Disbarred NJ Lawyer Gets 3 Years For Fleecing 82 Clients Out Of Legal Fees, Failing To Perform Work; Handiwork Included Bogus Loan Modifications; State Supreme Court's Ripoff Reimbursement Fund Shells Out Over $1.3 Million To Help Cover Victims' Losses

In Bergen County, New Jersey, The Record reports:

• A lawyer who blamed his addiction to alcohol for the theft of legal fees charged for work he never performed was sentenced Friday to three years in state prison and ordered to reimburse a state fund that paid out more than $1.3 million in claims to his former clients.
  
  Superior Court Judge Susan Steele imposed the sentence on Louis A. Capazzi Jr., 50, of Harrington Park, who practiced in Oradell before he was disbarred.
  
  Capazzi, who pleaded guilty last April to charges of theft by deception and admitted bilking dozens of clients, told the judge he had battled with alcoholism but has since turned around his life. He is now working as a paralegal in Pennsylvania.
  
  Bergen County Assistant Prosecutor Brian Lynch said Capazzi took fees from clients for specific tasks, such as loan modifications, and failed to perform the required work. The stolen fees went to sustain an upper middle class lifestyle that included membership in a country club, Lynch said..
  
  Michael McCormick, counsel for the New Jersey Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection, told the judge that the fund received claims from 82 of Capazzi’s former clients and paid out $1,384,738. The fund, which is an entity of the state Supreme Court, assesses an annual $50 fee on every lawyer in the state and reimburses clients who are victims of dishonest conduct.(1)

For more, see Lawyer from Harrington Park sentenced to prison in $1.3M theft scheme.

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(1) For similar "attorney ripoff reimbursement funds" that attempt to clean up the financial mess created by the dishonest conduct of lawyers licensed in other states and Canada, see:

• Directory Of Lawyers' Funds For Client Protection (now includes a listing for Canadian client protection funds, courtesy of the American Bar Association);
• Check the USA Client Protection Funds Map;
• Check the Canada Client Protection Funds Map.

Maps available courtesy of The National Client Protection Organization, Inc.

See generally:

• N.Y. fund for cheated clients wants thieving lawyers disbarred, a July, 2015 Associated Press story on this Fund reporting that the Fund's executive director, among other things, is calling for prompt referral to the local district attorney when the disciplinary committee has uncontested evidence of theft by a lawyer injuring a client or an admission of culpability;
  
  When Lawyers Steal the Escrow, a June, 2005 New York Times story describing some cases of client reimbursements ("With real estate business surging and down-payment amounts rising with home prices, the temptation for a lawyer to filch money from a bulging escrow account and later repay it with other clients' money has never been greater, said lawyers who monitor the thefts."),
  
  Thieving Lawyers Draining Client Security Funds, a December, 1991 New York Times story that gives some-real life examples of how client security funds deal with claims and the pressures the administrators of those funds may feel when left insufficiently financed as a result of the misconduct of a handful of lawyer/scoundrels.