In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
No. 10-2797
U NITED S TATES OF A MERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
C HARLES L ANDWER, JR.,
Defendant-Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 08 CR 712-1—Robert M. Dow, Jr., Judge.
A RGUED M ARCH 1, 2011—D ECIDED A PRIL 28, 2011
Before K ANNE, R OVNER, and W OOD , Circuit Judges.
P ER C URIAM. Charles Landwer, Jr. pleaded guilty to
mail fraud, see 18 U.S.C. § 1341, and at sentencing received
a two-level increase under U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1(b)(9)(C) for
using “sophisticated means” to perpetrate his scheme.
On appeal he challenges that increase and argues that
we should narrow our interpretation of the guideline
based on Begay v. United States, 553 U.S. 137 (2008).
We affirm.
2 No. 10-2797
For seven years, Landwer carried out a fraud that
bilked at least 17 victims out of more than $2 million.
Acting on his own and through two financial companies,
he scammed his victims—usually elderly or financially
distressed—by posing alternatively as a lawyer, licensed
real-estate agent, or certified public accountant; ingrati-
ating himself; and then offering to invest their money
or help them escape debt or foreclosure. He convinced
some victims to transfer property to him by quitclaim
deed or to place property into a land trust for which
he (through forged documents) designated himself the
beneficiary. With others, he perpetrated a financial scam:
he stole their investment funds, liquidated them, and
channeled the proceeds to earlier clients as purported
interest payments on their investments.
Landwer carefully masked his fraud. Along with
passing off fake checks and real-estate records, he sent
his clients letters from fictitious employees, reassuring
them that their investments were safe. He also curried
favor with respected community members—receiving
referrals from a high-ranking bank official, and being
accompanied by a state appellate judge at meetings
with people whom he defrauded. And when state
officials began investigating his operation as part of a
state criminal case against him, he forged documents
to cover up his transactions.
At sentencing Landwer objected to the upward adjust-
ment for sophisticated means recommended by the
presentence report. He argued that there “wasn’t much
behind the lies” he told, as he never created any
No. 10-2797 3
fake diploma or law license, and he downplayed his
forgeries as easily made. The government, however,
highlighted the prolonged duration of the fraud (seven
years), Landwer’s misrepresentation to victims about
the security of their investments, his use of complex real-
estate instruments, his deception of authorities through
phony documents, and his association with community
leaders to induce his victims’ trust.
The district court rejected Landwer’s arguments,
applied the adjustment, and sentenced him to a within-
guidelines sentence of 115 months. Landwer’s individual
schemes may have been simple, the court acknowl-
edged, but his fraud as a whole was “significantly more
elaborate than usual.” The court ticked off Landwer’s use
of “forged documents, fictitious checks, fictitious corre-
spondence, forged real estate documents, and . . . real
estate instruments such as a land trust and a quitclaim
deed” for his elaborate scheme that “robbed from Peter
to pay Paul.” The court also noted that he used many
of these same documents to mislead not only public
officials such as the County Recorder of Deeds, but also
prosecutors, investigators, and the state-court judge
presiding over his state criminal proceeding.
On appeal Landwer argues that the district court
erred in finding that his fraud involved sophisticated
means because it was too simple and dissimilar to the
examples listed in the guidelines to qualify for the adjust-
ment. The guidelines define sophisticated means as
“especially complex or especially intricate offense con-
duct pertaining to the execution or concealment of an
4 No. 10-2797
offense,” and provide two examples: (1) a telemarketing
scheme that is split across two jurisdictions to avoid
detection; or (2) a fraud that hides assets or transactions
using fictitious entities, corporate shells, or offshore
financial accounts. U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1, cmt. n.8(B). This
definition, Landwer insists, applies only to schemes
more elaborate than his fraud, which he describes as
“almost comically simple.”
Landwer’s conduct, however, falls within our inter-
pretation of sophisticated means. Application of the
adjustment “is proper when the conduct shows a
greater level of planning or concealment than a typical
fraud of its kind.” United States v. Knox, 624 F.3d 865,
871 (7th Cir. 2010) (internal quotation and citation omit-
ted); see United States v. Robinson, 538 F.3d 605, 607-08
(7th Cir. 2008) (upholding adjustment when defendant
covered up counterfeiting scheme by putting his phone
number on fake checks to vouch for their authenticity);
United States v. Wright, 496 F.3d 371, 378-79 (5th Cir.
2007) (upholding adjustment when defendant inflated
value of buyers’ assets to defraud lenders); United States
v. Halloran, 415 F.3d 940, 945 (8th Cir. 2005) (upholding
adjustment when defendant forged numerous docu-
ments and notary stamps). Here the district court charac-
terized Landwer’s fraud in avoiding detection as “sig-
nificantly more elaborate than usual.” And that finding
is not clearly erroneous; Landwer, under the guise of
operating a financial firm, oversaw for seven years
an elaborate scheme in which he created phony docu-
ments to conceal fraudulent transactions from victims
and authorities, used complex real-estate instruments to
No. 10-2797 5
scam victims out of property, liquidated clients’ invest-
ment funds for his own use and channeled the proceeds
in a manner that covered up his theft, and sent trumped-
up letters to clients falsely reassuring them that their
investments were safe.
Landwer next urges us to narrow our interpretation
of sophisticated means by applying the method of statu-
tory construction applied by the Supreme Court in
Begay. He reads Begay to hold that when a defined term
of a statute or guideline is accompanied by a list of ex-
amples, those examples should serve as a limitation on
the definition. The sophisticated-means adjustment, he
says, should similarly apply only to fraud having the
same essential characteristics as the listed examples,
which he describes as the “use of resources not easily
available or commonly used in business transactions” or
efforts to evade detection that give victims “little or no
way of tracing the fraudulent conduct.”
But Begay does not fundamentally change our analy-
sis. As relevant here, Begay applied the settled principle
“that a statutory list of examples of conduct that violates
the statute can be a clue to the statute’s intended scope.”
United States v. Taylor, 620 F.3d 812, 814 (7th Cir. 2010);
see United States v. Alderman, 601 F.3d 949, 952 (9th
Cir. 2010). Recently confronted with similar arguments
regarding the guidelines’ definition of “physically re-
strained,” see U.S.S.G. § 1B1.1, cmt. n.1(K), we ascer-
tained the essential character of the listed examples by
looking to interpretations or factual similarities present
in our past decisions. See United States v. Black, No. 10-
1721, 2011 WL 767999, at *5 (7th Cir. Mar. 7, 2011); Taylor,
6 No. 10-2797
620 F.3d at 814. When a similar approach is applied
here, Landwer’s interpretation of sophisticated means—
which confines the guideline’s application to crimes that
use uncommon resources or are nearly untraceable—
appears too narrow. Our past decisions do not construe
the examples as so limiting; they interpret the examples
as covering any scheme that involves more planning
or concealment than other frauds of the same
kind. See Knox, 624 F.3d at 871-72; United States v.
Wayland, 549 F.3d 526, 528 (7th Cir. 2008); Robinson, 538
F.3d at 607-08.
Finally, Landwer contends that the district court inap-
propriately double-counted his criminal activity when
it applied the sophisticated-means adjustment on top
of increasing his offense level for stealing more than
$1 million, U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1(b)(1)(I), and for affecting
more than 10 victims, id. § 2B1.1(b)(2)(A). But the court
did not rely on the loss amount or the number of victims
in applying the adjustment; it focused instead on
Landwer’s deliberate steps to conceal his fraud. More-
over, these guideline provisions serve different pur-
poses. The increase for using sophisticated means deters
elaborate efforts to avoid detection, while the increases
for the loss amount and number of victims punish defen-
dants for the magnitude of harm caused by their fraud.
See United States v. Diekemper, 604 F.3d 345, 354-55 (7th
Cir. 2010); United States v. Blum, 534 F.3d 608, 612 (7th Cir.
2008).
A FFIRMED.
4-28-11