Disbarment

It’s hard to believe that a highly educated man would think he could hire a contract-killing on his partner and get away with it nowadays. And he wasn’t just highly educated—he was a practicing attorney.

The man in this true crime began practicing law in 2003. Since then, he met a beautiful woman from another country living in the U.S., and they had two children—but never married.

When the relationship soured, both wanted full custody of the children. Knowing that courts tend to side with the mother of children when parents separate, he sought someone to help him have his ex-partner deported to her country of citizenship.

He paid a foreign hit-team to conduct reconnaissance and spy on his former partner. They charged him $10,000 for the service. Once they had completed their assignment, they informed the attorney their cost to bribe an immigration official to deport his ex-partner was over $200,000.

The lawyer cancelled the assignment. He hadn’t changed his mind. He needed to find a cheaper solution to his problem—he wanted sole custody of his young children. Murder-for-hire, he decided, was better and permanent.

Almost nine years after becoming an attorney, the man began discussions with an undercover FBI agent about hiring him to kill his ex-partner. They met in person twice. Feeling confident his troubles would soon go away, he gave the agent a down-payment of one gold coin worth $2,000 and agreed to pay $50,000 for the job. Half upfront and the balance upon completion. After the details were finalized, the attorney wired the balance of the first payment to an FBI undercover bank account.

To avoid the wire being flagged as suspicious, the former attorney also sent the FBI agent a phony agreement for consulting services. And so that the FBI agent had all the information needed to perform the job he’d been hired to do, he was given a target package that included details about the former partner’s whereabouts, schedule, and lifestyle habits.

The FBI arrested and charged the former attorney with murder-for-hire. They extradited him to the state where the crime had been committed.

The former attorney went ahead with the trial. It took one week for the trial to conclude and the jury to find him guilty of murder-for-hire. A judge sentenced the 48-year-old former attorney to the maximum allowable sentence per the sentencing guidelines for the jurisdiction—ten years in prison followed by three years of supervised release.

In the state where he practiced law, because of his felony conviction, the court revoked his law license and disbarred him from practicing law in any form.

Source: United States Department of Justice, New York State Supreme Court

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