Denn.
“The government should be ashamed of themselves for alleging I was going to physically harm people,” said Cohen, labeling the accusations “disgusting” and “offensive.”
He offered meticulous “logical explanations” for the evidence presented by the prosecution. A high-powered rifle he purchased, for example, was for an African safari trip. He’d bought a shotgun for a check-cashing store he owned in Baltimore. The several handguns the police found were for his personal protection. And the disguises he had were meant for a masquerade ball he was organizing.
However, the prosecution is convinced that Cohen was in fact defrauding clients and planning on committing physical harm against Laster and Denn. In his opening remarks, Assistant U.S. Attorney Harold Gruber claims that Cohen garnered millions of dollars for premiums on the nightclubs and bars he insured, only to neglect paying the insurance compensation as promised. In the first six months of 2013 alone, Gruber alleged, Cohen’s company earned $25 million in revenue.
“The cover they thought they paid for was not what they got,” Gruber said.
He told the 16-person jury that Cohen used every trick in the book — fake wire transfers, financial statements, bank statements, credit reports, web addresses, email accounts, and business profiles — to defraud clients. He also committed several instances of identity theft involving real people.
Identity fraud, a serious crime in the U.S., affected 13 million Americans in 2013, the same year Indemnity Insurance Corp. was shut down.
The worst crime of all to Gruber, however, was Cohen’s plan to harm Laster and Denn. In 2013, the two officials went after Cohen’s company, seizing its assets and eventually liquidating it. Cohen purchased several guns and ammunition (including incendiary ammunition), recorded a plot to harm the two men on a recording device, and printed out directions to their homes.
Overall, Cohen is charged with wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, money laundering, making false statements to insurance regulators, and “obstruction of justice in relation to the alleged plot to harm the officials.”
Though the evidence against him is ostensibly overwhelming, Cohen is adamant that it is all a massive misunderstanding and, moreover, the government is deliberately lying.
“Just because the government says it’s true doesn’t make it so,” he said in court. “They think they can do anything they please because nobody stops them.”