'Disgrace to the entire legal profession' gets time in 2 federal fraud cases
A California attorney was sentenced to a total of nearly three years in prison last week in unrelated fraud cases.
On July 20, Gino Paul Pietro got two years in a sentencing hearing at the federal courthouse in Santa Ana, for helping a client in a loan scheme, Courthouse News and the Los Angeles Times (sub. req.) report. The client, who submitted fabricated documents to the U.S. Small Business Administration concerning some $4 million in commercial loans, got 78 months.
By the end of the week, Pietro was sentenced to another 10 months, six of which will run consecutively to his earlier sentence, by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego. Sabraw described Pietro as a “disgrace to the entire legal profession.”
That case concerned six families of individuals in pretrial detention. Each was persuaded by Pietro to pay $3,000 for services of his legal assistant, who Pietro falsely described as an attorney skilled in immigration and criminal matters, according to prosecutors.
Another California attorney, who is in his mid-sixties, has the same name but is not involved in the wire fraud cases against the 54-year-old defendant, the Courthouse News article notes.
KNSD and the Orange County Register also have stories.
