6 - Contrived ignorance

Summary

The sad fact is that honest lawyers sometimes have crooked clients. In a notorious 1980 case of client fraud, a pair of businessmen used the services of an unsuspecting law firm to close hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crooked loans for their computer leasing company. The businessmen created forged leases to inflate the value of their company's contracts, which they used as collateral for the loans. In the evenings, the pair would turn the lights off in their office. Goodman would crouch beneath a glass table shining a flashlight upward so that Weissman could trace signatures from genuine leases on to the forgeries. New loans serviced previous loans in a decade-long pyramid scheme.

After nearly ten years, Goodman and Weissman's accountant stumbled across their frauds. He wrote a detailed warning to the swindlers' law firm, which the accountant's lawyer tried to hand-deliver to Joseph Hutner, the law firm's lead partner.

But Hutner didn't want to see it. In fact, he wanted the accountant to take the letter back. Above all, Hutner seemed to want to preserve his own oblivion. As the accountant's lawyer later recounted, “I had visions of him clamping his hands over his ears and running out of the office.”

Well, wouldn't you? Hutner had been used. He had mouths to feed in his firm, and the computer crooks represented more than half the firm's annual billings. His flight reaction probably came straight from the gut.