PORTLAND, Maine — The trial of two Brunswick men charged with conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Services continued Wednesday in U.S. District Court.
F. William Messier, 70, and David Robinson, 78, are both accused of the federal crime of conspiracy to impede and impair the IRS in collecting federal income taxes. Messier also faces charges of corruptly endeavoring to impede the administration of tax laws and failure to file tax returns from 2008 to 2012, according to court documents.
Messier, who built several communication towers at his Brunswick home, leases space on those towers to cellphone companies, municipal governments, radio stations and other companies and collects rent from them.
Robinson, who claims to be the “interim attorney general” of the “Maine Republic Free State,” allegedly worked with Messier to thwart the IRS investigation, U.S. Attorney Thomas E. Delahanty II said in August.
The two men, who together authored a 2012 book, “Maine Lawsuit Against the IRS: For Unfair Trade Practices,” were indicted in August by a federal grand jury. At the time, Delahanty said that Messier had not filed a federal income tax return since 1997, though the IRS assessed taxes, interest and penalties against him for $172,000 for the years 2000 to 2004. Messier allegedly earned more than $390,000 in gross income from renting antenna space on his radio communication towers.
In September, the two men pleaded not guilty and were released on bond.
Assistant U.S. Attorney James W. Chapman Jr. and Karen Kelley, assistant chief of the Department of Justice’s tax division, are prosecuting the case together.
In a brief, Chapman wrote that Messier “joined forces with David E. Robinson … who was active with various anti-tax and sovereign citizen groups,” and together the two urged Messier’s customers to stop notifying the IRS that they had paid him rent, told his customers he was tax exempt, and told customers to ignore notices of levy sent by the IRS.
But Messier’s Houston-based attorney, Michael Louis Minns, argued in court filings that Messier suffers from “chronic delusional disorder,” among other ailments, and did not file the tax returns because he does not believe he is required to do so.
“His strongly held beliefs are not subject to rational analysis but are delusional,” Minns wrote. “He also has a strong faith-based desire to follow the law, which prohibits him from intentionally violating the law. For nearly 20 years he has been obsessed with figuring this out … The sincerity of Messier’s beliefs is what is on trial; the legality of those beliefs is not.”
In August, Robinson told the Bangor Daily News, among other things, that birth certificates are “fictional documents.” He subsequently filed more than a dozen complaints and notices to the court in the fall of 2014, quoting at length from anti-tax rhetoric.
Messier faces up to 13 years in prison and fines totalling $1 million if convicted on all counts.
Robinson faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and three years supervised release.