In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
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No. 15‐3547
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff‐Appellee,
v.
SHAFT JONES,
Defendant‐Appellant.
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Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Indiana, Fort Wayne Division.
No. 1:11‐cr‐00078‐TLS‐1 — Theresa L. Springmann, Judge.
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ARGUED NOVEMBER 2, 2016 — DECIDED DECEMBER 12, 2016
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Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and POSNER and WILLIAMS,
Circuit Judges.
POSNER, Circuit Judge. A federal jury found the defendant
guilty of conspiring to possess, with intent to distribute, five
or more kilograms of cocaine, and of related crimes includ‐
ing carrying a gun in connection with drug trafficking. The
district judge sentenced him to 270 months in prison.
2 No. 15‐3547
A government informant named Martinez had arranged
with Jones to sell him 20 kilograms of powder cocaine. (The
term he used was “20 eggs” for making omelettes. Obvious‐
ly that was code.) At their rendezvous outside a car wash
police seized Jones, who drove his luxury SUV through the
car wash and emerged to a semicircle of waiting police cars,
and in a pat‐down search found a loaded pistol and four
magazines each containing 20 bullets. The police also found
an assault rifle in the back seat of Jones’s car together with
four more magazines, each containing 30 bullets, plus a
night‐vision scope and bags containing a total of $353,443 in
cash. Pursuant to a search warrant, police found in his home
and in a second car parked there another $321,280 in cash
plus more guns and ammunition, a bullet‐proof vest, a mon‐
ey counter, and a digital scale.
By the time their searches were done, they had seized
$890,210 from Jones, including cash from several bank ac‐
counts. There was no evidence that he could have obtained
this much cash from lawful business dealings; indeed there
was no credible evidence that he had any lawful sources of
money. While in jail awaiting trial he told another prisoner
that he’d been at the car wash to buy “keys,” which is a
street name for cocaine. He bragged that he never bought
less than $100,000 worth of cocaine at a time. The cash,
which the judge found to be proceeds of drug dealing, was
evidence that Jones had sold 31.79 kilograms of cocaine, as‐
suming a price of $28,000 a kilogram. Adding the 20 kilo‐
grams promised in the sting operation, the judge concluded
that Jones had engaged in an ongoing scheme that had in‐
volved the purchase and resale of more than 50 kilograms of
cocaine. There was also evidence that he’d conspired with
No. 15‐3547 3
brokers in the criminal drug trade to purchase illegal drugs
and resell them.
The judge, concerned particularly about the considerable
weaponry found in Jones’s car when he was arrested, and
about the magnitude of his drug activity, sentenced him to
270 months in prison, a sentence at the top of the applicable
guidelines range.
The arguments for reversal made by the defendant’s
lawyer in his briefs and at oral argument were exceptionally
weak, including his argument that the $353,443 in cash
found in the defendant’s car could have been for anything,
when obviously it was to purchase cocaine from Martinez,
the informant. There was no evidence of any other possible
use of the money, or any other possible motive for meeting
with the informant, who testified plausibly about his negoti‐
ations and meeting with the defendant. No motive was of‐
fered for carrying so much weaponry if the money was to be
given to the recipient (Martinez) for a legal transaction. He
argues that he did not have enough money with him to
complete the transaction: he had agreed to buy 20 kilograms
of cocaine at $26,000 per kilogram, but as 5 of those kilo‐
grams were to be bought on credit the immediate cost to him
would be $390,000. A lot of money—yet it would hardly
have been a surprise if he’d tried to bargain down the price
that he’d agreed to pay by pleading that $353,443 was all he
had—an amount equal to 90.6 percent of the agreed‐on price
of $390,000, and therefore not trivial. Or he might have
thought the seller would agree to front him even more of the
cocaine for later payment, or reduce the amount of cocaine
that he would buy. A final bit of evidence of the defendant’s
4 No. 15‐3547
involvement in the cocaine trade is that as noted earlier a
digital scale was found in his home.
At oral argument the defendant’s lawyer said that his cli‐
ent had been a boxing promoter, but no explanation was of‐
fered for why a boxing promoter should be carrying so
much cash and weaponry, and the evidence that Jones had
ever been one was slim: Martinez testified that the brokers,
in suggesting Jones as a potential client, referred to him as a
“boxing trainer” who “always pa[id] on time,” and Jones
told the waitress at the restaurant that he had taught one of
the brokers to box. The notion that the deal between Jones
and Martinez had something to do with Jones’s work as a
boxing promoter (if indeed he ever did such work) could not
be squared with his having bragged to Martinez that he’d
been in business for 26 years without ever having been im‐
prisoned—a comment that a real boxing promoter would
not have made.
The defendant also disputes the sufficiency of the evi‐
dence supporting his conspiracy conviction. He could not be
convicted of conspiring with the government’s confidential
informant, United States v. Bey, 725 F.3d 643, 649 (7th Cir.
2013), and was not; he was convicted of having conspired
with two brokers to obtain cocaine from Martinez, who held
himself out as a cocaine supplier. The brokers largely
dropped out of the picture before the transaction between
the defendant and Martinez, but a conspiracy is just an
agreement, not the acts that the conspirators agree to com‐
mit, and there was an agreement between the defendant and
the brokers and it is irrelevant that it wasn’t implemented.
The brokers had expected that they would be paid for their
No. 15‐3547 5
part in the deal, even though Jones had not wanted them to
be present at the transaction.
The defendant also argues that much of the evidence pre‐
sented at his trial should have been excluded. He claims that
the police did not have probable cause to arrest him and
therefore that the evidence seized during the searches of his
SUV and then of his property should have been excluded as
the fruits of an illegal search. But the agents who arrested
him knew he’d been negotiating a sizeable drug deal and
had tried to flee when he saw the police at the car wash.
They thus had probable cause to suppose that he was com‐
mitting a drug offense. He claims that the statements by the
brokers, because they didn’t testify at trial, should have been
excluded as hearsay. But the court did not err in concluding
on the basis of Martinez’s testimony and the content of the
brokers’ statements that the brokers were Jones’s co‐
conspirators.
He further argues that the recordings from the recording
device that Martinez had worn during his conversations
with Jones were unreliable because the batteries of the de‐
vice failed midway through one meeting and because the
tapes displayed an incorrect date. But the government had
produced a chain of custody for the recordings, and the dis‐
trict judge was entitled to admit the recordings and let the
jury decide for itself whether to believe them.
Last, Jones challenges his sentence, arguing that he
wasn’t responsible for more than 50 kilograms of cocaine.
But the district judge had two good reasons to think he was:
calculating backward from the money the government
seized, and relying on testimony that Jones had purchased
90 kilograms through one of the brokers. The government
6 No. 15‐3547
had the defendant cold, and the district judge was on solid
footing in saying that a sentence above the guideline range
would be reasonable given the magnitude of Jones’s criminal
activity, though ultimately the judge sentenced Jones within
the guidelines range.
AFFIRMED