Monday, February 01, 2016

Florida Bar's Client Security Fund Faces Potentially Heavy Payouts Attributable To Sticky-Fingered, Now-Disbarred Lowlife Lawyer

In Central Florida, the Orlando Sentinel reports:
  • Brooklynn Jones, 9, was born with severe disabilities. When her mother, Brittany Jones, went into labor, a nurse was supposed to give her penicillin every four hours but didn't, and Brooklynn was born with an infection that had devastating consequences.

    "She has epilepsy. … She's developmentally delayed, mentally impaired. She's probably the age of a 3- or 4-year-old, and she's 9," said the child's mother, who lives in Lake County.

    The family sued for medical malpractice and settled, money intended to help pay for the child's extraordinary needs. But now Brittany Jones is fighting to get a big chunk of it back, $180,000 that, in a complaint to the Florida Bar, she says disappeared from the child's trust fund while it was under the control of former Winter Park attorney Julie Kronhaus.

    "We can barely survive," said Jones. "I have to borrow money just to pay property taxes."

    Kronhaus was disbarred last year.

    Jones is one of a string of former clients who have accused Kronhaus, 51, of embezzling more than $2 million, according to court records, law enforcement records and those at the Florida Bar.

    Some of those who accuse Kronhaus of wrongdoing are business people who hired her to set up or manage trust funds, but she's also accused of misappropriating money from children, including Brooklynn Jones.

    Orlando attorney Cary Moss helped the Jones family after Kronhaus was disbarred. It is troubling, she said, when people are taken advantage of. "When you see it happening to a disabled child, it's a stab in the heart," Moss said.

    Jones filed a complaint with the Florida Bar, writing that Kronhaus embezzled $180,670.32, money that she's asked the Bar to repay from its Client Security Fund, an account set up to reimburse people who have been cheated by Florida lawyers.(1)

    Jones provided the Orlando Sentinel with a copy of the Florida Bar complaint and repayment request, as well as a hand-written note Kronhaus signed on March 2, promising to transfer the trust account to a new trustee by the end of that week.

    She did not, Jones said.

    Another former client, Erica Stoner, 41, of Casselberry, says $90,000 meant for her and her then-13-year-old son is now missing. Stoner's husband and the boy's father, Richard "Danny" Stoner, 38, was killed in an automobile crash in 2012. The money was from the family's insurer. Through her lawyer, Stoner hired Kronhaus to set up a guardianship for her son and create a secured account for the money that was to be set aside for him, she said.

    "I never saw the check for $90,000," Erica Stoner wrote in a statement on file at the Seminole County Sheriff's Office that she provided to the Sentinel.

    Kronhaus, who lives in a house valued at more than $1 million in Alaqua, a gated community near Longwood, would not comment.

    Julie Kronhaus has not been arrested or charged, although an investigator at the Seminole County Sheriff's Office spent several months in 2014 interviewing victims and gathering financial records then turned the case over to the FBI, according to Sheriff's Office records.

    Several people who accuse Kronhaus of looting their accounts say they've been interviewed by an FBI agent who works in Maitland and are frustrated that Kronhaus has not been charged.

    David Couvertier, an FBI spokesman and agent, would not comment or confirm that an investigation was underway.

    Alan Cook, an Oviedo businessman, and his wife, Brenda, say Kronhaus misappropriated $1 million from them, "and we're just sitting by, watching Julie Kronhaus spend our money, if it's still available."

    Kronhaus, whose office used to be in Winter Park, was permanently disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court last year. It found her guilty of misconduct, misappropriating funds, violating accounting standards and failing to shut down her practice in 2014 when she had been ordered to do so.

    The state also stripped her of her certified public accounting license.

    After the Sentinel published a story Jan. 5 describing the allegations against her by the Cooks and four other former clients, Kronhaus hired an attorney, August J. Stanton Jr. of Winter Park.(2)
For more, see Disbarred attorney embezzled money from disabled girl, records allege.

For an earlier post on this lawyer, see Disbarred For Fleecing Clients Out Of $1.5 Million In Entrusted Funds, Ex-Lawyer Yet To Be Arrested, Continues Living High Life ("It's Almost Too Hard To Believe," Says One Victim).
-------------------------
(1) For similar "attorney ripoff reimbursement funds" that sometimes help cover the financial mess created by the dishonest conduct of lawyers licensed in other states and Canada, see:
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.
(2) Hiring an attorney at this point appears to be an implicit recognition on Kronhaus part that the objects in her mirror are closer than they appear (ie. Feds, local prosecutor, major area newspaper).

posted by Home Equity Theft Reporter at 4:00 AM