Former Virginia lawyer gets six years for stealing from clients, relatives
A former Virginia bankruptcy lawyer has been sentenced to six years in federal prison for stealing more than $1.1 million from clients and relatives.
Michael Eisner, 32, was also sentenced Friday to three years of supervised release and was ordered to pay $1.1 million in restitution, the National Law Journal reports.
Eisner had pleaded guilty in July on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Eisner, who now lives in Mastic, New York, owned and operated the Northern Virginia Law Group in McLean, Virginia, in 2011 and 2012, and during those years he engaged in a variety of fraud schemes, many of which involved the use of phony check or credit card transactions, federal prosecutors alleged in the sentencing document (PDF). He did so by exploiting the lag time between a payment to a financial institution and the time it took for that institution to realize that his payment was phony.
Because the financial institutions sometimes caught up to him, Eisner’s approximately $3.6 million in intended losses was much higher than the actual losses he caused, which totaled at least $1.2 million, prosecutors said. The government initially identified higher losses for victims—an approximate figure of $4.8 million, according to an FBI press release from July—than those found in the presentence investigation report, according to the sentencing document. But the government accepted the probation office’s more conservative loss calculation for purposes of restitution since it feels the higher loss amount supports Eisner’s sentence, the sentencing document says.
Eisner’s lawyer, federal public defender Kevin Brehm, had asked the judge to sentence Eisner to no more than 30 months in prison.
“While it does not excuse his unlawful conduct, Mr. Eisner was motivated to commit these crimes because he had allowed himself to develop gambling, alcohol and drug problems while still trying to support his family,” he wrote in his sentencing papers (PDF).
