Among the many recent misfortunes of Jeffrey Chernick, his tax fraud case landed in Fort Lauderdale U.S. District Court rather than in Miami. That put him at the mercy of Judge James I. Cohn, who on Friday sentenced Chernick to three months in prison, despite a similar defendant's having been spared a prison sentence by a Miami judge.
Both Chernick and that other defendant, Steven Michael Rubinstein of Boca Raton, had traded a guilty plea and their cooperation in catching Swiss bank officials who helped clients evade taxes, in exchange for which they stood to receive leniency.
But then, Chernick may have played a more active role in the tax cheating than did Rubinstein. This post on the Vile Plutocrat cites court documents that explain how Chernick moved the money between the U.S. and accounts in Hong Kong.