Amazon sent the FBI to take my family’s bank accounts
The underlying case looks to be a pretty straight developing country "referral fees" / kickback type case.<p>One issue is how long these cases take to resolve. This was a whistleblower blowing the whistle.<p>Basic deal was Watson (who ran Northstar) a property developer signed a deal to kick back referral fees to an entity that did literally no work (Villanova Trust) created by a brother of the two amazon employees (Nelson and Kirschner) who were the transaction managers for 9 data center lease deals. The kickback deal was signed after these two Amazon employees met with Watson (the Vendor).<p>Amazon then did $400M in deals with Watson, who then kicked back $5M to the trust in "commissions". Then amazon discovered deleted files indicating the employees were entitled to "shares" in these projects from Watson of something like an additional $16M.<p>Others in the mix at developer also did some kind of land flip thing. One example was property that they bought for $20M, then sold to Amazon for $116M. In one case there was something like a $20M increase in price on property that was sold to Amazon the day that it was bought?! So they were frontrunning things. Watson was pissed, and wanted a cut, so recorded a meeting with the folks doing the flip scam. But that backfired because the folks doing the flip scam knew about the leasing scam and said, hey, if you don't back off we'll blow lid on your lease scam - claiming "that's FBI". They did end up compromising on kicking back $5M to Watson from the flip scam.<p>Anyways, all allegations, and thousands of pages so I've no doubt got some parts wrong, but it makes for interesting reading!<p>My question - it seems to take a long time to get these white color criminal types into jail.<p>In the linked post, there is a lot of complaining that the FBI messed up the guys career, but man, this court case - why would you hire a guy like this into a position of trust?<p>Note these allegations are contested. “My only hope in defending myself against its false allegations is that the process will be fair and impartial.” Mr. Nelson said per a WSJ article.