Jacobson exonerated in U.S. of money laundering charges

Nathan Jacobson, second from left, with his U.S. legal team, from left, Michael Gordner, Jon Cieslak and lead attorney Michael Attanasio

TORONTO — Nathan Jacobson sets down his tablet on the coffee shop table and arranges three cellphones on top of it.

One is for calls with Israeli security personnel, people he won’t identify. Another is for calls from Joint Special Operations Command in the United States, where he too has contacts in the anti-terror community.

The third is a simple “civilian” telephone, the kind any regular high achieving businessman or philanthropist might possess.

Jacobson is linked in, big time, to all three, as he has been to senior politicians and diplomats around the world. But he’s been preoccupied recently. He’s spent the last 14 months in San Diego awaiting the outcome of money laundering charges. Most of that time he was free on bail, living in a hotel, but for 44 days he was locked up in prison, sharing a dorm with dozens of “gang bangers.” He also spent about a month in a Toronto jail before being taken to San Diego by three U.S. marshals.

Jacobson, 59, had pleaded guilty to felony money laundering charges but was fully exonerated two weeks ago after U.S. prosecutors dropped their case against him. Jacobson had asked a U.S. court to overturn his guilty plea, arguing that he was innocent and had received “ineffective assistance of counsel.”

Now, in a legal sense, it’s as if he was never convicted, Jacobson told The CJN in an interview shortly after his return to Toronto. He’s been shown to be “absolutely innocent,” but it’s too early to tell whether his business and political relationships will suffer as a result of his well-publicized legal travails.

Jacobson, a citizen of Canada and Israel, had hoped to some day receive the Order of Canada for his philanthropic work supporting numerous charities, including many in the Jewish community. He’d been asked to run for parliament for the Conservative party and he had been asked to serve as ambassador to Israel.

As an enticement to that posting, he was told he’d get to move into the ambassador’s residence in Herzliya.

“It’s 300 metres up the street from my home, and mine is bigger and nicer,” Jacobson quipped.

And of course, there’s the matter of the money the case cost him. His bank account is about $8 million lighter after his lengthy legal battles – $1.655 million went to his current U.S. lawyers, the law firm of  Cooley LLP; $4.5 million was forfeited to the American government; and $1.7 million was billed by his Canadian lawyer.

Eight million dollars, and he’s back where he started. Actually, he’s behind. In his absence, his business affairs suffered. And of course, his family, wife Lindi and daughter Katya, were deprived of his presence for so many months, he said.

“It was extremely hard on Lindi and Katya. They saw [me] go from being a community leader to a felon, front page news. I feel bad for them,” he said.

Only a few days after his return to Toronto, Jacobson was back in the air, jetting around the world to take care of business. One of his stops was in Baku, Azerbaijan, where he was pursuing oil and gas opportunities. He’s had commercial interests in Russia and he’s done business in the Arab world.

It’s in those kinds of areas around the world where he can find the best opportunities, Jacobson said. 

The cell phones, the ones that connect him to the shadowy world of security agencies, each cost $10,000. They feature special encryption technology that even the NSA, the American intelligence-gathering agency, can’t break, he explained.

The technology was developed by one  of the many companies in which he has a stake. Altogether, he has business interests in a dozen countries, and over the course of his storied career, he’s hobnobbed with presidents, prime ministers and potentates, in democracies and dictatorships alike.

His relationship with leaders in the Conservative party were unfairly highlighted during his legal problems, designed to tar the party by its political opponents, he suggested.

“I have great friends within the Conservative party who have written and called and said how happy they are that I was vindicated,” he said.

Today Jacobson is all smiles, cracking jokes with waitress staff and back to his gregarious self after his experience with the American justice system. 

“What else am I going to be?” asked Jacobson, though he admitted he now feels “a little bit jaded.”

At the height of his legal travails, he famously was in Myanmar on business when he was supposed to be in a court in San Diego. A bench warrant was issued for his arrest, and when back in Toronto, he was taken into custody before being escorted to San Diego. That was a result of faulty communications with the court clerk, Jacobson said.

But things should never have gotten to that point anyway, he added. His business was perfectly legitimate – clearing credit card transactions for online pharmaceutical purchases. His company went out of its way to vet its clients to make sure everything was above board.

“Nobody in the industry was as demanding of a high standard as we were,” he said.

He was even in contact with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to alert them about problematic business practices in the industry, Jacobson added.

When he visited the offices of one client in Costa Rica, he became concerned over their business practices and severed the relationship the next day. He was indicted nine months later along with 17 others. He didn’t recognized any of their names.

He faced multiple charges, but U.S. prosecutors offered a plea bargain if Jacobson admitted his guilt. His guilty plea was the subject of a court hearing in July in San Diego.

“Based on the evidence before this court, including Mr. Jacobson’s sworn declaration and the testimony of his former counsel [Toronto lawyer] Steven Skurka, and the government’s non-opposition to the motion to withdraw… the court finds that there are fair and just reasons for withdrawal of Mr. Jacobson’s guilty plea,” ruled U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino.

The order restores Jacobson’s innocence, but doesn’t give him back the time he spent in custody. In his first week in jail, he was put in “the hole,” the nickname given solitary confinement, because, he said, of concerns that given his military background, he’d be dangerous.

Afterward, he was moved to the general population, living in a dorm with 53 other people.

Despite his experience behind bars, Jacobson looks on the positive side of things. Prisoners had air conditioning, television, he had his own radio, books to read, a telephone to the outside world. He was served kosher food.

“So how bad was it? It wasn’t that bad,” he recalled. “I thought about it all the time. What did the generation before go through? I thought of Holocaust survivors and partisans. Compared to that, it really was a  breeze.”