Defendants to sever in Jacksonville City Council fraud case

Suspended Jacksonville Councilors Katrina and Reggie Brown will be tried together.

Suspended Jacksonville City Councilors Katrina Brown and Reggie Brown are staring down a 38-count conspiracy to defraud.

The pair is accused of extracting hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal use from a Small Business Administration-backed loan provided for Katrina Brown’s family’s barbecue sauce plant.

The two Democratic Council members have presented a united front, maintaining their innocence. Until now.

Well ahead of a February trial date, Reggie Brown on Tuesday moved to sever his case from Katrina Brown’s. Then on Friday, Katrina Brown filed her own motion for severance.

Reggie Brown’s severance motion contends Brown solely performed “routine acts related to everyday business activity,” and that the “spillover effect” from the allegations against Katrina Brown is essentially guilt by association.

“There is no direct evidence Reginald Brown had any knowledge of any misrepresentations Katrina Brown may or may not have made to lenders. He never willfully agreed to commit a crime. He never knowingly aided and abetted any criminal conduct that may or may not have been committed by Katrina Brown,” the motion reads.

“As to Reginald Brown, the United States appears to simply hope its widely cast net ensnares people like him who associated with Katrina Brown and who, perhaps naively, relied on her purported business acumen,” the motion continues.

Another motion was to strike as “prejudicial” language in the indictment that discussed his vote in favor of the economic incentives the pair allegedly defrauded, as it was “customary” for Brown (a two-term Councilman) to vote for such deals.

The two face a compendium of charges: 13 counts of wire fraud, another 13 of mail fraud, five counts of money laundering, and charges of attempted bank fraud for Ms. Brown and failure to file a 1040 from Mr. Brown.

Katrina Brown filed her own severance motion Friday.

Ms. Brown believes that Mr. Brown’s defense will “shift blame” to her, and the combining of the cases will imperil her receipt of a fair trial.

She also wants recordings and notes of witness interviews, and language referring to the barbeque sauce plant as being “supposed” to produce sauce stricken as prejudicial.

Katrina Brown filed a number of other motions, including for personnel files of officers and criminal histories of alleged witnesses, along with whether or not they had ever been habitual drug users or had “ill will” toward Ms. Brown.

The trial will be high-profile, regardless of whether severance is allowed. The most recent local  analogous fraud case: that of former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown and her former chief-of-staff Elias “Ronnie” Simmons.

After the severance, Simmons was key to the federal government’s case that Corrine Brown was the ringleader of the conspiracy. He pleaded guilty to a reduced number of counts, and avoided the threatened hundreds of years in prison.