City of New York v. Milhelm Attea & Bros., Inc., et al.

New York City sued a number of cigarette wholesalers for selling untaxed cigarettes to Native American reservation retailers who then re-sold the cigarettes to the public. The court found that two of the wholesalers violated the Contraband Cigarette Trafficking Act (CCTA) and are liable for civil penalties to be determined by the court. The claim against a third wholesaler was dismissed due to insufficient proof of illegal sales of unstamped cigarettes within New York City. On another issue, the court found that the City had failed to prove that the wholesalers intended to harm competition or evade taxes and therefore had not violated the state’s Cigarette Marketing Standards Act. Finally, the court deemed the City’s public nuisance claim to be withdrawn since the City agreed it would withdraw the nuisance claim if it prevailed on one of its other claims. 

City of New York v. Milhelm Attea & Bros., Inc., et al., Slip Copy, 2012 WL 3579568 (E.D.N.Y.).

  • United States
  • Aug 17, 2012
  • US District Court, Eastern District of New York
Download Document

Parties

Plaintiff City of New York

Defendant

  • Capital Candy Company, Inc.
  • Day Wholesale, Inc.
  • Gutlove & Shirvint, Inc.
  • Jacob Kern & Sons, Inc.
  • Mauro Pennisi, Inc.
  • Milhelm Attea & Bros., Inc.
  • Winward Tobacco, Inc.

Legislation Cited

Related Documents

Type of Litigation

Tobacco Control Topics

Substantive Issues

Type of Tobacco Product

None

"Finally, and most concretely, the facts presented in this case make the defendants' protestations ring hollow. The defendants are in essence urging that because there was no prescribed tax collection mechanism for reservation cigarette sales, they had no option but to sell millions upon millions of unstamped cigarettes to retailers on the 375–person Poospatuck reservation—incidentally, at a large profit to themselves. Neither Gutlove nor Pennisi ever made any attempt to control or restrict the volume of unstamped cigarettes they sold to reservation retailers, or even to make inquiry of their customers about cigarette consumption by reservation Native Americans. The defendants' actions were thus materially indistinguishable from selling bulk quantities of unstamped cigarettes directly to members of the public. That the defendants funneled those cigarettes through the enforcement loophole presented by Native American reservation retailers does not insulate them from liability. Although the Court does not foreclose the possibility that there might exist fact patterns that would bar liability in the face of a wholesaler's good faith attempts to comply with its tax obligations under the prior version of § 471, this case does not present such a scenario. Cf. Morrison, 686 F.3d 94, 2012 WL 2877648, at *10 ("To the extent that New York's forbearance policy might be said to create some ambiguity regarding the scope of Native American cigarette retailers' tax liability for on-reservation cigarette sales, Morrison's actions went far beyond the sort of conduct that might be in any area of ambiguity."). The Cayuga court expressly noted that liability under the state tax laws remained for bulk transactions in unstamped cigarettes plainly intended for resale to non-Native Americans. Moreover, Morrison affirmed that the CCTA was an appropriate tool for overcoming New York's particular state-level obstacles to collecting applicable taxes on reservation-based cigarette sales. Morrison, 686 F.3d 94, 2012 WL 2877648, at *11."