Girardi

On New Year’s Eve in 2020, Tom Girardi called me from his cellphone. In a brief voicemail left in The Times’ general mailbox, the once fearsome attorney said there were “slanderous statements” in an article I had co-written.A lawsuit, he said, was coming soon. At another moment, a voicemail like that from Girardi might have elicited caution, even alarm.After all, for much of his career, Girardi was a formidable lawyer whose calling card was the “Erin Brockovich” case. He had won millions for scores of clients, and was on…

A federal judge in Los Angeles has found Tom Girardi competent to stand trial, paving the way for the disgraced former lawyer to go before a jury this year and answer charges that he stole more than $15 million from his clients as part of a long-running fraud scheme at his law firm.The decision was announced Tuesday in a brief notation on the case docket that said U.S. District Judge Josephine L. Staton had filed an “order finding defendant competent to stand trial.” The order was placed under seal until lawyers for both…

Disbarred Los Angeles lawyer Tom Girardi funneled more than $1 million in gifts and payments to an investigator at the State Bar and the investigator’s wife, a USC accounting professor, according to a report released Friday.The long-anticipated report, the result of a year-and-a-half investigation by a law firm working for the State Bar’s governing board, described corruption of the agency by Girardi beyond what was previously known publicly.In addition to the money and gifts he directed to investigator Tom Layton and his…

In the fall of 2016, two influential men in Los Angeles faced money troubles.The head of the L.A. office of the U.S. Secret Service, Lorenzo Robert Savage III, thought he was being shortchanged in a lawsuit over a defective braking system in his family’s Volkswagen minivan.And Tom Girardi, then at the height of his power, was borrowing heavily to fund his law firm and increasingly upset about the size of his wife’s American Express bill.To address their respective problems, Savage and Girardi and their spouses turned to…

Tom Girardi is expected to wake Monday morning in the memory care unit of an Orange County assisted living facility. After breakfast and the medications he has been prescribed for dementia and other ailments, the 83-year-old is to be driven to a downtown Los Angeles courthouse.There, federal prosecutors have said, Girardi will be taken into custody and brought before a magistrate judge who will formally advise him of his indictment on five counts of wire fraud.What will happen next is unclear. Will the man who ruled…

Tom Girardi, the once-vaunted Los Angeles trial attorney, was indicted by federal grand juries in two states on fraud charges amid allegations of swindling millions of dollars from injured and wounded clients, prosecutors announced Wednesday.In Chicago, Girardi and his son-in-law, attorney David Lira, and the former chief financial officer of Girardi’s law firm, Christopher Kamon, were charged with eight counts of wire fraud and four counts of contempt of court. Prosecutors said they misappropriated more than $3 million…

The case was not glamorous, and the clients — 16 homeless people evicted from an encampment — didn’t have money for a retainer, but that was how things went at Chima Anyanwu’s one-man law practice in Koreatown. He agreed to represent the group in 2016, and later that year secured a settlement of $64,000 from the city of South Gate.Anyanwu paid each client what they were owed, even accompanying one desperate woman to a bank branch on a Saturday to help her cash her settlement check, court records show. Then the State Bar…

The head of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office has formally recused himself from the ongoing federal investigation into fraud and corruption by Tom Girardi and others at his now-defunct law firm, an agency spokesperson confirmed Saturday.Donald Alway, assistant director in charge of the L.A. office, sought the recusal from the high-profile investigation after The Times and other news outlets reported that his mother, Michelle Alway, was a former girlfriend and secretary of Girardi. Public records show that she and her…

BALTIMORE —  The chief financial officer of Tom Girardi’s law firm embezzled at least $10 million from firm bank accounts and used stolen funds to renovate his Los Angeles home, purchase a Caribbean mansion and shower an escort with gifts, including a $120,000 purse, a federal prosecutor said in court Thursday.Government lawyers disclosed allegations against former Girardi Keese CFO Christopher Kamon at a detention hearing in U.S. District Court in Maryland. The 49-year-old was arrested on a wire fraud charge filed by…

Hello, it’s Friday, Nov. 4, and first up we’d like to highlight the incredible work on the Los Angeles Times Short Docs platform. The Times’ Nani Walker told us that over the last year she and L.A. Times Studios’ Leslie Lindsey had had the privilege of supporting and elevating the work of a talented and diverse group of emerging filmmakers.“As a programmer and executive producer,” Nani said, “I am proud to say that five of our films qualified for the Academy Awards, and two of our films made it to acclaimed industry Short…