Easton lawyer accused of draining estate, buying Super Bowl tickets with clients’ money

An Easton lawyer is charged with stealing more than $400,000 from the estate of a New Jersey man whose children hired him to put their father’s affairs in order.

In addition to depositing money from the estate into his personal and law firm checking accounts, federal prosecutors allege attorney Angelo Perrucci Jr. used the dead man’s money to treat himself to tickets for the Eagles 2018 Super Bowl appearance in Minneapolis.

Perrucci, 55, who lives in Bangor but has a law office on Walnut Street in Easton, is charged with five counts of wire fraud for allegedly issuing and depositing fraudulent checks and misleading the victim’s children.

“Attorneys of any kind, public or private, take an oath to act in accordance with the law — not to use their law license to steal. My office will continue to root out the type of conduct that is alleged here,” U.S. Attorney William McSwain said in a statement.

Court records do not list an attorney for Perrucci. A telephone number listed for Perrucci was disconnected and he did not immediately respond to a message left at his law office.

According to an indictment charging Perrucci, the children of the dead man, who is identified only by the initials P.D., retained Perrucci in 2015 to put together their father’s estate, including selling his properties and disbursing the money to his heirs. Perrucci agreed to charge his clients $300 an hour or a maximum of $7,500, which they had already paid as a retainer.

P.D. died without a will in January 2016 in New Jersey, where he lived. Perrucci was appointed the administrator of P.D.’s estate, the indictment says.

According to the indictment, between April 2016 and January, Perrucci deposited money into an estate account from P.D.’s checking, investment and insurance accounts and overseas bank accounts. From the estate account, he wrote more than 80 checks that he deposited into his law firm’s operating account, payroll account and his personal bank accounts, prosecutors allege.

In February, Perrucci told P.D.’s children in a telephone call that he estimated he had taken $30,000 from the estate and expected to take an additional $30,000. At the time, Perrucci had taken about $344,250, the indictment says. In the phone call, he also promised P.D.’s children that he would notify them before taking any more money, but actually wrote another seven checks totaling $42,000 without notifying his clients, the indictment says.

During a second phone call with P.D.’s children in April, he agreed to provide a bank statement for the estate account and an accounting of the money he had taken and disbursed on behalf of the estate. P.D.’s children never received the bank statement, the indictment says.

Also during the April phone call, Perrucci told P.D.’s children that money from the sale of P.D.’s home at the Jersey shore were being held in a trust account and could not be released, when he had allegedly transferred some of the money into the estate account and taken $32,500 for himself.

The indictment says that although Perrucci was the administrator of P.D.'s estate for more than three years, he never sold P.D.’s primary residence and failed to collect nearly $100,000 from an investment account.

If convicted, Perrucci faces a maximum possible sentence of 100 years in prison. The case was investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Mannion.

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Easton lawyer accused of draining estate, buying Super Bowl tickets with clients’ money