Judge Offers Now-Disbarred Attorney Incarceration 'Buy-Down' Offer: Pay $127K Restitution To Homeowner Who You Fleeced Out Of Home Sale Closing Proceeds & You'll Get One Year In County Jail - Otherwise, It's Three Years In State Prison ... I'll Give You A Week To Come Up w/ The Cash!

In Morristown, New Jersey, the Daily Record reports:

• A now-disbarred lawyer who used to practice in Flanders has one week to raise $127,583 he stole from a client or face a sentence of three years in state prison, a Superior Court judge said Friday.
  
  Neil Lawrence Gross, 47, of Livingston, pleaded guilty in December in state Superior Court, Morristown, to theft, issuing a bad check and practicing law without a license. Gross was supposed to be sentenced Friday on his plea but defense lawyer Michael Fletcher asked Superior Court Judge Stephen Taylor to give Gross one more week to borrow the $127,583 from an out-of-state relative to meet restitution.
  
  Restitution is critical to Gross' case in that Morris County Assistant Prosecutor Michael Rappa has recommended Gross be sentenced to 364 days in the Morris County jail if he repays the money. If Gross can't repay it, the state is recommending that he be sentenced to three years in state prison, the judge said
  
  "I'd like to see the victims be made whole," Taylor said. "If the defendant goes to state prison, the likelihood of the victims being made whole drops precipitously."
  
  Taylor noted that sentencing previously was postponed for the same reason and said sentencing would occur March 11 -- in one week -- whether or not Gross has managed to raise restitution.
  
  Gross is a former partner in the Flanders-based firm Ward & Gross. He was suspended from practicing law in October of 2012 for failing to cooperate with an investigation by the state Office of Attorney Ethics. Yet he represented six clients between October 2012 and June 2013 for fees even though his license to practice law was suspended.
  
  He ultimately was disbarred on Oct. 21, 2014 for an array of ethical violations.
  
  Last summer, the Morris County Prosecutor's Office received a referral of a theft from the New Jersey Lawyers' Fund for Client Protection.(1) Through an investigation by the Prosecutor's Office's Financial Crimes Unit, Gross was found to have used the name of another attorney in a real estate closing that occurred in 2013, while he was suspended.
  
  As part of the closing, Gross held the $127,583 in an attorney trust account but failed to disburse the funds to the seller of the property. He instead diverted the funds to a personal account, according to his plea.
  
  He also had admitted to passing bad checks in Florham Park in 2014 and pleaded guilty to this offense in December.

Source: Ex-Flanders lawyer who stole must raise $127K in restitution.

See, generally, Frederick Miller, "If You Can't Trust Your Lawyer .... ?", 138 Univ. of Pennsylvania Law Rev. 785 (1990) for more on the apparent, long-standing tolerance for deceit by many in the legal profession:

• This tolerance to deception is encouraged by the profession's institutional civility. Seldom is a fig called a fig, or a shyster a shyster. No, our euphemisms are wonderfully polite: "frivolous conduct," or a "lack of candor;" or "law-office failure;" or, heaven forbid, a "peculation," a "defalcation," or a "negative balance" in a law firms's trust account.
  
  There is also widespread reluctance on the part of lawyers --- again, some lawyers --- to discuss publicly, much less acknowledge, that they have colleagues who engage in deceit and unprofessional conduct.
  
  This reluctance is magnified when the brand of deceit involves the theft of client money and property, notwithstanding that most lawyers would agree that stealing from clients is the ultimate ethical transgression.

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(1) The New Jersey Lawyers' Fund for Client Protection was established to reimburse clients who have suffered a loss due to dishonest conduct of a member of the New Jersey Bar.

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.