Federal prosecutors say the disgraced Minneapolis lawyer Paul Hansmeier should spend more than a dozen years in prison for concocting an elaborate scheme to seed the internet with pornography so that he and his partners could sue those who downloaded it.
Now, U.S. Attorney Erica H. MacDonald wants anyone who paid Hansmeier and company to settle what she calls these "sham pornography film copyright infringement" cases to file claims for restitution.
That could add up to several million dollars.
Hansmeier and his onetime law partner, John Steele, are scheduled for sentencing June 4 before U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen.
The two men were convicted of running a multimillion dollar fraud scheme from 2011 to 2014 in which they extracted settlements from hundreds of people who feared being exposed as pornography consumers.
The settlements were set low enough that it would typically cost defendants more to fight the cases than to make the payments.
When federal judges grew suspicious of the scheme, Hansmeier lied to them and coerced others to mislead them as well, federal prosecutors wrote in pre-sentencing documents.
"While John Steele assumed an equal partnership in the settlement mill, Steele primarily handled the business side of operations — interacting with clients, organizing business entities, collecting payments, producing [pornographic] movies, and paying bills. Steele was the brash frontman whose false bravado and half-truths drew the ire of defense attorneys and judges, but witnesses repeatedly identified Hansmeier as the Machiavellian presence behind the scenes directing the creation and dissemination of false statements to courts," wrote Assistant U.S. Attorneys Benjamin Langner and David MacLaughlin.
