I suspect most of us have been deceived at least once in our careers, and not just by our clients. Often because we haven’t checked what we have been told. If we are told that a solicitor has played county cricket, I doubt many would go through Wisden to check.
When I was articled, my principal fell foul of a man whom he had employed ‘with a view to partnership’, as the saying went. Not that he actually stole from him. He was a good advocate by all accounts. His trouble was that he had never qualified.
Early in my career I never asked for references from a man with a good following whom I saw regularly in the magistrates’ courts. He said he wanted to move from Essex to London. Had I checked, I would have found him to be an alcoholic and saved myself the £100 he stole from me.
He was quickly employed at a much bigger and more fashionable criminal defence firm. ‘He cost me thousands,’ the senior partner told me later. The individual’s career culminated in prison and strike-off. He died accidentally setting fire to his bed in a Paddington hotel.
But the award for sheer chutzpah must go to a pair of unrelated tricksters from Australia, a land whose con artists seem much more inventive than ours.
Second prize goes to Ahmad Al Ridah, who, without qualifying, set up practices and stole thousands in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Arrested, he escaped from jail in a prison officer’s car and in 2001 transferred operations to Perth. When the Legal Practice Board raided his offices the next year, they found 128 files, 40 of them active. Six years.
The gold medal goes to Sara Grasso, who awarded herself a law degree and several prizes before throwing a grand party to celebrate her admission to the state bar. She also persuaded her parents and others to invest in a non-existent Italian marble business. The total loss to her victims was around AU$660,000. She received 43 months and her parents lost their house.
James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
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