His priority: Protect rural water

By Cy Ryan

Tuesday, May 13, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Sen. Dean Rhoads, the second in seniority in the Nevada Legislature, says his priority in the 2009 session will be to protect the water resources of rural Nevada.

“I want to make sure there is enough water left for rural Nevada in the future,” said Rhoads, R-Tuscarora, who is seeking his seventh term in the Senate after serving six years in the Assembly.

The Southern Nevada Water District seeks to pump water from rural counties to the Las Vegas area. Rhoads said that when wells get low in rural Nevada, “I want the water engineer to stop it so the rural counties would not be wiped out.”

Rhoads, 72, said Nevada water laws may have to be strengthened to prevent urban areas from pumping water from the “cow counties.”

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A federal appeals court has ruled that the U.S. attorney’s office in Las Vegas was guilty of “prosecutorial misconduct in its highest form” in handling the trial of three lawyers charged with laundering more than $12 million in a bogus stock scheme.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision of federal Judge James Mahan, who dismissed the charges in 2006 against Las Vegas lawyers Daniel Chapman and Sean Flanagan and former New York lawyer Herbert Jacobi.

Mahan tossed the case when it was revealed that the U.S. attorney’s office had failed before trial to provide 650 pages of documents to the defense.

The trial was in its third week when Mahan dismissed the charges against the trio, saying Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Damm “acted flagrantly, willfully, and in bad faith” in withholding the documents from the defense.

The appeals court agreed.

U.S. Attorney Greg Brower said no decision has been made about whether to appeal the case further.

Brower, who took over the office of U.S. attorney for Nevada this year, said the office reported the case to the professional responsibility section of the U.S. Justice Department, which sent an investigating team to Nevada. He said the federal team concluded there was no misconduct by the Las Vegas office.

Flanagan and Chapman could not be reached for comment.

A federal grand jury in August 2003 indicted the three lawyers along with Shawn Hackman and James Farrell on charges of arranging a complex securities trading scheme, falsifying records and manipulating stock prices.

Hackman and Farrell pleaded guilty before trial.

The scheme allegedly made $12 million, which, according to the indictment, was laundered through Flanagan’s and Chapman’s law firm and various corporations that Jacobi, disbarred from practicing law, had registered in the Bahamas.

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The gross win in Las Vegas Strip casinos in March was down 5 percent from a year ago, the third straight month of decline, the Nevada Gaming Commission reported.

The 34 clubs on the Strip won $517.5 million in the month.

Player spending is down, said Frank Streshley, senior research specialist for the commission. With gas prices rising and unemployment up, people are not playing as much at casinos across the state.

Statewide, casinos reported a gross win of $1 billion, down 1.5 percent, also the third consecutive monthly decline.

The drop shows in the taxes collected by the state. For this fiscal year, the taxes collected for the first ten months totaled $652.7 million, or $64.8 million less than what had been forecast.

Streshley said the results were disappointing. He is not predicting any major increase in the coming two months.

The state has already reduced its budget by more than $900 million because of the slower than expected tax collections.

Downtown Las Vegas “was one of the few bright spots,” Streshley said. Gross win increased about 2 percent to $56.6 million for March.

Casinos in North Las Vegas won $29.1 million, up 27 percent. But Streshley said part of that was due to the timing of the count of slot machine revenue that may have been won in February but not counted until March.