Lawyers for billionaire arrested at Las Vegas hotel want drug case dismissed

Attorneys for a California tech billionaire and his co-defendant want a felony Las Vegas drug case against them dismissed, arguing in documents filed Wednesday that prosecutors can’t prove ownership of luggage in which police reported finding heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and several psychedelic substances.

Broadcom Corp. co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III’s lawyers and an attorney representing Ashley Christine Fargo told a judge ahead of a scheduled July 31 evidence hearing that all seven drug trafficking and possession charges should be thrown out.

Nicholas also is primary backer of nationwide “Marsy’s Law” crime victim rights campaigns.

He and Fargo are denying they owned the drugs found last August in cases in their room at the Encore resort.

“No forensic evidence has been produced tying any of the contraband to either defendant,” attorneys said in the filing. They declined requests for comment.

The document does not address hotel video that a police report says showed a man and a woman who appeared to be Nicholas and Fargo each carrying a black hard-sided “Pelican case” about an hour before Fargo was found unconscious in the room.

Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson and the prosecutor in the case, Brad Turner, did not immediately respond to messages.

The court filing argues that people came and went for several days from the hotel room where Fargo checked in a several days ahead of Nicholas.

It points to state and federal court rulings that “mere proximity to contraband, presence on property where it is found, and association with a person or persons having control of it” are not sufficient to prove possession.

Police said Nicholas identified a gas canister in the room as nitrous oxide “for recreational use,” and Fargo was found “unresponsive with a semi-deflated balloon in her mouth.” The arresting officer suggested the balloon could have been used to inhale the gas, commonly known as laughing gas. Possession of nitrous oxide is not illegal.

Fargo’s attorney, David Brown, has contended that Fargo was asleep, not unconscious, and woke after hotel security broke through the latched hotel room door.

Nicholas, 60, lives in Newport Coast, California. He retired in 2003 from Broadcom, a publicly traded Fortune 500 computer software, semiconductor and infrastructure company. In 2008, he was indicted in California on federal securities fraud and drug charges that were later dismissed.

Nicholas’s attorneys, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, point to Nicholas’ philanthropy and his backing for a California victim rights measure named for his sister, Marsalee “Marsy” Nicholas, who was stalked and killed by an ex-boyfriend in the 1980s.

Voters in Nevada passed a Marsy’s Law initiative last year to expand the definition of a victim and provide rights including privacy, protection from a defendant, notice of court and parole hearings and “full and timely restitution.”