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A federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti on 36 counts of perjury, fraud, failure to pay taxes, embezzlement, and other financial crimes, according to an indictment that was unsealed on Thursday and first reported on by The Los Angeles Times.
According to the indictment, Avenatti allegedly stole millions of dollars from five clients using a web of shell companies and bank accounts to cover his alleged misdeeds.
Nick Hanna, the US attorney for the Central District of California, said during a press conference Thursday that the charges against Avenatti are connected because he allegedly used “money generated from one set of crimes” in “other crimes.”
Avenatti did so to prevent his “financial house of cards from crumbling,” Hanna added.
The maximum sentence Avenatti would face if convicted on all counts is 335 years in prison.
The lawyer pushed back the charges in a series of tweets Thursday.
“I am entitled to a FULL presumption of innocence and am confident that justice will be done once ALL of the facts are known,” he wrote.
According to the LA Times, one of the clients Avenatti allegedly stole from was a mentally ill paraplegic who won a $4 million settlement in a lawsuit against Los Angeles County. The report, which cited the indictment, said Avenatti received the money from LA county in 2015 but did not tell Johnson about it. Instead, he allegedly funneled most of the money through several bank accounts linked to a race-car team and coffee company he owned.
Then, Avenatti allegedly spent all the money in five months but did not tell Johnson about it. Instead, he paid Johnson $124,000 over the next four years and paid some rent on his behalf.
Avenatti faces additional charges in 2 other criminal cases
Last month, Avenatti was named as a defendant in two other indictments from federal prosecutors in New York and Los Angeles.
- In the first indictment on March 25, New York federal prosecutors charged Avenatti with attempting to extort more than $20 million from Nike.
- In the second indictment, prosecutors in the Central District of California charged Avenatti with wire fraud and bank fraud.
New York prosecutors said in a charging document that Avenatti tried to get the $20 million from Nike by “threatening to use his ability to garner publicity to inflict substantial financial and reputational harm on the company if his demands were not met.”
Read more: Michael Avenatti says he’s ‘nervous’ about potential prison time but proclaims innocence
News of Avenatti’s indictment in the Nike case came just after he posted a tweet saying that he would be holding a press conference to “disclose a major high school/college basketball scandal perpetrated by @Nike that we have uncovered. This criminal conduct reaches the highest levels of Nike and involves some of the biggest names in college basketball.”
In a court filing, an FBI agent wrote that Avenatti said he would hold a press conference alleging misconduct at Nike unless he and another lawyer were paid between $15 million and $25 million to conduct an internal investigation, or were given $22.5 million to resolve their client’s claims and in exchange for their silence.
“Full confidentiality, we ride off into the sunset,” Avenatti told a Nike representative, according to the FBI agent.
In the second case, in the Central District of California, Avenatti was accused of embezzling a client’s money “in order to pay his own expense and debts,” and of “defrauding a bank in Mississippi.”
The lawsuit accused him of executing a scheme, from roughly December 2017 to March 2019, to defraud his clients and to “obtain money and property” from them “by means of material false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises, and the concealment of material facts.”
Prosecutors also alleged that Avenatti attempted to facilitate a fraudulent wire transfer of $494,500 from The Peoples Bank in Mississippi to a California Bank and Trust account in his law firm’s name.
from Viral Update News http://bit.ly/2KtYQ0l
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