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Paralegal accused of stealing from law firm
Headline Topics |
2011/07/20 09:24
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Authorities say a South Florida paralegal stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from her Fort Lauderdale law firm.
Miami-Dade officials on Tuesday charged 53-year-old Brenda Wilcott-Kelly with more than 80 felonies, including grand theft and forging documents. Records show she's also took money from a lawyer who was on his deathbed.
Employees of Hermelee amp; Geffin were in court Tuesday as Judge Dennis Murphy set Wilcott-Kelly's bond at $116,000.
Defense attorney Morgan Cronin said his client is innocent.
According to the arrest affidavit, Wilcott-Kelly took $82,472 from the firm to pay off her husband's credit cards. She is also accused of stealing $31,050 from lawyer Steven A. Schultz, while he was in the hospital. Schultz leased space from the firm. |
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Fresno DA charges woman after deadly bus crash
Court Watch News |
2011/07/20 09:24
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A woman accused of providing alcohol to a teenage driver who caused a deadly Greyhound bus crash has been charged with a misdemeanor, officials said Tuesday.
Michelle Kay Cole, 22, was charged with purchasing an alcoholic beverage for a person under 21 resulting in death, Fresno County District Attorney Elizabeth Egan said at a news conference.
Cole was cited Monday but not arrested, Egan said. She could face up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine if convicted.
A California Highway Patrol report placed sole blame for the crash on 18-year-old Sylvia Garay. Investigators said she was drunk when her SUV hit a concrete barrier and overturned on Highway 99 on July 22, 2010.
The oncoming bus, carrying 31 passengers on a route from Los Angeles to Sacramento, struck the SUV, skidded into a concrete center divider, then tumbled down a 15-foot embankment and plowed into a eucalyptus tree shortly after 2 a.m. a few miles from downtown Fresno.
Garay, her two passengers and three people on the bus were killed. Authorities say Garay had a blood alcohol level of .11 when she died. The legal limit is .08.
The CHP report said the bus driver had no way to avoid the SUV, which was left without lights when it overturned. |
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Ex-CEO convicted in scam at auto-chemical company
Court Watch News |
2011/07/20 09:23
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A former corporate executive officer of a New York-based automotive-chemical company was convicted Tuesday in a multimillion-dollar investor fraud scheme that enabled him to buy expensive jewelry and take private jets.
A jury in Manhattan state Supreme Court found Cleveland lawyer James Margulies guilty of charges including grand larceny and scheme to defraud. He faces up to 25 years on the top two counts, which could run consecutively. Bail was set at $1.5 million.
Ira London, an attorney for Margulies, said he planned to file a very vigorous appeal.
The jury has spoken. I believe they have convicted an innocent man, he said.
While serving as the company's finance chief — and briefly as CEO — of Industrial Enterprises of America, Inc., from 2004 to 2008, Margulies illegally issued millions of shares of stock to friends and relatives, inflating the share price by making the company look more profitable than it was, prosecutors said.
A teachers' pension fund in Ohio and a church were among the victims of the scheme, prosecutors said.
Margulies personally reaped more than $7 million, spending it on lavish luxuries such as a $350,000 diamond ring for his wife from jeweler Harry Winston, prosecutors said.
He also paid more than a million dollars on the mortgage of his first home, bought a second home and spent $500,000 on a vacation club membership, prosecutors said.
Margulies was charged in the scheme in 2010 along with John D. Mazzuto, who pleaded guilty Jan. 14 to his role in issuing fraudulent shares of stock. |
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Challenge to visa lottery dismissed by judge
Headline Topics |
2011/07/15 22:20
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In a blow to thousands of hopeful would-be immigrants who had been told they'd won a chance to apply for a green card, a federal judge ruled that the State Department can toss out the results of its May visa lottery, which were deemed invalid because of a computer error.
The State Department said the results of a fresh drawing would be available Friday.
Members of the group had been seeking class action status in their bid to stop the government from nullifying their selection in the visa lottery.
In early May, about 22,000 people were notified they had won a chance to apply for a visa as part of the Diversity Visa Lottery Program, which is aimed at increasing the number of immigrants from the developing world and countries with historically low rates of emigration to the U.S.
One of them, 42-year-old French native Armande Gil, who lives in Florida, called Thursday's decision by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson another disappointment. |
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Soldiers seek foreclosures class action
Headline Topics |
2011/07/14 22:21
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Lawyers said they hope to get class action certification in New York for an increasing number of active-duty U.S. soldiers fighting mortgage foreclosures.
A federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in New York alleges CitiMortgage should have done a quick Internet check before foreclosing on the home of Army Sgt. Jorge Rodriguez of Del Valle, Texas, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Thursday.
In 2003, Rodriguez purchased a home with a mortgage eventually sold to CitiMortgage. He was deployed in 2006, and while he was in training at Fort Hood, Texas, the mortgage company sold his home in a foreclosure sale, the newspaper said.
Rodriguez was sent to Iraq and was on active duty until August 2007.
The federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act prohibits the foreclosure sale of an active-duty soldier's home without a highly detailed court order. Lenders can access a certain Web site to learn whether a soldier is on active duty, the newspaper said.
It's just an issue that we have seen percolating throughout the country, said Gary Lynch of Sewickley, Pa., an attorney for the plaintiffs. Major lenders operated on perhaps what might be a fundamental misunderstanding of the requirements of the statute.
The complaint indicates CitiMortgage may have initiated thousands of foreclosure proceedings ... without adequate safeguards to ensure that service members on active duty were not targeted. |
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Anthony lawyer rises from obscurity to legal fame
Legal Business |
2011/07/12 09:25
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Three years ago, Jose Baez's name was barely a blip in the legal community.
This was a lawyer who made his way to the profession after dropping out of high school, getting a GED and going into the Navy. He tried several failed businesses — including two bikini companies — before he eventually enrolled at Florida State University and St. Thomas University School of Law. It took another eight years for him to be admitted to the bar.
Now he's arguably one of the most recognizable attorneys in the country after his client Casey Anthony was acquitted in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, in a case marked by a captivated national audience and searing scrutiny of every legal twist.
For the last three years since, Baez faced questions from other attorneys and TV commentators about his lack of criminal law experience and tactics. Now he's a legal celebrity almost certain to be offered interviews, book offers and possibly movie deals that could bring hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I think this is obviously life-altering for Jose Baez, said Terry Lenamon, a former member of Anthony's defense team, who left the case in 2008 after a disagreement over strategy.
Baez, 42, took Anthony's case pro bono in 2008, after getting a referral from a former client who shared a cell with Anthony following her initial arrest. He has handled the case since then, operating on state funds available to Anthony because of her indigent status, and from an early $200,000 she received from licensing photos and videos to ABC News. |
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Biesecker named to NC investigations, court beats
Industry News |
2011/07/12 09:24
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Michael Biesecker, an award-winning reporter and investigative journalist for The News amp; Observer of Raleigh, has been hired by The Associated Press to cover federal courts, investigations and politics in North Carolina.
Biesecker is a North Carolina native and has spent his 15-year-career in his home state. He worked at the Winston-Salem Journal in a variety of positions including as a columnist and reporter before going to work for The News amp; Observer in 2003. He has covered the state capital for the newspaper since 2009.
His work probing the failings of North Carolina's mental health care system in 2008 uncovered more than 80 questionable deaths in state mental hospitals. The newspaper's series Mental Disorder: The Failure of Reform led to new policies on how state facilities report deaths and monitor care. He has won numerous awards from the North Carolina Press Association, including for general news and for investigative reporting. In 2008, he was part of a team that won an Associated Press Managing Editors Association First Amendment Award for reporting on access to email written by public officials.
The appointment was announced Monday by South Editor Lisa Marie Pane, Chief of Bureau Michelle Williams and Carolinas News Editor Evan Berland.
Biesecker has some serious reporting chops and we're looking forward to his using those to cover the vitally important federal courts beat and being involved in some important investigative projects, Pane said. |
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