Tom Girardi knew senators from California to North Carolina by first name.
The governor was on the speed dial list. And legions of state and local officials lined up for his boozy parties in Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and elsewhere.
Yet in few places has the once-legendary plaintiffs’ lawyer wielded as much power as in the courtrooms of downtown Los Angeles, where he swayed juries with his honey-sweet voice and countless judges have attributed their appointments to the bench — at least in part — to Girardi’s blessing.
On Tuesday, one of those downtown federal courtrooms was the scene of the latest low point in Girardi’s long descent from legal titan to disgraced and bankrupt former attorney as jurors were sworn in and his criminal trial began.
Girardi is charged with four counts of wire fraud for allegedly stealing $15 million from his clients over a 10-year period.
As the 85-year-old sat quietly in a blue sweater and gray plaid blazer next to his defense team, Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Paetty said Girardi “lied to his clients, stole from them, betrayed their trust, broke the law.”
These clients had all come to him in tragic times — a burn victim, a widow whose husband died in a tragic boating accident, a woman injured by a medical device and another woman injured in a car accident — and he won them compensation. The prosecutor said the problem was how he handled money.
“By lying and stealing millions and millions of dollars from their settlement, the defendant repeatedly chose himself,” Paetty said.
“This money does not belong to the defendant,” he said. “It belongs to the victims’ clients and it must be paid to them promptly.” The prosecutor explained precisely that money belonging to a lawyer’s client must remain safe in a special bank account.
“He treated this client trust account like a personal piggy bank,” Paetty said.
Two private jets. Jewelry. Country club memberships. A mansion in Pasadena and a house in Palm Springs. Paetty said the money he pocketed from clients allowed him to live an exorbitant lifestyle, and another $20 million from the company bank account went to the entertainment career of his estranged wife, “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Erika Girardi.
But Girardi’s defense team dismissed the prosecutor’s narrative as a fictional Hollywood plot that wrongly portrayed his client as the villain. Samuel Cross, an assistant federal public defender, invited the five-woman and seven-man jury to see Girardi as a once-powerful attorney whose final years were marred by progressive dementia, disorganization at his law firm, Girardi Keese, and large-scale theft by the firm’s chief financial officer, Christopher Kamon.
In essence, it was Girardi who was the victim of fraud, Cross said.
Kamon quietly pocketed more than $50 million from his boss through various transactions: checks to shell companies, payments to friendly suppliers, $23 million in American Express card charges, the defense attorney said.
As a result, Girardi had to invest $80 million of his own money in Girardi Keese.
“He’s trying to keep this company afloat,” Cross told jurors. “Why is the company going under? Because Chris Kamon is stealing money.”
Cross has repeatedly addressed the complexity of the law firm’s operations from 2010 to 2020, the period at the center of the case.
At that time, more than $1 billion flowed through Girardi Keese in 300,000 transactions across 175 bank accounts. As the account manager, Kamon had the unique power to gradually divert money to pay his girlfriend $20,000 a month and buy homes in Los Angeles and, later, the Bahamas.
“This annoying detail is how Chris Kamon provokes the theft,” Cross added.
Prosecutors have also charged Kamon with wire fraud and separately accused him of engaging in a “parallel fraud” in which he allegedly embezzled millions of dollars from the company. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases and is scheduled to go to trial next year. The two men will be tried again in 2025 in Chicago, accused of stealing payments Boeing made to families whose loved ones died in a plane crash in Indonesia.
Prosecutors have long expected Girardi to pin the blame on Kamon.
In his opening statement, Paetty told jurors that the amount Kamon allegedly stole was “a fraction” of the amount Girardi is accused of taking and that, regardless, it was Girardi – not Kamon – who was lying to customers.
As an example, Paetty played for jurors a voicemail from around 2020 in which Girardi tells one of his clients, Josefina Hernandez, that her settlement payment was delayed because of a court order.
“I don’t want you to be upset,” he told Hernandez in the recording. “I know you are and I don’t blame you.”
Paetty told jurors that “there was no more order to sign.”
“These were lies — his lies — and Josefina Hernandez never saw a dime of her settlement,” he said, promising jurors they would hear more voicemails and review emails and letters that he said further show Girardi’s role in defrauding customers.
“You will see for yourself how knowledgeable the defendant was about his clients’ files,” Paetty said.
Since Girardi’s law firm went bankrupt in late 2020, his lawyers have said he has suffered cognitive decline, and that continued Tuesday. Cross said witnesses throughout the trial will testify that Girardi’s personal hygiene was neglected, that the lawyer made famous by the movie “Erin Brockovich” had stopped recognizing people he had known for years, that he would reread the same emails multiple times and repeat himself in conversation.
Cross said the mental decline occurred during the decade at issue in the case, but accelerated after a car accident in 2017. By 2020, Girardi Keese had descended into chaos, and even Girardi was the victim of a “bizarre elder abuse scheme” by an unnamed person he thought was working as a secret government lawyer, the defense alleged.
“Tom doesn’t just lose a step,” Cross said. “He falls off a cliff.”
