Illegal Bid Rigging Racket? Or Mere Innocent 'Joint Bidding' Arrangement?

Real estate investors and others who have gotten themselves pinched on charges alleging participation in an illegal bid rigging scam at a public auction(1) may wish to consider an observation made by a Colorado Appeals Court in a 2010 ruling in considering whether to mount a defense before deciding to 'race to the prosecutor's office' and spill their guts about the racket, throwing their co-conspirators under the bus in the process in an attempt to beat the rap, or at least reduce any anticipated prison sentence.(2)

In the ruling, the court made the following distinction between what you can do and what you can't do when teaming up with others when bidding at auctions (bold text is my emphasis):

• Federal antitrust cases distinguish between unlawful bid rigging and lawful joint bidding. Bid rigging has been found when two or more competitors coordinate their bids to a third party. United States v. Mobile Materials, Inc., 881 F.2d 866, 869 (10th Cir. 1989).
  
  However, "[b]id rigging should not be confused with joint bidding, which allows bidders to pool their resources to place bids on property which they would otherwise be unable to afford." Love v. Basque Cartel, 873 F. Supp. 563, 577 (D. Wyo. 1995), aff'd sub nom. Dry Creek Cattle Co. v. Basque Cartel, 95 F.3d 1161 (10th Cir. 1996) (unpublished table decision).[7](3)
  
  In Love, 873 F. Supp. at 566, 568, on which the trial court relied, the court determined that the bidding at an auction for a 90,000-acre ranch did not constitute bid rigging because the auction encouraged joint bidding: in early rounds, bids were taken on individual subdivided parcels; in later rounds, bids were taken on the ranch as a whole. Id. at 567, 578.
  
  The Love court concluded that in pooling their resources to bid on the entire ranch, the individual defendants had not suppressed competition as to the individual parcels. Id. at 577. And it found no evidence that anyone had been prevented from bidding on the entire ranch. Id.

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• In United States v. Guthrie, 814 F. Supp. 942 (E.D. Wash. 1993), aff'd, 17 F.3d 397 (9th Cir. 1994) (unpublished table decision), a bidder who twice paid other bidders not to attend foreclosure sales at which he submitted winning bids for $1 above minimum bid levels was convicted of bid rigging.
  
  Although unlike here Guthrie rigged the bids before the sales, the court's explanation of the anticompetitive nature of bid rigging as "an agreement between two or more persons to eliminate, reduce, or interfere with competition for a job or contract that is to be awarded on the basis of bids," is instructive. Id. at 949.

For the court's ruling, see Amos v. Aspen Alps 123, LLC, No. 08CA2009 (Colo. App. 2010),(4) which decided how to apply the foregoing cases to the facts before it, and its legal analysis in considering whether a foreclosure sale tainted by illegal bid rigging should be voided.

(1) See e.g. California Real Estate Investors Agree to Plead Guilty to Bid Rigging at Public Foreclosure Auctions (Investigation Yields Eight Plea Agreements).

(2) "When a conspiracy is exposed by an arrest or execution of search warrants, soon-to-be defendants know that the first one to "belly up" and tell what he knows receives the best deal. The pressure is to bargain and bargain early, even if an indictment has not been filed." United States v. Moody, 206 F.3d 609, 617 (6th Cir. 2000) (Wiseman, J., concurring) (referring to the not-uncommon 'race to the courthouse' that breaks out among participants in an uncovered criminal conspiracy).

(3) In Kearney v. Taylor, 56 U.S. 494, 520 (1853), the Court explained that if "[t]he property at stake might be beyond the means of the individual, or might absorb more of them than he would desire to invest in the article, or be of a description that a mere capitalist, without practical men as associates, would not wish to encumber himself with," an agreement established joint bidding, rather than bid rigging. Joint bidding does "not . . . prevent competition, but . .. enable[s] . . . the persons composing [the agreement] to participate in the biddings." Id. at 521. However, "shutting out competition, and depressing the sale, so as to obtain the property at a sacrifice" is bid rigging. Id.

(4) Subsequent History: Writ of certiorari granted in part and denied in part Amos v. Aspen Alps 123, LLC, 2011 Colo. LEXIS 279 (Colo. Mar. 28, 2011).