I don’t remember how I got this particular client but I think it was from first representing his girlfriend/partner in a dispute with her homeowner’s association over a condo she owned where she kept cats, hundreds of them. So many she ordered kitty litter for them in 55 gallon drums. Before becoming my new client’s girlfriend, she ran a lucrative business providing entertainment for bachelor parties. Lucrative enough she paid cash for her cat condo back before there were any restrictive covenants against running an animal shelter on the premises. Her cats were all indoor cats and well cared for, no noxious odors or loud noises emanating from the condo, so there wasn’t much the homeowner’s association could do about. Anyway, that’s how I met my client who was a pioneer of the telephone sex industry. They’d established one of the first and largest telephone sex companies in the entire country right here in the Lowcountry.
When I first met him he had 30 employees, conducted business in twenty-five states, and had more telephone switching capacity than the local Mount Pleasant telephone company. He took care of the IT part of the enterprise while his girlfriend/partner took care of the girls. Their biggest customers? Men in retirement homes. Busiest time of the month? When social security checks came out. According to them most of their regular customers called more for companionship than sex. They were rolling in the loot.
Surprisingly, they ran an extremely clean business. They got very few complaints and settled any they got amicably. Turned out there was little they needed a lawyer to do for them. Then came the call from the United States Secret Service, which investigates cyber financial crimes, requesting an interview. I arranged a meeting in my office.
Despite my explicit instructions to keep his mouth shut, my client became a regular chatterbox during the interview insisting he ran a completely legit business. While the agent said he didn’t dispute that, he had some questions about the company’s financial practices. My client couldn’t help himself and decided to give the agent a history lesson. Believe it not, he said, originally the phone could would add charges onto the customer’s phone bills but stopped when too many unscrupulous callers ran up exorbitant charges on other people’s bills. That’s when he turned to credit card processing which served the dual purpose of verifying age and collecting charges. To avoid antagonizing the credit card companies, he issued immediate reversals of any disputed charges. Everybody was happy until the Moral Majority began pressuring financial institutions to stop financing pornography in the early 2000’s. Before long his bank, VISA and Mastercard would no longer process his company’s credit card transactions. My client turned to local businesses to process his charges for him offering them a flat 10% cut and guarantee he’d cover any charge backs. At the time he was processing upwards of $80,000.00 a month in charges, so the handful of local merchants he was dealing with were happy to be raking in $8,000.00 a month virtually risk free. My client assured the agent no one had lost a single red cent due to his transactions.
The agent thanked us for meeting with him and said, if what my client said was true, there was nothing the Secret Service would be interested in pursuing. We shook hands as he left but I asked my client to stay behind after the agent left. I told him my client I didn’t trust the agent and didn’t think the threat had passed. I’m not stupid and if I learned one thing over my years practicing law, its cover your ass, so after the meeting I wrote my client a letter to my client setting out the potential Federal and State laws I thought he might be violating.
Sure enough, not long after, my client, his girlfriend/partner, and the local merchants who’d been processing charges for him were all indicted in Federal Court. His indictment as the kingpin was for some ridiculous number of counts of financial access fraud, each count carrying up to 15 years and a $250,00.00 fine, bank fraud each count carrying up to 20 years and a $250,000.00 fine, and wire fraud each count also carrying up to 20 years and a $250,000.00 fine. I added up the potential penalties and told my client, eliminating the duplicate counts, he was only facing 600 years but, not to worry, I was confident I could get that knocked down to no more than 100 years. He didn’t think I was being funny.
This is a long way around to the disqualification part of this story, but here we are, in the preliminary stages of the case in Federal Court, appearing before the Honorable David C. Norton. Right out the blocks the U.S., I mean Useless, Attorney, filed a motion to have me disqualified from the case on the grounds I had a conflict of interest. And what was my conflict of interest? Since I hadn’t advised my client what he was doing was illegal, I’d have an incentive to throw him under the bus to conceal my own incompetence.
My co-counsel had to restrain me from punching the Useless Attorney in the face right there in the United States District Courtroom. He calmed me down by commenting that the disqualification motion was high praise and showed how much the government respected my legal abilities. When I settled down, I produced my letter advising my client of the statutes I thought he could be violating in camera to Judge Norton and he promptly denied the government’s disqualification motion.
I wish I could say I found some way to pull a rabbit out of the hat to free my client but that’s rarely how things work out in the real practice of law. Fortunately, Judge Norton didn’t like the idea the Secret Service Agent had told my client what he was doing wasn’t illegal as outlined in my letter to my client and let the U.S Attorney know it. He further stressed he didn’t want a trial stringing all the merchants along just so they could testify at trial nobody was defrauded out of anything or lost any money was in anybody’s best interest. And my client, although innocent of the massive fraud alleged, didn’t want his girlfriend/partner having to face jail time. This is the stuff out of which plea bargains are crafted in the real world. My client agreed to plead to a few counts for a manageable 36 month sentence, if his girlfriend and all the merchant defendants received probationary sentences.
My client pled and was sent off to Butler FCI where he received medical treatment for a benzodiazepine addiction. He actually thanked me when he came home a much healthier person. He never got his business back but I’m confident he’d stashed enough away for him, his girlfriend/partner, and her cats to all live comfortably thereafter. And me, in addition to my fee, I got to write this story touting I was such a good lawyer the United State’s Attorney Office for the District of South Carolina tried to have me disqualified from a case for no good reason.
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