Tom Girardi was on a first-name foundation with senators from California to North Carolina.
The governor was on pace dial. And legions of state and native officers lined up for his boozy events in Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and elsewhere.
But in few locations did the once-legendary plaintiff’s lawyer wield as a lot energy because the courtrooms within the coronary heart of Los Angeles, the place he swayed juries together with his honey-smooth voice and untold judges attributed their appointments to the bench — at the very least partly — to Girardi’s blessing.
On Tuesday, a type of downtown federal courtrooms was the positioning of the newest low level in Girardi’s lengthy descent from authorized titan to disgraced and bankrupt ex-attorney as jurors had been sworn in and his felony trial started.
Girardi stands accused of 4 counts of wire fraud for allegedly looting $15 million from purchasers over a decade.
With the 85-year-old sitting quietly in a blue sweater and grey plaid blazer subsequent to his protection staff, Assistant U.S. Atty. Scott Paetty stated Girardi “lied to his purchasers, stole from them, violated their belief, broke the legislation.”
These purchasers had all turned to him in moments of tragedy — a burn sufferer, a widow whose husband died in a tragic boating incident, a girl injured by a medical machine, and one other lady harmed in an auto accident — and he received them settlements. The prosecutor stated the issue stemmed from how he dealt with the cash.
“By mendacity and stealing tens of millions upon tens of millions of their settlement {dollars}, the defendant repeatedly selected himself,” Paetty stated.
“That cash didn’t belong to the defendant,” he stated. “It belonged to the sufferer purchasers, and it ought to be promptly paid to the sufferer purchasers.” The prosecutor tautly detailed how cash belonging to a lawyer’s shopper should stay safeguarded in a particular checking account.
“He handled that shopper belief account like a private piggy financial institution,” Paetty stated.
Two personal jets. Jewellery. Nation membership charges. A mansion in Pasadena and a house in Palm Springs. Paetty stated that the funds pocketed from purchasers underwrote an exorbitant way of life and that an extra $20 million from the agency’s checking account went to the leisure profession of his now-estranged spouse, Erika Girardi, star of “Actual Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
However Girardi’s protection staff dismissed the prosecutor’s account as a fictional Hollywood plotline that inaccurately solid its shopper because the villain. Samuel Cross, deputy federal public defender, invited the 5 girls and 7 males on the jury to see Girardi as a once-mighty lawyer whose later years had been marred by progressive dementia, disorganization at his legislation agency, Girardi Keese, and a large-scale theft by the agency’s chief monetary officer, Christopher Kamon.
In essence, it was Girardi who was being defrauded, Cross asserted.
Kamon quietly pocketed greater than $50 million from his boss by quite a lot of transactions — checks to sham corporations, funds to pleasant distributors, $23 million in American Categorical card expenses, the protection lawyer stated.
Consequently, Girardi needed to pour $80 million of his personal cash into Girardi Keese.
“He’s attempting to maintain this agency afloat,” Cross instructed jurors. “Why is the agency sinking? As a result of Chris Kamon is stealing cash.”
Cross returned repeatedly to the complexity of the legislation agency’s operations from 2010 to 2020, the interval on the middle of the case.
In that point, greater than $1 billion flowed by Girardi Keese in 300,000 transactions throughout 175 financial institution accounts. Because the particular person overseeing the books, Kamon held distinctive energy to regularly siphon off cash to pay his girlfriend $20,000 per thirty days and purchase properties in L.A. and, later, the Bahamas.
“This boring element is how Chris Kamon makes the theft occur,” Cross added.
Prosecutors have additionally charged Kamon with wire fraud and individually charged him with participating in a “facet fraud” wherein he diverted tens of millions of {dollars} from the agency. He’s pleaded not responsible in each instances and is scheduled to be tried subsequent 12 months. Each males face one other trial in 2025 in Chicago on expenses that they stole payouts made by Boeing to households whose family members died in an Indonesian airplane crash.
Prosecutors have lengthy anticipated Girardi to push blame onto Kamon.
In his opening assertion, Paetty instructed jurors that the quantity allegedly stolen by Kamon was “a fraction” of the quantity Girardi is accused of taking and that, regardless, it was Girardi — not Kamon — who was mendacity to purchasers.
By means of instance, Paetty performed jurors a voicemail from about 2020 wherein Girardi tells one in all his purchasers, Josefina Hernandez, that her settlement cost was delayed due to a courtroom order.
“I don’t need you upset,” he instructed Hernandez within the recording. “I do know you’re and I don’t blame you.”
Paetty instructed jurors that “there have been no extra orders that wanted to be signed.”
“These had been lies — his lies — and Josefina Hernandez by no means noticed a penny of her settlement,” he stated, promising jurors they might hear different voicemails, and look at emails and letters that he stated additional present Girardi’s position in defrauding purchasers.
“It is possible for you to to see for yourselves how a lot the defendant knew about his purchasers’ instances,” Paetty stated.
For the reason that collapse of Girardi’s agency in late 2020, his attorneys have asserted he’s within the grip of cognitive decline, and that continued Tuesday. Cross stated witnesses all through the trial would testify that Girardi’s private hygiene had passed by the wayside, that the lawyer made well-known by the movie “Erin Brockovich” had stopped recognizing folks he’d recognized for years, that he would reread the identical emails a number of occasions and repeat himself in dialog.
The psychological decline, Cross stated, occurred over the last decade at concern within the case however accelerated after a 2017 automobile accident. By 2020, Girardi Keese had devolved into chaos, and even Girardi fell sufferer to “a weird elder abuse scheme” by an unnamed particular person wherein he thought he was working as a secret authorities lawyer, the protection claimed.
“Tom is not only dropping a step,” Cross stated. “He’s falling off a cliff.”
