Investigations Into Billing, Criminal Conviction For Failing To Pay Taxes and Accusations of Miscond
On January 5, 2007, the Hartford Courant reported that Sherman was under investigation by a panel of the Statewide Grievance Committee, a state agency which disciplines lawyers, concerning an accusation that he violated several rules of professional conduct, including charging the client $187,000 without providing a fee agreement or an hourly billing statement. A former client, Hakan Yalincak, complained to the agency in March 2006 that Sherman, his attorney, had billed him but had provided little documentation to show where the money went.
"I was hired to try to put these fires out and defend him. It was an absolutely fair fee, and I'm confident that will come out," Sherman told The Courant "I'm confident this will resolve itself in a very favorable manner." Sherman said he worked on Yalincak's complex cases for more than a year and earned the money. In 2007, Sherman's former client filed a lawsuit in federal court which Sherman later settled in May 2008.
In 2006, Sherman paid Yalincak a $50,000 refund during the grievance process, and the former client tried to drop his charges, but the agency wouldn't allow it. The panel then started investigating whether or not Sherman had acted improperly by making a payment to someone who brought accusations against him to the state agency. Sherman said the payment had nothing to do with the complaint to the agency but was made in exchange for Yalincak's agreement not to file a lawsuit against him. In September 2006, a regional panel of the Statewide Grievance Committee issued a finding of probable cause against Sherman. In May 2007, Sherman agreed that he violated two rules of professional conduct and was reprimanded by the Statewide Grievance Committee.
On June 30, 2010, Sherman pled guilty two counts of willfully failing to pay federal income taxes for tax years 2001 and 2002, in the amount of $390,000 in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut. As of the date of his plea, Sherman still owes penalties and interest for those years in the approximate amount of $309,000. Sherman also owes back taxes in the approximate amount of $697,500, and approximately $144,000 in penalties and interest, for the 2004 through 2008 tax years. He was sentenced on December 22, 2010 to one year and one day in prison. He will report to prison on March 16, 2011.
Sherman's former law firm partner, Joseph Richichi also pled guilty to similar charges of tax evasion for failing to pay taxes on approximately $3.1 million on April 5, 2007 and was sentenced on December 19, 2007 to sixteen month imprisonment.
It is unclear whether Sherman will be permitted to practice law ever again after his June 30, 2010 criminal conviction.
Read more about this topic: Mickey Sherman
Famous quotes containing the words pay, accusations, taxes, failing, conviction and/or criminal:
“Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, “If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“The law before us, my lords, seems to be the effect of that practice of which it is intended likewise to be the cause, and to be dictated by the liquor of which it so effectually promotes the use; for surely it never before was conceived by any man entrusted with the administration of public affairs, to raise taxes by the destruction of the people.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“I would be a winner because I was a loser! That’s right. I dream of failure every night of my life, and that’s my secret. To make it in this rat race you have to dream of failing every day. I mean, that is reality.”
—Donald Freed, U.S. screenwriter, and Arnold M. Stone. Robert Altman. Richard Nixon (Philip Baker Hall)
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)