Disbarred lawyer overbilled province
Hired, fired and disbarred.
That’s the pitching line on Munyonzwe Hamalengwa, who this week was stripped of his licence to practise law.
He is a bilker, as the Law Society of Upper Canada determined last October at a tribunal that found Hamalengwa guilty of professional misconduct for “intentionally and deliberately” overbilling the provincial government for close to $62,000, which went into his own pocket.
But the Law Society moves at a glacial pace, as anyone (me included) who’s ever made a complaint against one of its members well knows. So it took six months to get from conviction to sentencing in a case that actually stretches back to 2006. That’s when Hamalengwa — a hero to many for his leadership in the black community, mentorship of black law students and advocacy work in the area of systemic racism — was hired to represent Richard Wills, among the most thoroughly reprehensible of defendants, an ex-Toronto traffic cop ultimately found guilty of first-degree murder in the 2002 slaying of his long-time mistress: striking her on the head with a baseball bat, strangling her, stuffing the body in a garbage bin and hiding it behind a wall in the basement of his Richmond Hill home where it remained for four months, during which time Wills drenched his house with fragrant disinfectants to squelch the reek of decaying flesh.
Wills’s six-month trial may go down as the most bizarre in local history as the garrulous, narcissistic accused frequently disrupted proceedings with rants, racist and sexist diatribes, on several occasions urinating in the police car that shuttled him to court in Newmarket, and once defecating in the dock, lifting his excrement-smeared fingers to the judge (who coolly offered a box of tissues to defence counsel.) That the trial was kept on the rails was entirely due to Justice Michelle Fuerst and the two Crowns, Harold Dale and Jeff Pearson.
Wills, a man of considerable financial assets, had been turned down by Legal Aid because he’d deliberately divested himself of real-estate holdings and pensions worth at least $500,000 (transferring much of the portfolio to his ex-wife).
However, Justice Bryan Shaughnessy concluded that the case would be virtually “untriable” if Wills was self-represented, issuing what’s known as a “Fisher order,” which compelled the Ministry of the Attorney General to pay for his lawyer, first at $200 an hour and later enhanced.
Wills burned through seven lawyers as his case wound through the courts, hiring and firing at will.
Whether reluctantly or not, though, Hamalengwa took the case and held it for about 16 months. Wills canned him on the eve of trial starting in May 2007.
During that time, Hamalengwa billed the AG — to wit, the taxpayer — for some $750,000, about half of what was spent on the other six lawyers combined.
Following the money trail and the revolving door of lawyers is a meandering, complex journey.
To cite but one example of oversight failure, documents released just as the Wills verdict came in indicated zero vetting of Hamalengwa’s billings — fees and disbursements for expenses — for nearly a year, until red flags began popping up.
In that period, Legal Aid, tasked by Shaughnessy with supervising and approving the payments, had done no more than check Hamalengwa’s math.
Only belatedly did anyone scrutinize the contents.
Indeed, from the beginning Hamalengwa had outright rejected financial auditing of his bills, heatedly arguing that his predecessor on the case — Cindy Wasser, fired by Wills after she’d represented him in pretrial motions — had never been vetted.
“The hours in this case are therefore unlimited,” Hamalengwa told Legal Aid director Janet Froud.
It says a great deal about Hamalengwa that he immediately tried to frame the issue in racial overtones.
“I am a black lawyer trying to practise law in this province. I come on board, all of a sudden the Attorney General is talking about accountability and public funds when Cindy Wasser was not subjected to the same.
“Here comes a black man and a white judge cannot understand this. Probably even a white lawyer cannot understand this.” Hamalengwa mounted the same poor-black-me argument at the sentencing phase (not in his trial evidence) of this tribunal, contending through his lawyer that the ministry and the Law Society had racially profiled him — “picking on him because he is a black man,” as the tribunal judgment states.
Yes, Wills treated him outrageously, unleashing racist barrages. In Hamalengwa’s shoes, I would have knocked Wills’ block off.
Instead, Hamalengwa knowingly and cunningly ratcheted his bills and fattened his wallet by billing the province for court appearances he either didn’t make or were shorter than he claimed.
He charged fraudulently high for legal research — including for legwork done by a researcher who was also his mistress, Marsha Cadogan, never disclosed to Law Society investigators and which Hamalengwa revealed to his own lawyers just before Cadogan began testifying at the tribunal, as if to cast his ex-lover as a bitter, scorned woman whose evidence would be suspect.
He further billed for services that didn’t quality for compensation and forged invoices.
And Hamalengwa is a serial offender.
This was his third go-round before the Law Society. In 2004, he was admonished, directed to pay $1,000 in costs and ordered into Practice Review for failing to account to a client. Six years later, he was suspended for a month for failing to co-operate with a Law Society investigation and ordered to pay $5,000 in costs.
This tribunal agreed that Wills had been the “proverbial client from hell.” But the purported “exceptional circumstances” can’t be a mitigating factor in Hamalengwa’s conduct as a cheat.
“The lawyer intentionally and deliberately overbilled the (ministry) with the intention to profit personally from these overbillings,” reads the ruling, written by chair Harvey Strosberg.
“Thou shalt not pad thy dockets and/or intentionally misrepresent thy disbursement is one of the commandments of legal life. The lawyer broke this commandment repeatedly. The lawyer padded his dockets.’’
He bilked. He’s also on the hook for $125,000 in legal costs at the tribunal.
Revoking of his licence becomes effective May 31. Hamalengwa can apply for reinstatement in three years.
A rarely applied penalty, disbarment. Between Jan. 1, 2004, and Dec. 31, 2014, 150 lawyers had their licences revoked (subject to ongoing appeals).
That’s out of a membership (as of last year) of 47,428.
Five powerful letters of support from the likes of former provincial minister Alvin Curling and Justice Irving Andre were submitted on Hamalengwa’s behalf.
A community petition had 254 signatories. Didn’t help. Wrote Strosberg: “In the panel’s opinion, Mr. Hamalengwa’s fall from grace is a Shakespearean tragedy.
“During the period from about March 2006 to about September 2007, Mr. Hamalengwa’s moral compass had somehow been sent askew.
“As a result of his misconduct, the panel concluded that Mr. Hamalengwa must lose his licence to practise law.
“Losing his licence to practise law is a tragedy to Mr. Hamalengwa personally, his family, the black community, the profession and the Ontario community.”
Somewhere, Richard Wills must be cackling. And perhaps soiling his jail pants. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.