Stonewashed

Robert V. Kesling was the narcotics kingpin and Ultimate Fighter. James L. White, A. Mark Vanderveen, and Joel Manalang were the wise attorneys and ultimate losers. Their cash-fueled joyride careened over the legal edge and into prison, and while Kesling sensed it coming and didn't care, the attorneys knew better and didn't react. They were "intelligent, educated, and sophisticated" legal minds, as a federal judge called them; two also wore the robes of lower-court judges themselves. Yet they willingly helped Kesling, a loose cannon and one of the Northwest's biggest drug dealers, stash and launder some of his tempting millions. The bundled money would arrive in containers—a backpack, duffel bags, shoeboxes, and paper sacks. Noooo checks, thank you! Instead of handing out receipts or filing proper currency forms, the legal eagles stuck the cash in safes or hid it in their homes.

No transaction was too big or too bold. Take that day in 2005, up in Jim White's Denny Building penthouse law office above Sixth Avenue in Seattle. In walked his new client, Rob Kesling, 27, a former Seattle car salesman and a martial arts expert who was training for an Ultimate Fighting–style submission-wrestling championship in California, a combat form of jujitsu involving grappling, sparring, and kicking. The muscular 220-pounder had been a high-school wrestler in Alaska, where he grew up and worked on fishing boats. In recent years—though he'd cracked an elbow in training—he'd become obsessed with winning a title in Brazilian jujitsu, taking steroids to bulk up and working out three days a week in a Seattle gym.

His heavy lifting at the moment, however, involved a backpack filled with $100,000 cash, which he unabashedly lugged into White's office. At the time, Kesling was the target of one of the largest drug probes ever mounted in the Northwest. The feds had been on his tail for two years and had already busted several couriers from his drug ring, which transported cocaine imported from Mexico into British Columbia, then returned with loads of B.C. marijuana to distribute in the United States.

White, who'd been running for a seat on the state Supreme Court only a few months before this meeting, later referred to Kesling's $100,000 payment as a "nonrefundable retainer." Besides proposing that the attorney also wash thousands more in other dirty money he'd supply, Kesling asked White to use some of the cash to hire an attorney for one of his busted drug couriers. It wasn't exactly a humanitarian act. Kesling suspected the courier might be helping the feds in their investigation. Kesling wanted White to find a defense lawyer who was willing to breach the attorney-client relationship and fill them in on anything the courier said. A friend and legal protégée of White, Mark Vanderveen, later accepted the assignment.

As it turned out, Kesling had a good nose for betrayal. The courier had indeed been turned by the feds and had even begun recording Kesling and others on a wire. But while Kesling was their target, prosecutors say they were stunned to ultimately discover, through the recordings and other evidence, no less than three attorneys joining the conspiracy. All ultimately pleaded guilty to helping Kesling launder his drug money or failing to report the drug-related income. Kesling pleaded guilty to drug-sales conspiracy.

It was the first felony conviction for all four men, but the sentences weren't exactly comparable: Two of the attorneys got 18 months and one got six, while Kesling was sent away for 17 years, an imbalance that didn't sit well with his attorney, Sheryl McCloud.

At Kesling's sentencing hearing last month in U.S. District Court, she noted that the attorneys "had had the benefit of graduate schooling and advanced degrees, and hence they had a variety of professional choices and opportunities in front of them." Her client, by contrast, was "a much younger man with far less education, from a small town in Alaska, with no advanced schooling, no professional degree, and no similar ability to give the legal profession and the criminal justice system such a black eye."

U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez, who handled sentencing in all the Kesling drug-ring and attorney cases in the past 13 months, was unmoved. Not a lot of people have come before him who shipped the amount of drugs Kesling had, Martinez said. One runner alone got caught with a load of Canada-bound Colombian cocaine with an estimated street value of more than $30 million.

But even more rare was the attorneys' roles. Federal prosecutors say they can't think of another time when three Seattle lawyers were locked up for drug-money laundering in one short stretch or in one related case. Judy Berrett, spokesperson for the Washington State Bar Association, says in the past 10 years only three attorneys were convicted of money laundering, all separate cases. (A fourth local attorney was also convicted recently in another laundering case, this one involving, yes, a Laundromat: See sidebar)

It's not illegal for an attorney to take cash from a client, drug defendants included. But if the amount exceeds $10,000, it has to be reported on an IRS Form 8300, detailing the amount, source, and other details. That's a federal requirement for anyone in any business or trade, a procedure specifically passed by Congress to track crime money. Additionally, if that unrecorded money is used by the recipient in any way—as income, to buy goods, pay bills, and so on—it is then considered to be illegally laundered.