Beale Clan Update

Y’all remember the Beale family, right? I’ve written about them before. They’re the ones with the right-wing Professional Christian scuzzball would-be techie/games guru and his right-wing Professional Christian scuzzball tax dodging daddy.

Well, the short version is that Daddy Beale helped run a company, did bad things, nearly blew up the company with his nuttiness, skipped town to avoid justice, was finally caught and put on trial, and has now been convicted of doing bad things:

A trial that at times seemed to exist in parallel universes, with accepted law in one dimension and Robert Beale in the other, came back firmly to earth Wednesday.

Ignoring Beale’s indignation, religious beliefs and obscure interpretations of the U.S. Constitution and philosophy, a federal jury in Minneapolis took only two hours to find him guilty of all seven counts brought against him for tax evasion, conspiracy and fleeing authorities.

The former millionaire CEO of Comtrol Corp. in Maple Grove now faces up to 10 years in prison.

The trial in U.S. District Court lasted eight days and featured more than 100 exhibits, some about arcane tax laws.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Rank repeatedly told jurors: “This isn’t a complicated case; it is what it looks like, and it looks like tax evasion.”

Rank and Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Cheever argued that Beale deceived and conspired to hide more than $5 million in income for which he owed more than $1.6 million in taxes.

His greed and arrogance were simply cloaked in anti-tax arguments from the radical fringe, prosecutors argued.

The former North Oaks resident, who said he was once worth $20 million, fled rather than face the government in court when he was originally charged in 2006. He was captured in Florida after 14 months on the run.

Here’s how he did it:

From 2000 through 2004, Beale directed employees to pay him through a shell company, Chayil Corp., in order to hide his income. After the Minnesota Department of Revenue issued subpoenas for pay documents, Beale removed them from the building and stopped sending invoices. He eventually was paid through cashier’s checks and sent money to Swiss bank accounts.

Meanwhile, Beale sent “nonsense” documents to the IRS and Minnesota Department of Revenue that pretended to offer financial information or challenge laws, in case his income was discovered. Those “distraction and manipulation” tactics are common among tax protesters, Rank argued.

When those attempts failed, Beale fled. While on the run, Beale, through a son, tried to get $600,000 from his Swiss bank account to buy property in Switzerland. He also filed a phoney document to have a lien removed on a seized property, which he then tried to sell.

When Beale was arrested in November at a strip mall in Orlando, Fla., he was carrying a fake passport and driver’s license issued from “The Kingdom of Heaven,” something he had copied off the Internet.

Yupper: Run down a checklist of every single stupid-ass and ultimately futile thing the far-right tax protester nutjobs have dreamed up, and Beale’s likely done it. Their efforts to help him with reams of testimonials and bogus research didn’t work that well:

Most of the letters and documents were written with the help of well-known tax protesters. Rank pointed out that every one of them had also been convicted of tax fraud.

But it gets even better. Our favorite moron and four of his buddies also face a new criminal complaint issued just last week, this time for conspiring to disrupt the proceedings and intimidate the judge:

“God … wants me to take the judge out, that’s what he wants me to do,” Beale allegedly told his fiancée on a tape-recorded call from jail. “Once I take down Ann Montgomery, no judge in the whole court will have anything to do with me.”

That’s just the sort of thing to inspire leniency in the sentencing phase, eh?

Among the bits of hilarity was this:

He tried to argue that the U.S. Constitution identifies anyone outside the District of Columbia and U.S. islands as “non-resident aliens,” but was stopped by Judge Ann Montgomery. He also accused the government of misconstruing his motives and tried to shift the blame to his bookkeeper for failing to turn in the proper documents to the IRS.

Rank, however, showed that the bookkeeper, after being ordered by Beale to keep financial disclosures from the government, was the person who turned him in.

Once again, reality outstrips The Onion.