– Photo by John Meiu
By Steve Thorpe
Legal News
U.S. Assistant Attorney General Tony West, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, gets annoyed when wrongdoers prey on consumers.
He’s especially miffed when they manage to do it from a jail cell.
“One of my favorite cases was against a guy named Willoughby Farr,” West said to an audience at Wayne State Law School. “How many of you actually examine every page of your telephone bill? That’s what Willoughby Farr was counting on. He figured a way to place minimal charges on people’s phone bills. A few cents here, a couple of dollars there, on the last pages of a phone bill. “
Unsuspecting customers would pay the bills, West said, “never realizing that it was a few cents or dollars more than it should be.
“It was a classic telephone ‘cramming’ scheme and Farr made more than $30 million doing that in just a few years,” he said. “What’s even more remarkable is that he conducted this entire scheme from a jail cell. He was incarcerated at the time. But he obviously had access to a prison computer.”
Hopefully, Farr’s “cramming” days are over.
“When we caught him and convicted him and sentenced him to 20 years, we made sure he will serve his sentence without computer privileges,” West said.
“When the unscrupulous and the dishonest line their pockets with consumers’ hard-earned money, we will hold them accountable,” West said in a statement at the time of Farr’s sentencing. “As this sentence demonstrates, the Justice Department has put a priority on protecting the public from fraudulent schemes.”
West spoke recently about his division’s consumer fraud efforts as he presented the Academy of the Scholars Annual Senior Lecture hosted by the Wayne State University Law School. He was nominated to fill his position by President Barack Obama in January 2009 and confirmed by the Senate in April of that year.
West is an honors graduate of Harvard University and while there was publisher of the Harvard Political Review. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he was president of the Stanford Law Review.
The Civil Division represents the U.S in legal challenges to federal agency actions and administration policies. Among the issues his division handles are national security litigation, constitutional challenges to the president’s health care legislation and petitions brought by Guantanamo Bay detainees.
West has made enforcement of consumer laws a priority of his division.
Since January 2009, the Consumer Protection Branch has convicted more than 100 defendants of harming consumers and imposed penalties and restitution in excess of $3.6 billion.
The Civil Division has also recovered more than $8 billion through civil enforcement under the False Claims Act.
“Even in Washington, that’s real money,” West said. “That could pay the ‘full freight’ for every Wayne State University Law School student for the next 2,307 years.” When West arrived in the job, he believed that new tools and approaches were needed to protect consumers. He and Attorney General Eric Holder moved to create a new office to guide the effort.
“It’s a particular passion of mine,” West said. “We created something called the Consumer Protection Branch within the Civil Division. Because it’s Washington, D.C., it literally took an act of Congress. Through that branch we have considerably stepped up our consumer protection efforts.”
West believes that the consumer cases are special because they often affect individual citizens.
“I remind myself just how privileged I am to work on these cases,” West said. “These are cases that matter and touch real lives, real people. I love my job and I love the institution of the Department of Justice.”
West also went out of his way to pay tribute to the permanent employees of the Justice Department and the Civil Division.
“As a political appointee, I am the ‘Christmas help’,” West said. “The people who do the work of protecting all of us every single day are the career attorneys and staff at the Justice
Department. I’m privileged to be able to work with them as colleagues.”
West was promoted by Holder on Feb. 27 to Acting Associate Attorney General, the third highest official at the Justice Department, upon the departure of Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli.
The WSU Academy of Scholars was founded in 1979 to bring prominent experts to campus and to create a community of scholars. The organization’s Annual Senior Lecture Series is intended to provide a distinguished scholar or public figure a forum and to enhance the prestige of the university.
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