Thieving att’y going to pen
Gets 1-3 yrs. for grabbing $575K in clients’ funds
A disbarred lawyer will spend the next one to three years behind bars for stealing COVID relief funds and bilking his Brooklyn clients out of $575,000 in settlement funds, prosecutors announced Wednesday.
Raleigh Herbert, 61, was sentenced Wednesday in Brooklyn Supreme Court, after pleading guilty to embezzling the cash from two dozen different clients and stealing about $96,000 by filing bogus loan applications through the COVID-19 Paycheck Protection Program.
Herbert also continued represent the grandmother of a victim in an NYPD wrongful-death lawsuit who was set to receive a $750,000 settlement even after he’d been suspended from practice, and never told her, prosecutors said.
Herbert, of Chatham, N.J., handled wrongful-arrest and personal injury lawsuits against the city, and embezzled from clients between 2015 to 2021, depositing checks into his attorney escrow account, prosecutors said.
He then lied to his clients when they asked him why they hadn’t received the money, blaming COVID-19 related court closures, or claiming falsely that the victims had liens against them.
Herbert, who was suspended from practicing law in March 2021, was first arrested last February, then faced more charges in May and December.
He was disbarred in June and pleaded guilty to grand larceny and scheme to defraud in December.
“This defendant repeatedly violated his oath as an attorney and betrayed the trust of his clients by pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlement money and COVID-19 relief funds to which he was not entitled,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said Wednesday.
The Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection of the State of New York has reimbursed about $470,000 to 16 victims.
The wrongful-death case involved the June 2014 death of 16-year-old Laquan Nelson, who was shot near the 88th Precinct stationhouse in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
His grandmother, Shirley Nelson, sued the city, alleging that Laquan and a friend showed up at the front door of the stationhouse and begged an officer outside to let them inside because they were about to get shot by an angry group chasing them. The cop turned them away and told them to call the 79th Precinct instead, according to court filings in the case.
“He would have been alive today but for the depraved indifference of the NYPD officers who refused to aid him and barred him from the safety of the 88th Precinct,” Shirley Nelson wrote in a June 2022 affidavit. “I know this because no less than three witnesses have come forward to confirm these facts.”
Nelson said in her affidavit that she brought the case to Herbert in 2014, and he filed suit the next year. He also pushed for her to settle for $750,000, she said.
“Of course, I came to find out that Mr. Herbert has been stealing money from his clients and practicing law despite being suspended. I felt incredibly betrayed and misled,” she wrote. “Mr. Herbert was not properly representing me and my deceased grandson. He did not fully develop the case and was not prepared for trial. And the settlement money was at risk of being stolen by him.”
Lawyer Ilya Novofastovsky, who took over the case, described his intervention as a “rescue operation.”
“In my case, I was essentially able to stop the case from going off the rails,” he said. “I think we avoided the illegality that was being perpetrated.”
Novofastovsky has agreed to split the legal fees, with Herbert still getting $195,000 for his work on the case, according to court filings.
Herbert’s attorney did not immediately return a call seeking comment Wednesday.