Rhode Island State Cops Probe Allegations Of Lawyers w/ Sticky Fingers; Bag Two Suspected Of Swiping Client Cash, At Least Seven Others In Crosshairs

In Providence, Rhode Island, The Providence Journal reports:

• Disbarred lawyer Robert D. Natal has been arrested by the police and charged with 11 felony counts for misappropriating $1,136,013 from real-estate transactions.(1) He is the second disbarred lawyer within a week to be charged with misappropriating clients’ money.

• Todd M. Amaral, a correctional officer at the Adult Correctional Institutions who lost his license to practice law last October, was charged on Jan. 16 with two counts of unlawful appropriation and two counts of forgery. The total in his case was just over $50,000. According to the Supreme Court’s disciplinary counsel, David D. Curtin, Amaral eventually repaid the money owed to the clients, but not until Curtin’s office began investigating the alleged thefts.

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• Lt. John Lemont, head of the Financial Crimes Unit of the state police, said Monday that there are at least seven other attorneys under investigation for theft of client money, ranging in amounts of $60,000 to $300,000, but that the cases often take a long time to probe because of all the paperwork involved.(2)

For more, see State police: Ex-lawyer took clients’ money.

(1) According to the story, the criminal charges against Natal, who owned Security Title and Escrow Co. Inc., allege that he received funds from real estate closings and failed to remit them to the sellers or to pay off mortgages, taxes, sewer fees and title insurance premiums. They also allege that in one case involving a client he had worked with for nine years, he pocketed a $24,900 deposit for a piece of real estate the client wanted to buy. In another case, he allegedly bounced a $286,076 check to an estate. Reportedly, Natal was so strapped for cash that he hit up his mother-in-law for a $185,000 loan to him and his wife, the proceeds of which were obtained from a reverse mortgage on the mother-in-law's home.

(2) Could it be that the "giant sucking sound" I'm starting to hear is the money draining out of the Lawyers' Funds For Client Protection maintained by the state bar associations across the country? As I've noted on numerous occasions, these funds have been established to reimburse clients who have suffered a loss due to the dishonest conduct of an attorney. The sums of client money that a number of attorneys around the country are allegedly ripping off must have the officials at the state bar associations administering these funds "running around with their hair on fire." In one recent post, I noted a recent story in which the senior counsel for the State Bar of California's Client Security Fund commented that the glut of discipline cases involving loan modification ripoffs committed by California attorneys is "really sort of impacting the bar and the fund specifically." See Calif. State Bar Probers Have Hands Full With Loan Mod Ripoff Complaints; 1200 Probes Pending; Attorney Scams Begin To Drain Client Security Fund.