The best legal system money can buy

Feature: A pound of flesh: how Cisco’s “unmitigated gall” derailed one man’s life.

High-tech entrepreneur Peter Adekeye's yearlong nightmare began after he dropped his wife off at the Vancouver International airport and headed downtown to The Wedgewood, a posh boutique hotel. Inside a tasteful boardroom adorned with gilt-framed mirrors, the US District Court for Northern California, San Jose division, had convened a special sitting to hear Adekeye's deposition as part of a massive antitrust action he had launched against his former employer, the computer giant Cisco Systems. An official court video camera recorded the proceedings on May 20, 2010—Adekeye affably answering questions in an elegant black suit accented with a pale blue shirt and a coral tie.

At 5:15pm, however, two plainclothes women—the shorter one brandishing a badge—and two uniformed police officers entered the room. Adekeye was confused, as were his two Wall Street lawyers and the special judicial master conducting the hearing. But the four lawyers for Cisco knew exactly what was going on.

“I’m from the RCMP,” the taller woman said, “I’m sorry I have to interrupt your meeting here.”

[Ars Technica]

From this article we learn that if you annoy Cisco, by bringing a lawsuit against them for example, they can get the KGB’s immigration people to keep you out of the country (and away from the courtroom), and if you find a workaround for that they can get a prosecutor to charge you with a phony “crime” and arrest you in the middle of testifying for the lawsuit (thus keeping you from being heard). Clearly Cisco is getting their money’s worth from their bribes “campaign contributions” to elected officials.

In the end their use of blatant corruption didn’t help Cisco, as they still lost the lawsuit, so apparently their bribes where misplaced–it seems like it would have been more effective for them to bribe the judge in the lawsuit. Still, this case provides an example of how corrupt the US legal system is, and how it can be subverted by an organization with a lot of money.