## Facts

- Electrical contractors competed for industrial electrical construction projects where only firms on a facility’s pre-approved bidders’ list could bid.
- In 1983, Sargent was prosecuted and convicted for bid rigging at U.S. Steel’s Western Pennsylvania Works and was fined $1 million.
- Pangborne and its executive vice-president, J.A. Bruce Pinney, previously entered nolo contendere pleas in a separate bid-rigging case involving a Gulf Oil refinery in Philadelphia.
- On July 19, 1984, a grand jury indicted Sargent, Lord, Pangborne, and Pinney for conspiring to rig bids for electrical construction work at U.S. Steel’s Fairless Hills Works, alleging job allocation and collusive bidding in violation of Sherman Act § 1.
- Defendants moved to dismiss the Fairless Hills indictment, arguing the Western Works, Fairless Hills, and Gulf refinery conduct constituted one overarching conspiracy, making the new prosecution barred by the Fifth Amendment Double Jeopardy Clause.
- After an evidentiary hearing, the district court found a single conspiracy to rig bids “whenever possible” and dismissed the indictment; the United States appealed.

## Issues

1. Whether bid-rigging conduct at multiple industrial facilities constituted one overarching Sherman Act conspiracy or separate conspiracies for double-jeopardy purposes.
2. Whether the district court clearly erred in finding a single conspiracy, thereby barring the Fairless Hills indictment under the Double Jeopardy Clause.

## Decision

- The Third Circuit reversed the dismissal and remanded for further proceedings.
- The court held the challenged bid-rigging arrangements were separate conspiracies tied to distinct facility-specific markets, so the Fairless Hills prosecution was not barred by double jeopardy.
- The court concluded the district court’s single-conspiracy finding was clearly erroneous given the structure of the bidding markets, differing bidder lists, and variation in participants and coordination across sites.

## Legal Principles

- For double jeopardy in successive conspiracy prosecutions, the question is whether the government is prosecuting the same offense, assessed by the nature of the agreement(s) rather than a generalized criminal purpose.
- A broad shared aim (e.g., “rig bids whenever possible”) does not, by itself, establish a single conspiracy when the record shows distinct agreements operating in different markets.
- Market structure matters in antitrust conspiracy analysis: facility-controlled, facility-specific bidders’ lists can define separate relevant markets and limit the scope of any agreement to the firms eligible to bid at each site.
- Overlap in participants across schemes is insufficient to merge multiple localized bid-rigging agreements into one conspiracy when the locations, affected bids, and coordination patterns differ.
- On appeal, a district court’s finding of a single conspiracy may be reversed as clearly erroneous when its own factual findings compel the inference of multiple independent agreements.

## Conclusion

The Third Circuit held that bid-rigging schemes tied to separate facility-specific bidding markets were separate Sherman Act conspiracies, so a new indictment for Fairless Hills did not violate the Double Jeopardy Clause despite prior prosecutions involving other facilities.


United States v. Sargent Elec. Co., 785 F.2d 1123 (3d Cir. 1986)