Amazon ends its six-year legal fight with former AWS managers over alleged data center kickbacks

Two former Amazon real estate managers acknowledged receiving personal payments tied to data center deals they handled for the company, under a settlement that resolves the company’s claims against them in a six-year lawsuit.

Carl Nelson and Casey Kirschner “regret their actions, apologize for failing to meet Amazon’s high ethical standards, and are glad this matter has been resolved,” according to a joint statement that the parties agreed to as part of the settlement.

The payments “violated Amazon’s Code of Conduct & Ethics, broke the trust Amazon places in its employees, and put Amazon’s reputation at risk in the communities it serves,” says the statement, which Amazon provided Friday evening in response to GeekWire’s inquiry.

The statement doesn’t call the payments kickbacks or say they were illegal. Nelson was investigated by the FBI but never charged, and a federal judge ruled in 2023 that Amazon’s Code of Conduct wasn’t a legally enforceable contract. The other terms of the settlement are confidential, including whether any money changed hands.

Before the settlement, Nelson had maintained that he abided by the terms of his Amazon employment agreement, which his attorneys said gave him broad leeway to do outside business.

Rodney Atherton, a Colorado attorney who set up business entities for the two men, also settled and “regrets the role he played in the conduct at issue in this case,” according to the statement.

The settlement closes a long legal ordeal for Nelson’s family. His wife, Amy Nelson, the former Seattle entrepreneur who founded The Riveter, a network of co-working spaces for women, has been his most outspoken advocate, defending him for years on social media and in interviews and criticizing Amazon and the Justice Department for pursuing him.

“All disputes with my husband’s former employer have been resolved,” she said in a short video posted Friday on social media.

The case upended the family’s life. The FBI seized $892,135 from the Nelsons’ bank accounts in 2020, including hundreds of thousands of dollars Amy Nelson earned as CEO of The Riveter.

The government returned most of it in a 2022 settlement. By then, the Nelsons had sold their West Seattle home and emptied their retirement accounts to pay lawyers, and they had moved with their four daughters to Hawaii and then Ohio, where Amy’s parents live. The family had spent more than $3 million on legal fees, she told KIRO 7 in 2023.

“Many of the things that we lost over the past four years, we can never get back. We can never get our home back. We can never get our jobs back. We can never get our reputation back,” she told The Seattle Times in 2024, after federal prosecutors moved to drop the related criminal cases.

Amazon told the judge on Oct. 20 that it had reached the settlement, less than two weeks before the case was set to go to trial in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., according to court filings.

The case continues against the remaining defendants, Brian Watson and his Denver-based real estate firm, Northstar Commercial Partners, which Amazon hired for nine data center development projects in Northern Virginia between 2018 and 2020. Amazon alleges that Northstar won that business by paying kickbacks to Nelson and Kirschner, which Watson denies.

Watson and Northstar are headed to trial Nov. 2. In a filing Friday, they asked the judge to make Amazon hand over the settlement agreement so they can see its terms.

The settlement follows years of rulings that went both ways. In April 2023, a federal judge dismissed most of Amazon’s claims, including its breach of contract claims against Nelson and Kirschner. In September 2025, a federal appeals court revived several of the claims, including racketeering and fraud, and sent the case back for trial.

In January 2024, federal prosecutors moved to vacate the guilty pleas of two other men in the case, Kirschner’s brother, Christian Kirschner, and former Northstar account manager Kyle Ramstetter, calling prosecution “not in the best interests of justice.”

Prosecutors added that they had declined to prosecute the other alleged co-conspirators, including Nelson.