Medina's niece and nephew have pleaded not guilty to helping Medina set up sham companies to help funnel casino revenue into Medina's personal holdings.

Colma's former mayor was sentenced to 18 months in prison in July after pleading guilty to accepting airline tickets from Medina while the casino had business pending before him.

The Marchellettas own Circle Industries, a multi-million dollar international commercial construction firm based in Alpharetta. Circle worked on various prominent jobs, including the construction of the Olympic Village in downtown Atlanta in 1996 and the Atlantis hotel and casino on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Kottwitz served as the bookkeeper of the firm during the relevant period.

Testimony and other documents presented during trial revealed the Marchellettas spent millions in company money for their own personal benefit. The biggest items were two luxury estates built by the owners, each of which cost Circle more than $1 million.

The Marchellettas also caused Circle to pay more than $10,000 for each of the following personal items: luxury custom clothing, trips to the now-defunct Gold Club, a rental apartment in Alpharetta and landscaping costs at a house one of them kept in New York. None of these personal payments were recorded on Circle's books as income or loans to the Marchellettas, or as having anything to do with them personally. Instead, with the assistance of Kottwitz, the expenses were falsely booked as job-related or other business expenses.

The jury found Marchelletta Sr. and Jr. guilty of one count each of willfully subscribing to a false personal tax return, and all defendants guilty of assisting in the filing of a false corporate return and of conspiracy to commit these crimes.

"This was a case of pure greed, in which the defendants tried to defraud the United States Treasury of over $1 million," said U.S. Attorney David E. Nahmias. "The Marchellettas, assisted by their former bookkeeper, Kottwitz, skimmed millions out of their company tax-free to pay for their own mansions and other personal expenses, disguising those blatant personal expenditures on the company tax returns as business expenses. Today the jury held them accountable for their lies, deception and bogus accounting."

Francis, though, upheld a separate law the Legislature passed as a part of a two-pronged effort to cut property taxes.

The law, which does not need voter approval, requires cities and counties, but not school districts, to roll back and cap taxes for all types of property.

The proposed amendment was touted as offering even greater tax reductions -- almost entirely to homeowners -- through a "super exemption," and would have affected all local governments including school districts.

Gov. Charlie Crist and legislative leaders issued statements saying their efforts to cut taxes are not over. No decision, though, yet has been made on whether the ruling will be appealed, said Jill Chamberlin, spokeswoman for House Speaker Marco Rubio.

Besides appealing, the options include rewriting the ballot summary to meet the judge's objections or deferring the issue to the constitutional Taxation and Budget Reform Commission.

A suburban South Florida mayor who challenged both measures said he hoped lawmakers will leave it to the commission, which can make recommendations to the Legislature and put amendments directly on the November 2008 ballot.

"I'm hoping that they will look at this as an opportunity to fix something," said Weston Mayor Eric Hersh. "Hopefully that's the tactic they will take instead of looking at this as a defeat."

Hersh said he has not yet decided whether to appeal the tax rollback decision. He said he would be more inclined to do so, though, if the state appeals the amendment ruling.

"Not only was it misleading, but it was terrible legislation," Hersh said.

The Republican-controlled Legislature approved both tax-cutting measures during as special session in June. The law passed with bipartisan support, but Democrats opposed the amendment.

That proposal is designed to eventually get rid of the existing Save Our Homes Amendment, which limits assessment increases on primary homes, known as homesteads, to no more than 3 percent a year.

While it protected existing homesteaders, it shifted tax burden to new buyers and owners of other properties including second homes and businesses. Rapidly rising real estate values in recent years made the discrepancy even greater leading to an outcry for tax cuts.

The amendment would have offered homesteaders the one-time choice of keeping their existing benefits or accepting the super exemption -- 75 percent off first $200,000 of a home's value and 15 percent off the next $300,000.

Save Our Homes benefits, though, cannot be transferred to new owners, so they eventually would disappear as those properties change hands.

The ballot summary, though, refers to "preserving application of Save Our Homes provision."

"The summary is just not correct," Francis wrote. Nowhere in the ballot summary is the voter alerted to the elimination of these constitutional protections on homestead assessments. They are simply led to believe that they are preserved or revised."

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said that in 2004 the IRS received about 3.8 million miscellaneous income statements reporting some $150 billion in earnings that could not be computer-matched to a filed tax return because of missing or erroneous ID numbers.

The inspector general's office, which does oversight of the tax agency, looked at a sampling of these mismatched IDs and calculated that some 6,000 of these individuals had not filed 2004 tax returns despite having income statements indicating they earned more than $100,000. That translates into some $630 million in income, it said.

Much of the income involved compensation for nonemployees such as independent contractors reported on unusable miscellaneous income statements.

The office said that it looked at 620 income and wage statements with mismatched names and ID numbers reporting more than $60,000 in earnings. Using IRS automated data systems, it was able to manually match half of those to taxpayer accounts in IRS records.

It urged that Congress pass legislation, backed by the administration, that would require employers to verify the accuracy of ID numbers for the employees they hire. The office also recommended that the IRS do more to investigate high-dollar miscellaneous income and wage statements with mismatched names and IDs.

The IRS, in response, said it supported the legislation but concluded that the cost of manually tracking down mismatched names and IDs might exceed that of the benefits.

"The IRS's opposition to this recommendation is confounding," said Inspector General J. Russell George, adding that their audit showed that increased examination of statements would more than pay for itself in increased revenue.

Instead, the Atwoods' home was sold at a sheriff's auction in 1997 to American Land Investments because of the delinquent bill. The couple have won several court challenges since then and hope to withstand one more appeal over the property.

The State Tax Commission eventually nullified the 1997 sale, but when the Atwoods tried to sell the house in 2002, they discovered that American Land Investments had sold the property rights to Jamie Land Co., which then sued the Atwoods.

James A. Lindsay II, the company's president, said his rights were violated when the tax commission didn't inform him of its decision.

Without a clear title, the couple couldn't sell the house. Then in 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck. Dolores Atwood said they didn't have insurance, and because of the title, they didn't qualify for federal rebuilding help.

"I don't know how much more I can endure," said Atwood, 69, who lives in a FEMA trailer in front of the still-damaged home north of Slidell. Her husband, 71 and on a respirator, lives with relatives. She said the couple had been through "seven years of emotional hell."

In May 2006, a judge ruled that the property title belongs to the Atwoods. Last month, a state appeals court panel upheld the decision. Jamie Land asked the court to rehear the case, but that request was denied last week.

Now, the company plans to ask the Louisiana Supreme Court to take up the case. Lindsay said he doesn't want the Atwoods to suffer, but "I have rights too," adding that the commission gave him no notice when it annulled the tax sale.

"I don't owe him 50 cents," Delores Atwood said, "not with what he's put me through."