Opinion
No. 07-2252.
June 11, 2009.
On Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Following an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service in 1991-92, appellants John Keith Blakely and John Emmett Long were each charged both criminally and civilly with tax evasion and violations of federal currency-structuring law. The civil charges were eventually resolved by means of a stipulation pursuant to which appellants agreed to forfeit property worth several million dollars. The district court approved the stipulation and entered a consent judgment accordingly. In the years that followed, appellants filed a series of motions seeking to invalidate the consent judgment under Fed.R.Civ.P. 60(b). The district court has denied all of those motions.
Appellants now appeal the denial of their seventh such motion, making essentially the same arguments they made in support of their prior motions, namely that the consent judgment lacked a sufficient factual foundation. We rejected those same arguments — sans some of their current hyperbole — in appellants' prior appeal of the denial of their prior Rule 60(b) motions. See United States v. Real Property 6185 Brandywine Drive, 66 Fed. Appx. 617 (6th Cir. 2003). We also rejected those same arguments, albeit on procedural grounds, in a related civil case brought by appellants. See Blakely v. United States, 276 F.3d 853 (6th Cir. 2002).
The district court saw no reason to reopen the case based upon appellants' reiteration of these arguments in their latest Rule 60(b) motion; and neither do we. We therefore affirm the district court's order denying the motion.