Tuesday, January 09, 2007

More Lawyers for Landis

Email from Michael Henson

LANDIS RETAINS ADDITIONAL COUNSEL

Tour de France Champion Hires Maurice Suh, Former Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles and Partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

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New York, January 9, 2007 ­ 2006 Tour de France Champion Floyd Landis has retained Maurice Suh, partner at the law-firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher (Gibson Dunn) in Los Angeles, as legal counsel in his case to fight unsubstantiated doping allegations following his victory in the 2006 Tour de France. Mr. Suh was retained last December and joins Howard Jacobs in representing Landis.

Mr. Suh¹s expertise in complex litigation proceedings and experience in prosecuting public corruption and official misconduct cases against federal and state law enforcement officials allows him to bring significant prosecutorial strength to the complexities of a multi-jurisdictional case in which the various anti-doping organizations and sports federations have acted with gross misconduct, denying Landis the basic right to due process while violating their own charters and rules.

Mr. Suh is a member of Gibson Dunn¹s Litigation Department and its Business Crimes and Investigations and Crisis Management Practice Groups. He focuses his practice on complex business litigation and the representation of clients in conjunction with governmental compliance and enforcement actions.

Prior to joining Gibson Dunn in October 2006, Mr. Suh served as Deputy Mayor of Homeland Security and Public Safety for the Office of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. In that capacity, Mr. Suh had oversight over all homeland security and public safety issues for the Cityof Los Angeles, including the Port of Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports. In addition, Mr. Suh has served as a Deputy Chief of the Public Corruption and Government Fraud Section of the United States Attorney¹s Office of the Central District of California. While there, he prosecuted and supervised a number of public corruption and official misconduct cases against federal and state law enforcement officials, as well as a wide variety of fraud and environmental crimes cases.

For more information on Floyd¹s case, please visit www.floydfairnessfund.org.

About the Floyd Fairness Fund:

The Floyd Fairness Fund was established to support Floyd Landis against unsubstantiated doping allegations, provide the means to attain fairness for Floyd and bring justice to those responsible for misconduct in this case.
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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

ORG Here ...

I could guess from this post what this means. So I will:

Landis is preparing counsel to go after USADA/WADA for huge dollars if/when he gets off.

Again, this is just a guess. What do you think it means?

Anonymous said...

Hmmm. Corruption and fraud come up a lot in his bio there. Looks to me like they're fleshing out their approach and bringing in a big gun to go on that attack.

Say what you will about all of this, when this hearing finally happens it's going to be a hell of a ride.

Anonymous said...

My guess would be he's going after them whether he wins or not for abuse of process - Pound's published statements the other day will hardly help WADA's case if he does.

DBrower said...

Huh, is "abuse of process" an appropriate cause of action against Pound? He doesn't seem to be directly involved.

Nor does the failure of the ADRB to do any real review clearly seem like an actionable "abuse of process", since there are no courts involved.

A lot of this seems to get hung up in the weeds of arbitration and contract law where, generally, the little guy gets screwed.

Anything in that space seems difficult to me unless Landis wins the USADA case. Then he ought to be able to get some pelts of his own.

But, IANAL (I am not a lawyer) so I won't claim to understand.

TBV

Anonymous said...

Retaining this lawyer almost feels like a separate, but related, task. I don't know enough about law to know where it would lay, but it feels like he'd be taking on "whistle blower" status in order to allege corruption at, most likely, USADA (otherwise wouldn't they be looking at international law?) rather than sue.

It just seems odd that they'd push corruption and fraud so hard unless those two concepts were playing big roles in their plans. When you go public with your selection, you generally edit their bio to suit your needs.

But, then, we're all just guessing. For all we know Suh could be a killer Battleship player and the team might need someone to help relieve stress on long evenings reviewing the case.

Anonymous said...

I'm not an Attny either. However I love the way Landis is going after these bozos. My guess into what Landis is having the new Attny look into or at least what I would be looking for.

1. Corruption (I'm sorry but Its starting to walk like that duck, Is there direct proof? Not that i've seen but it appears to be walking like a duck, and its time for a closer inspection)
2. Misappropriation of government funds. While there are not any courts of law involved there IS TONS of Government money involved. Which, I would think could lead to investigations into Misappropriation of Government funds (broad definition that would need to be refined: not using the funds to protect athletes and the sports they are participating in.)
4. Abuse of power and or (process as TBF has put it)

And rattling the cage for a Congressional hearing, Government Financial Audit, Etc. I would also be filing public freedom of information requests into any and all information I can think of no matter how irrelevant it appears to be. Emails, Financials, AAFs, etc. etc. etc. This will also keep USADA busy chasing its tail. You wont make any friends but I think we are beyond bridge repair. Time to break out all the ammo on that bridge. I would also be encouraging TBF and others to file their own Freedom of Information Requests and share any info received on the WIKI or email to FFF.

We had some corruption and less than ethical good old boy networks and other issues in the suburb I live in, we weren't able to prove anything, mostly because of lack of funds. but we got alot of info from fredom of information requests and other research that helped run them out of office as we hit the pavement and started sharing the info with the citizens of the town. I will say that out of all the officials involved, every on thats come up for re-election has chosen not to run or they have lost. 4 out of 5 council seats so far. All thats left is the mayor and one council member and their days are numbered. Small scale I know, but the Landis case is reminding me allot of it, especially the way the public is getting involved in the process.

VENGA! VENGA! VENGA! LANDIS!!!!
VENGA! VENGA! VENGA! TBF!!!!