A Lehigh County jury convicted Glenn D. McGogney in February of theft by deception for concealing the settlement from his client for more than five years and keeping a third of the money as an attorney fee. Another lawyer uncovered the theft.
McGogney, who was disbarred in 2012 for misleading a partner in a failed Bucks County strip club venture, also pleaded guilty Tuesday to forgery for doctoring a document presented as evidence in his disbarment hearing and no contest to a charge that he falsified a receipt stating that he had paid $52,000 in estate taxes on behalf of his sister-in-law when he had kept the money for himself.
McGogney was sentenced to two to five years in the theft case and two years of probation in the forgery and falsified receipt cases. With the benefit of a program for first-time offenders, McGogney could be released from prison in 18 months, his attorney, Gavin Holihan said. The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office filed the charges in all three cases.
“It doesn’t appear to represent the finest hour for the legal profession,” Holihan said.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a statement that lawyers take an oath to serve the best interests of their clients, to act ethically and to follow the law.
“Mr. McGogney swindled his victim out of more than $500,000 of their hard-earned money. As a result of this conviction, he has been held accountable, and will never again be able steal from his clients,” Shapiro said.
The sentencing Tuesday is the culmination of legal difficulties that began 14 years ago with McGogney’s efforts to save a foundering Milford Township strip club, Coyotes Show Club, by bringing in investors.
One was John Sibley, who needed $50,000 to repay a partner who had pulled out of a land development deal. According to court records, McGogney persuaded him to mortgage the equity in the land Sibley and the partner had planned to develop and invest the money in McGogney’s club. Sibley said he believed that McGogney represented him in the transaction because McGogney prepared the mortgage papers. Sibley later learned that there were liens on the property and that it had been listed for sheriff’s sale just days after he signed the mortgage papers.
Sibley sued McGogney alleging breach of contract and fraud and reported him to the Pennsylvania office of disciplinary counsel, which prosecutes misconduct allegations against attorneys. In a hearing, McGogney presented as evidence a document purporting to show that Sibley understood that McGogney represented the strip club and not Sibley.
Sibley testified that he had never seen the document and said he believed that his signature had been “cut and pasted” from another document. A forensic document examiner later determined that Sibley’s signature had been copied from another document, court documents say.
In the theft case, George Fetchko of Northampton hired McGogney to represent his son’s estate after Nicholas Fetchko was killed in a drunken driving crash in 2010. Over the next five years, George Fetchko inquired of McGogney about a settlement with Erie Insurance over his son’s death but received only excuses about the settlement being delayed, court documents say.
In 2015, George Fetchko hired another attorney who obtained court documents showing that Erie had settled the case in 2011 for $510,000. McGogney later handed over about $330,000 of the settlement proceeds but kept one-third for himself as an attorney fee, court documents say. In addition to his prison sentence, McGogney was ordered to repay more than $170,000 in restitution.
The attorney general’s office also investigated after a Delaware County attorney told an agent that McGogney assisted his client, McGogney’s sister-in-law Carole Knopf, with her husband’s estate following his death in 2014. Although McGogney had been disbarred, he represented Knopf on a pro bono basis, court records say.
In the course of settling the estate, McGogney told Knopf that she needed to pay $52,000 in inheritance taxes to the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue. Knopf wrote a personal check for the amount and gave it to McGogney to remit to the state through the Lehigh County register of wills.
When Knopf hired the Delaware County attorney to file her taxes in 2015, the attorney contacted McGogney for records from the estate needed to complete the tax returns. He wrote to McGogney that the register of wills had no record of the estate and had not received an inheritance tax return.
The lawyer later received a fax from McGogney with a copy of an inheritance tax receipt. When the lawyer sent a copy of the receipt to the register of wills for confirmation, the Lehigh County solicitor’s office informed him that there was no record of the inheritance tax payment being made and that the receipt number on the receipt McGogney provided corresponded to another person’s estate.
The cases were prosecuted by Deputy Attorney General Kirsten E. Heine.
means, including collecting fees for work he never performed.