Jacob “Jake” Smith, who earlier admitted providing “muscle” to the criminal organization controlled by his former boss, Michael J. Miske Jr., is scheduled to appear before Federal Judge Derrick K. Watson via Zoom on Wednesday morning for sentencing.
Smith, 31, was one of the key witnesses against Miske during his nearly 6-month long trial which ended in Miske’s conviction on 13 federal charges, including several that call for mandatory life sentences. Smith spent four days on the witness stand describing what he saw during several years as a close Miske associate.
He is the first of the main witnesses to be sentenced.
Smith was moved from Honolulu’s Federal Detention Center to an undisclosed location on August 9 after he was beaten several times in apparent retaliation for his testimony against Miske.
He pleaded guilty in November 2020 to racketeering conspiracy and drug trafficking, which carries a minimum 10-year sentence.
Smith graduated from the Kailua Christian Academy in 2011. In February 2012, he took part in an attempted burglary, and later that year was charged with a Class B felony for his part in the crime. He agreed to plead “no contest” to the charge and was granted a deferred acceptance of the plea, allowing him to clear his record if he stayed out of trouble. He was jailed briefly in 2015 after violating the terms of his release.
When he got out of OCCC, he started hanging around with John Stancil, Miske’s younger half-brother. Stancil then introduced him to Wayne Miller, a longtime associate of Miske’s who had finished a long sentence for armed robbery the prior year.
“He would give me money, pay for my hotels, pay for my food and stuff, after I went to jail the first time,” Smith testified during Miske’s trial.
Eventually, Stancil and Miller introduced Smith to Mike Miske, and over the next two years Smith was involved in a number of armed robberies, assaults that involved extortion, murder for hire conspiracies, and drug deals, as part of Miske’s racketeering enterprise.
He was arrested on drug trafficking charges in mid-2018, and began cooperating with federal authorities on the same day.
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Wonder if he’s going to be relocated off island for jail and if so, if he’ll ever return? This is a small town and if you have the label “snitch” for such a big case, you will have a bulls eye on your back for the rest of your days.
No sympathy for these guys. Choices were made and people suffered because of them.
In Miske’s case, there were about 20 defendants who accepted plea deals with prosecutors, and most of those agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. They were snitches, to use your term, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to allow Miske’s perspective to define them. After all, Smith and the others did the public a great service by agreeing to tell the truth, making it possible to hold Miske accountable.
Yeah, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for them either. You said it exactly — bad choices. When reading Ian’s prior article “A job with benefits: Food, drinks, and protection” I was struck by how little Miske’s people were willing to settle for in exchange for the awful things asked of them. I can’t imagine that it was just the material comforts. Miske clearly is a master manipulator and knew exactly which buttons to push to get what he wanted. Once they were out of his reach, he no longer could do so. In the end telling the truth is the right thing to do, so with the exception of the hard-core criminals there is hope that the rest may yet redeem their lives.
We don’t have a federal prison here, only the detention center. So Smith will serve his time on the mainland.
You really think everything these snitches told are the truth???
I got some gold….