Former Utah Attorney Generals arrested

Former Utah Attorney Generals John Swallow and Mark Shurtleff have been arrested on 23 charges of corruption, according to a report in the usually reliable US poker information site Flushdraw.

Respected industry investigative journalist Haley Hintze reports that the charges include bribery, unreported income and destruction of evidence, and are connected with the defendants’ association with dubious businessman Jeremy Johnson, SunFirst Bank and illegal financial processing for online poker sites that were subsequently dismantled in the Black Friday shutterings of April 2011.

Johnson allegedly “shopped” Swallow and Shurtleff after secretly recording a long conversation with the former in 2012.

“Johnson himself acknowledged engaging in multiple bribes and bribe attempts designed both to assist the SunFirst poker processing operation and to forestall an ongoing Federal Trade Commission case involving iWorks, his Utah-based online- and telemarketing concern,” Hintze writes.

“The FTC targeted Johnson and iWorks in late 2010 in a $275 million lawsuit alleging false and deceptive marketing practices and illegal credit-card billings.  The ongoing FTC case and the commingling of funds between Johnson’s iWorks and online-poker corporate entity Elite Debit are why Johnson was not named as a 12th criminal defendant in the “Black Friday” poker case.”

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