For 35 years, Richard Kops enjoyed a respectable though modest career as a lawyer, handling mostly real estate transactions and dispensing free advice to local churches. Then, in the late 1990's, as his wife of 24 years was dying of cancer, he crossed the line.
Faced with medical bills not covered by insurance, Mr. Kops dipped into client funds held in his escrow account, according to his lawyer and the Suffolk County district attorney's office. He stole a second client's money to pay back the first. Helping to support a grown daughter and her twin sons, another daughter in graduate school, and an elderly aunt, he took a third client's money, then money from a fourth.
The dodge went on for years, prosecutors said, until the amount of money his clients clamored to get back exceeded his escrow balance. By 2004, when the police went looking for him, he was living with a daughter in North Carolina and bagging groceries in a supermarket.
On Monday, wearing a threadbare jacket and no tie, Mr. Kops, 71, appeared in Suffolk County Criminal Court, a disbarred lawyer pleading for mercy. ''I've committed grievous wrongs against God and mankind,'' he said. As a dozen of Mr. Kops's supporters wiped away tears, Justice Robert W. Doyle sentenced him to one and a third to four years in prison.
Cases of lawyers stealing from their clients are on the rise in New York, state figures show, and most of the lawyers implicated in recent years were middle-aged men who, like Mr. Kops, practiced alone. And, like Mr. Kops, a growing number were from Long Island.
Details here from The New York Times via LexisONE.com.