Tom Girardi is on a first-name basis with senators from California to North Carolina.
The governor is on speed dial. Thousands of state and local officials lined up to attend his boozy parties in Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and elsewhere.
Yet there are few places where the once-legendary plaintiffs’ lawyer wields as much power as in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom, where he swayed juries with his honey-smooth voice and countless judges turned their The appointment is attributed—at least in part—to the judge.
As jurors were sworn in and Girardi’s criminal trial began on Tuesday, a downtown federal courtroom became the site of the latest low point in Girardi’s descent from legal titan to disgraced, bankrupt former attorney.
Girardi was charged with four counts of wire fraud for allegedly plundering $15 million from clients over 10 years.
The 85-year-old, wearing a blue sweater and gray plaid blazer, sat quietly next to an assistant U.S. attorney on his defense team. Scott Petty said Girardi “lied to his clients, stole from them, violated their trust and violated the law.”
These clients all turn to him for help in times of tragedy—a burn victim, a widow whose husband was killed in a tragic boating accident, a woman injured by a medical device, and another injured in a car accident— —He won reconciliation for them. Prosecutors said the problem stemmed from how he handled the money.
“By lying and stealing millions of dollars in settlements, the defendants repeatedly chose themselves,” Petty said.
“The money does not belong to the defendant,” he said. “The money belongs to the victimized client and should be promptly paid to the victimized client.” Prosecutors scathingly detailed how attorney-client funds must be kept in special bank accounts.
“He treated his client trust accounts like a personal piggy bank,” Petty said.
Two private jets. jewelry. Country Club Fees. a mansion in Pasadena and a home in Palm Springs. Petty said funds collected from clients supported a lavish lifestyle, with another $20 million in the company’s bank account used for the entertainment career of his now-estranged wife, Erika Girardi, Erica Girardi is the star of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
But Girardi’s defense team dismissed prosecutors’ claims as a fictional Hollywood plot that falsely cast their client as a villain. Deputy Federal Public Defender Samuel Cross asked the five women and seven men on the jury to remember Girardi as a once-great lawyer who, in his later years, suffered from progressive dementia, Girardi’s The disorganization of Dickies Law Firm and the massive theft of Christopher Kamon, the firm’s chief financial officer.
Cross asserted that, in essence, Girardi was defrauded.
Defense attorneys say Carmon quietly defrauded his bosses of more than $50 million through a variety of transactions — paying checks to fake companies, paying friendly vendors and charging $23 million in fees to American Express cards.
As a result, Girardi had to inject $80 million of his own money into Girardi Keese.
“He was trying to keep this company afloat,” Cross told jurors. “Why did the company sink? Because Chris Carmon was stealing money.
Cross repeatedly reviewed the complexities of the law firm’s operations from 2010 to 2020, the period at the heart of the case.
During this period, Girardi Keese’s 175 bank accounts conducted 300,000 transactions totaling more than $1 billion. As overseer of the books, Carmon had unique authority to gradually divert funds to pay his girlfriend $20,000 a month and buy homes in Los Angeles and later the Bahamas.
“This boring detail is why Chris Carmon committed the burglary,” Cross added.
Prosecutors also charged Carmon with wire fraud and separately charged him with engaging in “collateral fraud” that embezzled millions of dollars from the company. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases and is scheduled to stand trial next year. The pair are due to face another trial in Chicago in 2025 on charges they stole payments from Boeing to families whose loved ones were killed in an Indonesian plane crash.
Prosecutors have long expected Girardi to pin the blame on Carmon.
Petty told jurors in opening statements that the amount Carmon allegedly stole was a “small fraction” of what Girardi is accused of taking, and that in any case, it was Girardi — not Carmon — who was responsible for The customer lied.
For example, Patty played jurors a voicemail from around 2020 in which Girardi told one of his clients, Josefina Hernandez, that her Settlement payments were delayed.
“I don’t want to make you sad,” he told Hernandez in the recording. “I know you are like this, and I don’t blame you.”
“There are no more orders to sign,” Petty told jurors.
“These were lies — his lies — and Josefina Hernandez never saw a penny of her settlement,” he said, promising jurors they would hear other voicemails and review of emails and letters that he said further showed Girardi’s role in defrauding customers.
“You’ll be able to see firsthand how much the defendant knows about his client’s case,” Petty said.
Since Girardi’s company collapsed in late 2020, his attorneys claim he has suffered cognitive decline, which continued Tuesday. Cross said witnesses throughout the trial would testify that Girardi’s personal hygiene had fallen by the wayside and that the lawyer, best known for her role in the movie “Erin Brockovich,” no longer recognized him. For years, he would reread the same emails multiple times and repeat himself in conversations.
Cross said the mental decline occurred within the decade involved in the case but accelerated after a car accident in 2017. The defense claims that by 2020, Girardi Keese was in turmoil and even Girardi became the victim of a “bizarre elder abuse scheme” by an unnamed person, who he believes He is a secret government lawyer himself.
“Tom didn’t just lose a step,” Cross said. “He fell off a cliff.”
