Another Light-Fingered Lawyer Gets Frog Marched to Prison, Getting Multiple Sentences Covering 4 To 12 Years For Pilfering Cash Out Of Trust/Escrow Accounts; Among Victims Were Pair Fleeced For Over $1.1 Million In Separate Real Estate Transactions

In Staten Island, New York, the Staten Island Advance reports:

• A disbarred lawyer, who swindled clients on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, is on the hook for nearly $1 million in restitution and will spend up to a dozen years in prison, to boot.(1)
  
  Robert Fontanelli was sentenced [] in state Supreme Court, St. George, to one to three years behind bars and ordered to pay $55,760 to a Staten Island client whose personal-injury settlement the ex-barrister pocketed.
  
  The sentence will run concurrently to a separate sentence of four to 12 years in prison and $933,245 in restitution imposed on Fontanelli last week in Brooklyn state Supreme Court for grand larceny and fraud-related convictions.
  
  In June of last year, Fontanelli, then 49, pleaded guilty in state Supreme Court, St. George, to attempted second-degree grand larceny for cheating a client of more than $55,000.
  
  In December 2013, Fontanelli dropped off a check for the victim, which bounced, said a law enforcement source with knowledge of the case.
  
  Fontanelli, a Brooklyn-based lawyer, had represented the unidentified victim in a slip-and-fall lawsuit, which was settled for $90,000, the source said.
  
  The victim was entitled to more than $55,000 after expenses and Fontanelli's fees were deducted, said the source.
  
  In the Brooklyn case, Fontanelli had pleaded guilty in April of last year to felony counts of first- and second-degree grand larceny and scheme to defraud to satisfy two indictments against him.
  
  According to authorities, Fontanelli helped himself to more than $1 million owed a client from a real-estate sale and to more than $155,000 from another client in an unrelated property deal.
  
  The Appellate Division, Second Department, banned Fontanelli in March 2014 when he failed to cooperate with a Grievance Committee investigating the thefts in Brooklyn.

For the story, see Disbarred lawyer hooked for $989K restitution, gets prison in client swindle.

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.[...] The fact is, however, that theft of client property is not an insignificant or isolated problem within the legal profession. Indeed, it is a hounding phenomenon nationwide, and probably the principal reason why most lawyers nationwide are disbarred from the practice of law.

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(1) The Lawyers’ Fund For Client Protection Of the State of New York manages and distributes money collected from annual dues paid by members of the state bar to members of the public who have sustained a financial loss caused by the dishonest conduct of a member of the New York bar acting as an attorney or a fiduciary.

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.