Girardi’s ex-CFO sentenced to 10 years in prison for defrauding clients
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A federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced the former chief financial officer of Tom Girardi’s shuttered law firm to 10 years in prison Friday for his role in stealing millions of dollars in settlement money from the disgraced attorney’s clients.
U.S. District Court Judge Josephine Staton imposed the term after a hearing in which a trustee overseeing the firm’s bankruptcy accused Christopher Kamon of ongoing efforts to hide stolen money, including in what she said were recently discovered bank accounts in Hungary and the Bahamas.
As part of the plea deal, Christopher Kamon admitted that he and Girardi worked together to perpetrate a long-running scheme to defraud and mislead clients.
“Mr. Kamon added on to what Mr. Girardi did,” trustee Elissa Miller said. She told the judge about phone calls in which she had to tell former Girardi Keese clients expecting multimillion-dollar legal settlements that they would receive only $750, calling the conversations “just a snippet of the horrors of this case.”
Tom Girardi is facing the collapse of everything he holds dear: his law firm, marriage to Erika Girardi, and reputation as a champion for the downtrodden.
Kamon, a 51-year-old former Torrance High math teacher, controlled the bank accounts for Girardi Keese for a decade and a half before the firm’s 2020 collapse. In that period, the Wilshire Boulevard practice was operating as a Ponzi-like scheme that prosecutors have said siphoned off as much as $100 million in client funds to, among other things, underwrite the luxe lifestyle and music career of his wife, “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Erika Jayne.
After Girardi’s fraud conviction last year, Kamon reached a deal with prosecutors under which he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and acknowledged that he had routinely transferred money from client trust accounts at Girardi’s direction. In one case cited by Asst. U.S. Attorney Scott Paetty, Kamon removed $50,000 in settlement funds due a client, a widow whose husband had been killed in a boating accident, allowing the attorney to pay bills at two country clubs. In another, he moved $128,500 in settlement funds owed to a woman injured by a medical device so Girardi could cover leases on two luxury vehicles.
A filing in federal court in Maryland on Wednesday offered new details about how Tom Girardi’s chief financial officer conducted what prosecutors have called a “side fraud” inside the massive corruption at the legal titan’s Los Angeles-based firm.
Kamon also admitted to launching his own separate scheme in 2013 — a “brazen theft-within-a -theft” in the words of prosecutors — to steal from Girardi. Using phony vendors and kickbacks, he embezzled more than $6.5 million that he spent remodeling properties he owned in Encino and Palos Verdes, as well as on gifts and a $20,000 monthly allowance for a woman he met on an escort site.
How responsibility should be apportioned between Girardi and Kamon has been contested since Girardi’s downfall four years ago. After creditors pushed him into bankruptcy in 2021, financial records emerged showing firm money, including settlements owed to catastrophically injured clients, funneled to a host of personal purposes: breast implants, college tuition for an employee’s child, a Santa Monica condominium for Girardi’s mistress, Gucci purses for a firm consultant and $750,000 diamond earrings for Jayne.
During Girardi’s August trial, his lawyers argued that the attorney, now 85, had debilitating dementia and that Kamon had taken advantage of his condition to steal from clients.
Jurors did not appear to buy the argument, convicting Girardi on four counts of wire fraud.
Former legal titan Tom Girardi is on trial, accused of four counts of wire fraud for allegedly looting $15 million from clients over a decade.
Kamon, for his part, has presented himself as a minor participant who was following directions from a boss who was a legend in the legal field and a personal hero to him. In a letter to the court, Kamon recalled being diagnosed with intestinal cancer just three months after starting as a firm accountant in 2000. Though he was out of work for a year, he said Girardi kept him on at full salary.
“As far as I was concerned, I owed him my life,” he wrote. Girardi promoted him to head of the accounting office in 2004, gave him a used Porsche and paid him well enough that he could support his financially strapped parents, he wrote, adding, “I trusted Mr. Girardi and believed in him and I did not want to see or believe that he was stealing from his clients.”
Tom Girardi and his firm were sued more than a hundred times between the 1980s and last year, with at least half of those cases asserting misconduct in his law practice. Yet, Girardi’s record with the State Bar of California remained pristine.
At his sentencing hearing, Kumon, wearing ankle shackles and a white jumpsuit, apologized several times and told the judge he wanted her to understand that “I am not a horrible person. I’ve tried to correct this as best I can.”
Miller, the bankruptcy trustee, disputed his claimed cooperation. She said Kamon had refused to facilitate the sale of a $2.4-million waterfront mansion he owned in the Bahamas and had not turned over $1 million discovered in Hungarian and Bahamian banks.
Staton, the judge, said she found his apologies “vague” and his claim that he was only following Girardi’s directions “a bit hollow” given that he was the mastermind of a separate scheme that personally benefited him. She said the fact he didn’t have a prior criminal record was not persuasive given the length of the Girardi Keese scheme.
“The defendant committed fraud on a near daily basis for years,” she said. She ordered him to pay restitution of $8.9 million.
Both Girardi and Kamon face additional federal charges in Chicago over the misappropriation of millions of dollars in settlements for families of plane crash victims. Kamon is in the process of negotiating a plea deal, his attorney, Michael Severo, said in court Friday.
Clients who have accused Tom Girardi of misconduct will be tracking the new season of ‘Real Housewives,’ hoping for evidence to bolster their case.
Girardi has yet to be sentenced in the L.A. case. Prosecutors are seeking a 14-year term. His attorneys have argued that due to his cognitive decline he should remain in an Orange County nursing home rather than be sent to prison. He underwent a medical evaluation at the federal prison in Butner, N.C., earlier this year and, according to a filing by his attorneys this week, experts there concluded he did not require special treatment.
A forensic psychologist and a neuropsychologist who evaluated him “determined that not only can Mr. Girardi be safely and appropriately imprisoned within [the federal prison system] ... he need not even, at this time, be placed in a specialized medical facility,” the attorneys wrote. He is due back in court in May.
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