A Tennessee man who adopted the alias “Dr. Evil” and sought to extort $1 million by claiming he had access to 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s tax returns may have caught a break at the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The 6th Circuit on Monday affirmed the convictions of Michael Brown, aka “Dr. Evil,” but vacated his sentence and remanded it for resentencing.
“In ‘Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,’ Dr. Evil develops a plan to steal a nuclear warhead and to hold the world hostage for $1 million,” wrote Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton in the 6th Circuit’s opinion. “This was not, Dr. Evil’s deputy pointed out, all that much money for a 1990s global criminal enterprise. But it was enough for an anonymous extortionist in today’s case, who apparently was familiar with the movie and who chose some features of it as signatures of his 2012 crime. Assuming the nom de guerre ‘Dr. Evil,’ the individual demanded $1 million in Bitcoin in exchange for an encryption key to Mitt Romney’s unreleased tax returns. The extortionist claimed to have stolen Romney’s returns from PricewaterhouseCoopers, and he posted a taunting, digitally altered image of Mike Myers’s Dr. Evil, wearing a Secret Service badge, in the lobby of the accounting firm’s offices in Franklin, Tennessee.”
Sutton explained that “a trail of digital breadcrumbs” helped law enforcement officials track down Brown and determine that Brown never stole Romney’s tax returns. While “Dr. Evil’s” plot to use fictitious Romney tax returns failed, the 6th Circuit agreed that enhanced sentencing from a lower court was not correct.
“[H]is attempt to extort PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Democratic and Republican parties, and the public earned Brown twelve convictions for wire fraud and extortion, a four year prison sentence, and an order to pay over $200,000 in restitution,” Sutton wrote. “Brown appeals his convictions on the grounds that the Secret Service’s search warrant lacked probable cause and that he was prejudiced by the trial judge’s decision to allow questions from the jury. Brown also appeals the obstruction of justice enhancement in the district court’s calculation of his sentence. We affirm Brown’s convictions but vacate his sentence.”
