 We're back, we're live, the two o'clock block here on Think Tech Community Matters is the show of the series. And we have Peter Carlisle, former mayor, former prosecutor, practicing attorney, done it all. Hi, Peter. Thanks for being here. It's great to be here as always. You know that. It's a good day. So what provoked this discussion is the death of Ronald Rewald. He was a piece of Hawaiian business history, don't you think? He was a piece of very, very untoward behavior. He was one of the greatest conmans that ever hit Honolulu, Hawaii. And he has now met his reward. And I'll say no more about that. But he was somebody who was absolutely blindingly greedy and spent 10 years of an 80-year term in prison, which wasn't half of what he deserved. Yeah, it is so interesting. So let's unpack it a little bit. At the time of all the Rewald thing, you were the prosecuting attorney for the seating count of Honolulu. Can you talk about your career as such? Well, I mean, I started off as a line prosecutor. I always knew that I wanted to be a prosecutor. And it's always been my opinion that law enforcement are really the guys in the shining armor. And that is not what has happened recently in the corruption problems that we've had in Honolulu. But the truth of the matter is the vast majority of police officers are dedicated to what they do, and they do it very well here. And they actually have very distinct impact on the community. When they start sweeping people who have committed crimes, when they start going after violent people, when they start going after people who use guns irrationally and dangerously, they step in. And because they've stepped in so effectively, crime rates have gone down and stayed down. So how does the prosecutor interface with the police? I mean, there's a role. There's a connection. Isn't there? What is it? It's sort of a person in the middle, which is the screening deputy. And so the police officer does the investigation. They come in and they speak to the screening division person. And they decide whether there's enough for probable cause. Is it a case that's got some problems with it? Is it something that more activity could be done on the investigative side or the police side that could make it a stronger case? And then once that's done and they're satisfied that there is a case that has probable cause and there is a reasonable likelihood of conviction, then in you go. So somebody from the Office of the Prosecutor is the screening person and it sounds just like TV. It does sound just like TV, you know, because, you know, TV every once in a while imitates real life. Not always, not frequently, but there is no doubt about it that there is law and order. Well, funny you should mention the term. So in your time, what was it like? I mean, what was your agenda, your model, your way of doing business as a prosecutor in those days? Well, it used to be when I first came over here from the mainland and I knew that that's the job that I wanted and I worked my way into it. There was this huge problem that it was looked at is just sort of where all the bad attorneys would go to that couldn't get to themselves the lucrative jobs in the big law firms and therefore you were dealing with somebody who at very best in terms of their attorney skills was sort of a dull normal. And happily over a series of years, that whole idea of an absence of a professional law enforcement community evaporated. And that was good for everybody. What do you look for in an assistant prosecuting attorney, somebody to go out and try the cases and, you know, handle the day-to-day workflow? You know, it's interesting because you have to figure out what is their skill set that they're bringing to the table. If they are an appellate attorney and that's what they do well, then you put them in that particular position. And that doesn't involve going to courtroom and speaking in front of juries. It's going in and doing legal research and doing it effectively and doing it well, which they were notorious for being one of the better appellate divisions in the entire state. So that's step one. Step two is if you've got people who want to stand in front of the juries who want to do the types of cases, perhaps the big complicated cases or the white collar cases, then you give them the opportunity to do what they do. And they'll end up doing it very well if it's what they like to do. Sometimes, you know, I'm only gauging this from what I see on TV. Sometimes there is no case or there shouldn't be a case. And the prosecutor has to sort of, you know, wean himself away from the notion of I want to win, I want to indict, I want to convict, I want to send to jail against the notion of, you know, gee, if he's not guilty, I shouldn't be prosecuting. That's 100% true. And actually that's a requirement of prosecutors. Our job is not to seek merely convictions, but to see that, quote, justice is done. Now according to many of the members of the defense bar, perhaps the more avid of them, the only way that justice is done is as their client is released. Well, that's not actually true at all. So what we do is we make sure that if we have something that we have a question about, that we have something that we have concern about, and it keeps on coming up over and over again no matter what you ask or try, then you're probably not going to take the case. So you have that authority, that discretion. This is very powerful stuff. You do it when you're the head guy. I mean, you can tell them exactly these are what the guidelines are. But basically, you're not going to treat people like children who are professionals. And most of the people who gave advice and were acting professionals, and that was the majority of the people in the office, you would get the right result. So turning to the 80s when Rewold was doing his business, quote, you know, I was telling you before the show that I recall so many scammers on Bishop Street, it was like replete with scammers of every kind of nature, doing these Wild West kind of companies and things and scams. It wasn't violent. It was white collar, but some of them were really good at it. Can you describe, at least from the point of view of the prosecutor, can you describe what that part of Hawaiian history was like, what that part of business history was like in those days? Well, I think calling it the Wild West is probably not an unfair accusation. And the more important thing with those type of people is that if you give them a taste of purgatory, they're going to change their business model. And they may go off and do something now that's actually productive for the community, because they don't want to end up sitting there in a very unpleasant prison cell with a roommate who might not be the world's friendliest person. Yeah, and who might be a violent criminal. Could be, and then ultimately, that is enough to satisfy some of them that it's time for a career change. But not always. And if they keep on coming around and around again, even if it's, quote, nonviolent, because I think almost anything that has to do with taking people's money and those people reacting violently for what's happened to them, all of those things lead to very, very difficult confrontations. And sometimes very dangerous confrontations. So you want to be able to convince that person, okay, stop. And if they don't, then they have nobody to blame but themselves. So when a prosecutor, when a prosecutor's office gets involved in a white collars kind of crime, because you can tell pretty early that it's white collar versus another kind, as opposed to the other kind, what's the fork in the road there? How do you treat it differently? Well, one is a blunt trauma situation, and the other one is a business, although an illegal business situation. And so you have to approach that with different types of strategies. And with the violent confrontation where there's death, where there's mutilation, where there's sexual assault, where there's domestic violence, those things you have to step in immediately and to make sure that the behavior stops. And it's not easy to do, particularly at the lower levels. Because misdemeanors aren't taken very seriously in certain circumstances. Now there's a much more fluid way of approaching domestic violence and realizing that that is sort of the mother of all disasters. Because that's what causes crime to grow. Perpetuates it down the generations. Exactly, that's much better put. That's exactly what it is. And so that's the thing that you have to be able to do if you're going to be dealing at the root cause of crime. So there's an immediacy in that kind of case. Yes. In the white collar, you can afford to take it with a little less alacrity. Well, I think what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to do a better case in terms of analyzing and gathering evidence. Because some of these are very complicated. They require boxes and boxes of documentation. You need to be able to check and follow the money, which the criminal element is trying not to let you follow it. And you have to try and do your best to get over whatever landmines they've basically put in your path. And that becomes very, very significant. Intellectual experience. Well, actually it is, which is why I didn't do much of it. So, but yeah, you have people who are dedicated to white collar work. Certainly that's true for the US Attorney's Office. That's what they do most of the time. And it has a very, very distinct impact on the criminals who are doing it. Unfortunately, not particularly well done or enacted when you were dealing with a rewalled. Yeah, let's turn to rewalled for a minute. He was really a special case. And I think we all wondered about the name of that firm. Was it Bishop Baldwin? Dillingham. Rewalled and somebody else? What was this? Wonderful thing. They had a wonderful name. Oh, yeah. We all know this. Peter is reading from the article, The Star Advertiser, which talked about Rewalled's death and his life and times last week. And it was so interesting that you said to yourself, hey, this guy is involved with the biggest names in the history of the state. Bishop Baldwin, Rewalled, Dillingham, and Wong. Wong was a young kid. So that was, and you know, this guy was so completely shameless. I mean, he was robbing from people. He was stealing money from people who were his friends. He was stealing money from people who live next door to him. He was stealing money from people who were blind. You name it, he would steal from them. I have a recollection, just coming back to me talking with you about a woman who was fleeced by Rewalled. And she went into a bank. I think it might have been the Bank of Hawaii. And she said, you know, why can't you give me, you know, 97% interest this year in my money? Bishop Baldwin is doing that. And this was a kind of tip-off. There was something wrong in Mudville. Oops, oops. Yeah, I mean, it was outlandishly a bunch of bravado and success. And then blaming the CIA for this and then talking about how he had been absolutely robbed, blind, and that the police are all corrupt and everybody's corrupt. And he had lots to say about that, none of which was true. All of it was hogwash. And every ounce of it should have kept him in jail way longer than 10 puny years. And Bishop and Baldwin, there were no Bishops, no Baldwin's in the company, it was just him. There was no level of lying that he did not reach and breach. That's style. They should have made a movie, you know? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not too late. I'm trying to think who the actor would be. So how did this come to your attention? I mean, this could have gone on for a while. It wasn't really sustainable over time. But it could have gone on for a while. How did you catch it? Well, it was basically a bail hearing. And then I was briefed on what was going on. And all of this CIA nonsense, we ended up, at that point, I got to stand up in front of the judge and start talking about just exactly what this guy had done and what an absolutely miserable excuse for a human being he was. And he was sort of glaring at me. And it was fun. I mean, it was really enjoyable because he was so awful and so completely despicable that it was a pleasure to start spewing misery in his direction. Makes it all worthwhile. Yeah, I mean, none of it should have happened. But the payback for him, if they had actually been stern with him, was perfectly delightful. So you won the bail hearing. In other words, no bail for Ron. I'm trying to think back on that. I don't know whether that or whether he had enough money so that he could actually pay the bail, which I'm sure parting with money from him unless it was going in his direction with something he was very not fond of it. All of them think it was fair. And so, but I seem to recall it kept him in for a while. So then there began the experience of gathering evidence, of seeing if you could prove this beyond a reasonable doubt. Well, it's a bail hearing. So that's the reason. But it's ultimately after the bail hearing. Ultimately, it is going to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. And so that's a chore. When you have a white collar situation like this, you have to go through all the records and all the files and see what's there. And you also have to find stuff that is called exculpatory evidence, which means that this suggests that he really isn't guilty of any crime. And that's, in his case, it was not difficult to see that there was nothing that was remotely exculpatory about his conduct. Peter Carlisle, former mayor, former prosecutor for the city of Canada of Honolulu, and the guy who handled the rewalt investigation, Ronald Rewalt died last week. And it's really worth looking back on his life and his trouble with the law. I can't say that I was the person who was in charge of the investigation. I was in charge of the bail hearing and then a few other things I got involved with tangentially. But the real people who were going into that were the people who were the federal US attorneys and as well as the people who had done some of the more obvious issues of basically white-collar crime. We're still going to take this one minute break. OK. And we're still going to come back and talk to you some more about it. Well, that's Peter Carlisle. I insist on that. Aloha. I'm Kili Ikeena. And I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock PM on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government, and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 PM on Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Kili Ikeena. Aloha. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate, and power, and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 PM. And we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Now I want to tell you something. And I wasn't kidding. I said we'd come back. We came back. I said Peter would still be here when we came back. That's Peter Carlisle. And we'd still talk about Ron Rewald after we came back. It's all true. I was trying to escape, but they wouldn't let me out over here. They've got people with guns. It's frightening. OK, one has a club. And they're looking at me menacingly. OK, Peter. So now this is going to reveal itself. Other agencies involved, as you mentioned. Right. What was the law enforcement side of this? And who was involved? And what was the mission? And how did they work together? Well, everybody was cooperating to do whatever they could that needed to be done. So I stepped in for this small area that involved trying to keep them on bail, not permitting them to be on bail. But there was interaction between the police department. There was interaction with the federal people. They ended up having an enormous trial that ended up going on for, I think it was, 11 weeks. That's huge. And really, three months. 140 witnesses. That's an enormous. And it's all, a lot of it's paper. So I can't imagine how many stacks of banker's boxes there were. And how much research to look at all that and figure out what's what. And you have to go through all of it. And you have to go through all of it with a fine-tooth comb to see what is there that should be there. What is admissible. So you have to put the law into effect as to whether you know you can't be asking this because it's a criminal case. And that makes all the difference in the world. Because then you have all of the plethora of rights that are given to a criminal defendant. So there was a jury trial. It was a jury trial. It was a jury trial. Oh, major, juries can get so confused. You give them an 11-week trial. That's a long time for a jury. And 140 witnesses, you could get confused. You could. But in this case, I think what you also have is after you hear all of what he has done and the helplessness of the people who he victimized, the jury I would think would have been easily impressed with how awful this guy was and what a horrible thing he'd done to all of these innocent people. And I mean, he's literally the kind of person who would throw his blood relatives underneath the train. This is like that case in New York with the Ponzi. It was the Ponzi, right? The fellow who took people's investments and then took other investments to pay the interest on the first investments and on and on. There's been so many of these Ponzi schemes that I don't remember that specific one. A couple of years ago, I can't remember his name right now, but it was huge. And the amount of money was in hundreds of millions. It's staggering. It is staggering. And it's in the halls of the most venerable financial institutions that we have in the country. And yet we find out that they're being run by people who don't understand the basic meaning of integrity or truth. So what did we all do? What was his MO? He would solicit your investment. He would take your money. He would presumably invest it, but maybe not. And then he would take somebody else's investment and cover interest on it. The starting point was he would promise you a return of 20% or more. So now nobody is going to believe that if they're somebody who's financially sophisticated. So he would go to friends, relatives, people who trusted him, people who thought that he was the next best thing to can't be here. I mean, he was just absolutely very charming. He was, in many ways, a real good slick salesman. And sales is a part of almost all of our professions. And this guy was a very good one with almost no ability to separate what's right from what's wrong. So the elements of that offense would be he had to know he was lying when he told him he's going to give a big return. He had to know that he was not going to pay it back to them when he took their money. And in fact, he didn't pay it back and essentially stole it and applied it to his own expenses or maybe to paying interest of other people he was scamming. Well, and it's also all of those things that are the entourage, there's the boats, there's the cars, the limousines, the building that I live in now, the Pacific Guardian, he had one in there that was on a floor that was above ours. And it had a flowing waterfall coming down inside the building. And all of it was done in solid gold. Yeah, so that people thought this guy must be so incredibly successful, he's got to be good. He knows how to invest. Well, of course, and then you had the credentials. I mean, he went to, he did go to MIT and he was a member of the CIA and all the rest of that stuff, none of which had anything to do with the reality of the planet Earth. In fact, go to MIT. I think he didn't quite get out of high school. OK. So he was well known for that and had actually gotten convicted of theft when he was a student. Really? Now, the CIA, there was something in the article, and I wonder if you remember, there was something in the article about how he actually was a front for the CIA. He rented space to them. That was it. He rented space for their office and something in downtown, probably out of that office with the waterfall. Yes, I'm sure. And he told everybody that he was working with the CIA. And there was definitely contact between him and the CIA. So he took that kernel of knowledge and fact and turned it into an entire field of corn. So was this case heavily resistant in the 11 weeks of trial? Oh, it was definitely a big fight. Yeah, it was a big fight. And although he did not take the stand. He did not take the stand. Yeah, so but yeah, it was definitely a battle between the federal public defender and the forces of good as opposed to evil. You were counsel in that trial? No. Did you observe it? I did not go and observe it. I was too busy doing sort of like my usual blunt drama cases. OK. What year was it you were called? Probably in the article somewhere. Somewhere in the article. It's got to be in the 80s, I think. I think you're right on that. I think it was 80s, early 90s. I think you're right. I think it was the 80s and 80s. Maybe even the 70s and 80s. Here we go, in the 70s and 80s. 70s. Nine years Rewald lived in Hawaii. Only nine years. So he could achieve this huge structure, the Ponzi structure, and come down all in seven or eight years. And in the process, enrich himself with millions and millions of dollars. So was the money recovered, you know? Most of it was not. Not. He'd spent it, or hidden it somewhere. He'd spent it. So he had done exactly what he planned to do, which was to use it to his advantage. And at the end, he was convicted, what, on all counts, some counts? I think something like 92 counts or something like that. So it was fraud. And it was theft. And it had other things that they threw in, which I can't remember all of them, because for one thing, I think it was all on the federal side. And I don't practice that type of law. But it's basically stealing. Is this a federal trial or a state trial? I thought that it ended up being a federal trial. Possibly, yeah. And I can't say that absolutely unequivocally. Can you say whether he was alone or whether there were other defendants with him? He was the key defendant. And I don't recall whether they had anybody else on top of it. So and then the really nice thing about it is after he failed in that regard, he still ended up in 2010 as working as the director of operations for Beverly Hills-based talent and literary agency. I saw that in the article. That's extraordinary. Yep. I mean, AT, he was up to it right until the very end. So he gets convicted. He goes to jail for how his sentence was viewed. His sentence was 80 years. 80 years. And the amount of time that he spent in jail was less than 10. Wow. I guess it was good behavior or something along those lines. Whatever it did, it was a system that wasn't working correctly. If it had been working correctly, he would have never gotten out at anything less than 20 to 30 years. Why is that? I mean, is it that he was incorrigible? Or there are so many people. You're saying that because so many people were affected and damaged in the process. Not for one, but there's also the love of deterrence. I mean, if somebody is living like that, then that life is cut out from underneath them and they're living in a small, cramped cell. That is supposed to give everybody the absolute certain knowledge that if they do this type of behavior, they're going to go and spend and lose decades out of their lives. Does that work? I mean, we're talking about Rudolph Giuliani in New York. He went after every crime, no matter how big or small. And he had a very positive effect when he did that. So it's long been true that this is an effective way of stopping people from doing something. I used an example. I believe it was in 1600 in China. There was this enormous problem with one of the sort of the rogue areas in China. And these people were going off and killing people and stealing their money. So they were basically cutthroats. And the central government, whatever it was at the time, went charging down there with a display of force, gathered every one of them up, lined them up in a row, and started cutting off heads. And then they put the heads on a spike and they pointed it in the direction of Beijing. And the reason that they did all that was to let everybody know that this was not going to be tolerated. And the next 10 years, crime rates had been cut in half. So does that kind of violent barbaric behavior that we would never consider doing today? We couldn't do that today, for sure. Is it effective? Yes, it's effective. Well, within the context of today, we have white collar crimes that are really serious. And I speak of hacking, for example, where I don't think the community fully understands the damage that a hacker can do to anonymous groups of people, large groups of people. I think it really hurts society in general. But they treat it as a joke, maybe? I don't think I think, well, that's what the person who's doing it thinks it's funny. But you can quickly stop that with a couple of very significant jail terms. And sit there and say, OK, you want to play games? We'll play games with you. But you'll be playing them in prison. It's very interesting, Peter, on this very note. I went to the Pacific Telecommunications Conference a few weeks ago. And there were lots of technology guys there. And I said, you guys are able to understand and intercept hacking. And can you tell who's hacking? Can you track it back and find out who the culprit is with any degree of certainty or specificity? And he said, and a number of them said, yes, we can. The level of the technology now permits us to do that. So I suggest to you that rewalled come current. And the notion of prosecuting for the sake of deterrence, it's all the more important now in the time of hacking as a white color. You can see the impact of it already. I mean, we're watching TV on a daily basis. Some new person is being accused of doing something nefarious and proves out that they can actually prove that they're doing it in a nefarious fashion. And then they should be punished, and significantly so. And you're talking about people's livelihoods being taken away from them. This is the kind of stuff that leads to suicides. It leads to all sorts of. Or a complete lack of faith in their own judgment. And so then for years, they live with the thought that, I'm so stupid, why did I allow this to happen? And it was not their stupidity that was occurring. It was somebody else's aggressive criminality. And a lack of confidence in the system around them, in the world around them, that could ruin your whole day, not to believe in the system and the government around you. Yeah, I mean, and right now I think we've got a good case of where I don't think people do trust their government. And I think that that's a complete flaw in a system that requires trusted government. And you take a look at some of the people in government now and some of the stuff that they're doing, and serial liars and the rest of those kind of things coming to the forefront, that's not the way the United States is supposed to operate. No, we have to protect our people care for each other. And we have to prosecute crimes. And we can't let this happen with impunity the way it has. We'll put. So do you miss those days, Peter? I enjoyed the trial at the trial work. But when I walked out of the prosecutor's office, I'd done pretty much everything that I could do in terms of trial work. And I was real pleased with it. So there's a part of me that misses it, but there's a part of me that absolutely and unequivocally kneels and bows in a humble fashion before my wife. If she suggests that I'm not going to be doing this, I would be willing to bet you I'm not going to be doing it. Well, I do want to have another discussion with you about the Xerox case in which you were involved. And the reason why is that there are so many of those kinds of mass shootings today. You don't have to wait three days to find another one. And so I would really like to explore that case and what it teaches us also with you. And that'll be a lot less pleasant conversation than this because that's pretty grim and gruesome and so, and it should be discussed. Thank you, Peter. Peter Karla. Jay, always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha.