Villages attorney William Abruzzino disbarred following elderly exploitation sentence

An attorney and financial adviser formerly from The Villages has been disbarred for 10 years.

The Florida Supreme Court took away the law license for William Abruzzino II, retroactive to June 2011, as part of his punishment for raiding $202,000 from a client with Alzheimer's disease.

Abruzzino, 48, is serving a five-year prison sentence for taking the funds from Marlene Scippa, a 72-year-old woman who is now living at an Ocala nursing home. He has been ordered to repay Scippa the funds and to also serve ten years of probation after his prison term.

As her former attorney and financial adviser, Abruzzino was trustee of $1 million set aside for her long-term care. However, as her illness progressed, he regularly withdrew $700 in cash and wrote out $9,000 checks to himself, according to court documents.

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Villages attorney William Abruzzino disbarred following elderly exploitation sentence

Couple accused of stealing $20K from 88-year-old woman

POMPANO BEACH — Peggy Sue Chormicle was hired by an 88-year-old woman to look after her in her golden years, officials say.

But instead of doing a good job, Chormicle took advantage of Dolores Farquharson while Farquharson's health was declining, the Broward Sheriff's Office said.

Chormicle, 50, and her boyfriend, Kelvin Butler, 52, were arrested Tuesday for allegedly taking Farquharson's debit cards and forging her checks to steal about $20,000 from her, the agency said.

Wednesday, Broward County Judge John "Jay" Hurley ordered each suspect held on $21,000 bond on charges of exploitation of the elderly, grand theft and uttering a fraudulent instrument, records show.

"What was done to her [Farquharson] was horrible," said Farquharson's neighbor, Dorothy Mecklenburg. "She was extremely devastated. Her whole life was flipped upside down."

The judge appointed a guardian for Farquharson. She has since been moved to an assisted-living facility, Mecklenburg said.

Chormicle somehow managed to befriend Farquharson, who hired her as her caretaker and let her move into her home, Mecklenburg said. And when Butler was freed from prison, he also moved into Farquharson's house, Mecklenburg said.

Farquharson may not have known the couple each had a criminal record, Mecklenburg said. "People should be very cautious as to who they take in," she said.

From Dec. 11, 2011, through June 20, Chormicle and Butler fraudulently used Farquharson's debit card to make unauthorized purchases totaling about $20,000, an arrest report said. The pair made more than 100 ATM withdrawals using the victim's debit card during a six-month period "at all hours of the day," the report said.

The pair also signed Farquharson's checks and cashed them, the arrest report said. Chormicle "was trusted by the victim to be in possession of her personal information," the report said.


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Couple accused of stealing $20K from 88-year-old woman

How judges, probate attorneys, and guardianship orgs abuse the vulnerable

Mary Dahlman's problem is all about money.

A lot of people want at the estimated $20 million trust Dahlman's deceased mother left to her and her brother. Over the past year, a flock of local probate attorneys have already drained nearly half a million dollars in fees out of that trust.

And they want more.

"I'm not dead yet," Dahlman, 67, said wryly in an interview with the Current this summer. "Obviously they can have it when I'm gone."

It's all that money that first brought Dahlman into court with Bexar County Probate Court 2 Judge Tom Rickhoff three years ago. Dahlman has a knack for explaining dizzying financial details with crystal clarity: trust managers at Falcon Bank, she claims, had begun to withhold depletion taxes from the trust, calling it principle then making Dahlman and her brother pay income tax on cash they never got. Lawyers with Falcon Bank denied they'd made a mistake, and the lawsuit was set to play out in Rickhoff's court.

That is until Rickhoff and attorneys in his court began tossing around the loaded word "incapacitated."

By summer 2011, Dahlman insisted, Rickhoff got fed up with the Falcon Bank dispute and, as she recalled it, "Judge Rickhoff comes out and says he's so tired of seeing me in his courtroom. He says, 'I'm gonna see if she needs a guardian.'"

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Stripping away someone's rights in court can be messy, expensive business, especially when family squabbles or large, contested estates exacerbate things.

In Texas it's estimated some 30,000 to 50,000 disabled and elderly persons have been declared incapacitated and ordered into guardianships, losing the right to decide where they live or how they spend their money. Nationally the number of those declared incapacitated is rising fast as baby boomers age. Reports of mistreatment, neglect, and problems involving both relatives and non-family members appointed by courts to protect them have also risen, according to reports from the federal Government Accountability Office, which in 2010 and 2011 issued warnings of increasing numbers of elderly and disabled people neglected and ripped-off under guardianships.

With guardianship hanging over her head, Dahlman's Falcon Bank lawsuit was put on hold, and it's been a fiasco ever since, she says. William Bailey, a court-appointed attorney and a regular in Rickhoff's court, investigated years of Dahlman's financial statements, scouring through every check she'd written, each transaction, every gift to friends and family. Bailey's conclusion: People for years had been financially exploiting Dahlman, making her no longer mentally fit to watch over her own sizeable estate. He urged Rickhoff to appoint a guardian to freeze, take over, and manage Dahlman's finances for her, meanwhile Dahlman's three estranged daughters, perhaps out of fear that their mother was burning through their inheritance, filed motions to have the court appoint a guardian.

Three forensic psychiatrists would eventually disagree with Bailey, declaring that Dahlman is mentally fit and capable of spending her money as she pleases — though she might be better served by keeping a closer eye on her checkbook balance, one psychiatrist wrote. Still, despite three expert opinions to the contrary, a court-appointed investigator and lawyers for Dahlman's three daughters continued to push for guardianship, and over the course of the summer Dahlman had to continue to fight for her financial freedom in court while also fighting nearly $100,000 in fees attorneys tried to draw from her estate.

"They're going to bankrupt Mary for the foreseeable future just so they can get paid in full," Dahlman's attorney Phil Ross said as he exited a court hearing in July.

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As guardianships rise, advocates in Texas and elsewhere claim cabals of judges, close-knit networks of probate attorneys, and guardianship organizations are free to pilfer the pocketbooks of the elderly and vulnerable, wrongly seizing possessions, kicking folks into nursing homes and hospices before their time, splitting up estates and separating parents from their disabled children.

"After seeing many of these cases play out, I've boiled it down to this: it's the deception of protection," said Debby Valdez, a vocal San Antonio-based activist behind the advocacy group Guardianship Reform Advocates for the Disabled and Elderly (GRADE), whose members regularly testify at committee hearings at the Texas Legislature. GRADE gets regular calls and emails from families across the state, Valdez says, the common element being family members severed from aging parents or disabled children without knowledge, or those frightened and confused over the prospect of having their lives, finances, and futures put in the hands of court-appointed guardians.

With GRADE's bullhorn, many families have stepped forward in recent years accusing courts of needlessly taking control of elderly people and their estates. Valdez recently helped speak out for James Pride, 78, an Air Force veteran from the Dallas area who awoke from a stroke in 2010 to find the court had appointed a guardian over him and frozen his assets. And Valdez says it's been a long, hard, and costly road trying to get his personal and financial freedom back.

Similar stories have played out in Bexar County courts. One woman woke from a horrific car wreck to find she'd been appointed a guardian and declared incompetent to touch her own money. In the process of regaining her freedom, she wound up on the street while local attorneys pulled thousands from her life savings in court-approved fees. Lawyers drained hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mary Dahlman's estate while arguing she couldn't manage her own finances, though three medical experts testified to the contrary. And one San Antonio woman, after years of fighting for guardianship of her disabled daughter in Bexar and Travis counties, has now been completely cut off from her daughter after a court-appointed guardian terminated visits last month.

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How judges, probate attorneys, and guardianship orgs abuse the vulnerable

Discipline deserved in case of disgraced Judge Orie Melvin

Judicial opinions often are laced with jargon and technical minutiae that make them indecipherable to laymen.

Not so in a ruling this week by the state Court of Judicial Discipline. President Judge Robert E.J. Curran made plain the court's dismay with suspended Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin. In the process, the court contributed to a string of precedents that have been established in the prosecution of the judge and her two sisters for alleged and, in the case of former state Sen. Jane Orie, confirmed corruption.

Justice Orie Melvin was removed from the court in May, when she was charged with allegedly using her publicly paid judicial staff to conduct political work in her pursuit of a Supreme Court seat in 2003 and 2009.

Last week the Court of Judicial Discipline found that Justice Orie Melvin should not be paid while awaiting the outcome of her case.

"We see this respondent as so single-mindedly occupied with achieving personal aggrandizement that she pressured, intimidated and bullied her clerks and secretaries into performing work on her political campaigns," Curran wrote for the 5-1 majority. "... "We cannot leave this subject without mentioning that assertions that (Justice Orie Melvin) did not know what her sisters were saying and doing and, for that matter, what her staff and her sister's staff were doing, test the patience of the court."

Jane Orie, the former senator, is serving a 2½-to-10-year sentence for using her judicial staff for political work on her own and her sister's campaigns. Janine Orie, a third sister and the judge's chief of staff, has been charged and will be tried with the judge in Allegheny County.


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Discipline deserved in case of disgraced Judge Orie Melvin

See Also:
Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules no out-of-county judge for Joan Orie Melvin trial

Kim Rothstein, Wife Of Ponzi Schemer Scott Rothstein, Charged With Conspiracy To Commit Money Laundering

MIAMI -- The wife of imprisoned Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein was charged Thursday with money laundering conspiracy and other charges for allegedly concealing more than $1 million in jewelry from federal investigators and later attempting to sell some of it.

Prosecutors filed the charges against Kim Rothstein, 38, and four other people. Attorneys for Kim Rothstein said in a statement she takes "full responsibility" for her actions but insisted she did not know about her husband's $1.2 billion scam.

"Kim welcomes the opportunity to put a very challenging time in her life behind her," the statement said. "Kim is a vibrant, diverse and deeply caring person who looks forward to being a productive citizen in the years to come."

She faces up to five years in federal prison on charges of money laundering, obstruction of justice and witness tampering conspiracy. The type of charging document used by prosecutors typically means that a defendant intends to plead guilty.

Scott Rothstein, once a high-flying attorney in Fort Lauderdale, is serving a 50-year prison sentence for fraud involving investments in fake legal settlements. Shortly after the scheme unraveled in fall 2009, investigators went to the Rothsteins' residence to seize jewelry, watches and other items purchased with money from the scheme.


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Kim Rothstein, Wife Of Ponzi Schemer Scott Rothstein, Charged With Conspiracy To Commit Money Laundering

Greed and Corruption Cause Heartbreak in Elder Abuse Cases

It has been awhile since my last article on the serious issue of law guardian abuse. The problem has never gone away, and the fact is that it still persists nationwide. I was moved to remind everyone about the hardships and horrors of people who are caught up in this. Those who perpetrate these unfair and illegal actions often have their actions overlooked, or even approved by the judges who are supposed to be protecting the rights of all citizens.

Having written mostly about the Dorothy Wilson case where, as per federal statutes, she was illegally removed from her home of sixty-plus years, my personal knowledge in other cases was limited. Since writing the other articles in this series, I have been contacted by more victims who are also enduring what Dorothy’s daughter, Diane, had to suffer through. Law guardian abuse against the elderly and the emotionally or physically handicapped is a much broader problem than the average person is aware of. If you are knowledgeable of any person in this predicament, sitting back idly while this is occurring makes you no better than the NYS Judicial Commission, Senators, attorney generals, the mainstream media, and everyone else that Diane pleaded with for help.


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Greed and Corruption Cause Heartbreak in Elder Abuse Cases

St. Louis judge suspended after she turns cases over to her clerk

ST. LOUIS • A St. Louis judge was suspended Friday after a state judicial commission took the unusual step of recommending her removal from the bench.

The Commission on Retirement, Removal and Discipline’s report says Associate Circuit Judge Barbara Peebles abdicated her judicial responsibilities to her clerks, frequently showed up late and removed and destroyed a court document, then tried to cover it up by telling her clerk that the pair should “take (the incident) to our graves.”

The report also says that during a criminal investigation into Peebles’ conduct, prosecutors taped a phone call with her, and that the prosecutor found her explanation of the missing document not credible.

The criminal investigation and the commission’s 25-page report, filed with the court Thursday, were prompted by a Dec. 18 article in the Post-Dispatch that revealed that a clerk for Peebles handled at least 350 cases while Peebles was on vacation in China.

The clerks postponed and dismissed cases, refused to dismiss at least one and decided that as many as 18 arrest warrants should be issued. The warrants, however, didn’t become active until Peebles returned and signed them.

One lawyer called the practice “illegal as hell.”


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St. Louis judge suspended after she turns cases over to her clerk

Woman charged with elder abuse of 98-year-old

KFVS12 News

CAPE GIRARDEAU COUNTY, MO (KFVS) -
Cape Girardeau County prosecutors filed charges in the alleged beating of a 98-year-old woman who lived at the Lutheran Home.

Sherri Sprenger, 22, is charged with elder abuse in the 3rd degree, a misdemeanor.

In an interview with police, Sprenger admitted she slapped the victim across the right side of her face with the back of her hand. She stated it was in response to the victim yelling at her and that she had lost her temper when the incident occurred.

In the report, Sprenger says she did not mean to strike with such force and she felt remorse.

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Woman charged with elder abuse of 98-year-old

Death Takes a Policy: How a Lawyer Exploited the Fine Print and Found Himself Facing Federal Charges

Joseph Caramadre has spent a lifetime scouring the fine print. He's hardwired to seek the angle, an overlooked clause in a contract that allows him to transform a company's carelessness into a personal windfall. He calls these insights his "creations," and he numbers them. There have been about 19 in his lifetime, he says. For example, there was number four, which involved an office superstore coupon he parlayed into enough nearly free office furniture to fill a three-car garage. Number three consisted of a sure-fire but short-lived system for winning money at the local dog track. But the one that landed him on the evening news as a suspect in a criminal conspiracy was number 18, which promised investors a unique arrangement: You can keep your winnings and have someone else cover your losses.

Caramadre portrays himself as a modern-day Robin Hood. He's an Italian kid from Providence, R.I., who grew up modestly, became a certified public accountant and then put himself through night school to get a law degree. He has given millions to charities and the Catholic Church. As he tells his life story, his native ability helps him outsmart a phalanx of high-priced lawyers, actuaries and corporate suits. Number 18 came to fruition, he says, when a sizeable segment of the life insurance industry ignored centuries of experience and commonsense in a heated competition for market share.

Federal prosecutors in Rhode Island and insurance companies paint a very different picture of Caramadre: They say he's an unscrupulous con artist who engaged in identity theft, conspiracy and two different kinds of fraud. Prosecutors contend he deceived the terminally ill to make millions for himself and his clients. For them, Caramadre's can't-miss investment strategy was an illusion in which he preyed on the sick and vulnerable.

ProPublica has taken a close look at the Caramadre case because it offers a window into a larger issue: The transformation of the life insurance industry away from its traditional business of insuring lives to peddling complex financial products. This shift has not been a smooth one. Particularly during the lead up to the financial crisis, companies wrote billions worth of contracts that now imperil their financial health.


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Death Takes a Policy: How a Lawyer Exploited the Fine Print and Found Himself Facing Federal Charges