With Charges Dropped, Disbarred Attorney Works to Clear Her Name
Mark Fass, NY Law Journal, 12-27-2010

Editors' Note: This article has been updated to reflect a Correction.

After five felony charges against her were dismissed earlier this month, a former Queens attorney has accused the Queens District Attorney's Office of pursuing a grand-larceny case against her despite ample evidence of her innocence.

The attorney, Jennie Dellaria, says that defending against the year-long prosecution bankrupted both her and her elderly mother.

"A basic investigation would have established that she was not involved in these transactions," Ms. Dellaria's attorney, Robert Gottlieb, said yesterday in an interview. "It's not an overstatement to say that this case drove [Dellaria] and her mother to bankruptcy."

Ms. Dellaria was charged in January 2010 with stealing funds from former clients after several checks bounced from her attorney escrow account.

The bounced checks also led to Ms. Dellaria's disbarment in December 2006.

Joseph Levine, Ms. Dellaria's romantic and business partner, admitted stealing the missing funds, which totalled approximately $300,000, from Ms. Dellaria's escrow account to pay off gambling debts (NYLJ, Nov. 13, 2007).

Ms. Dellaria and Mr. Levine have a daughter and shared office space.

Both Mr. Levine and Ms. Dellaria contended that she did not know that he had stolen the money. Mr. Levine was sentenced in 2008 and is serving a three-to-nine-year sentence on the theft and other unrelated charges at the Wallkill Correctional Facility.

The district attorney's office maintained that Mr. Levine was not solely responsible for the misappropriations from Ms. Dellaria's account and on January 2010 filed a five-count grand larceny indictment against her.

Ms. Dellaria, who suffers from breast cancer and is raising the couple's 12-year-old child on her own, hired Mr. Gottlieb to defend her.

The case went to trial in November before Supreme Court Justice Stephen Knopf, and resulted in a mistrial stemming from evidentiary issues.

Last week, the district attorney's office withdrew the charges in People v. Dellaria, 2781-09.

Mr. Gottlieb calls the prosecution's decision to end the case too little, too late.

"If they had done even a basic objective investigation, it would have been clear that there was no evidence that Jennie was involved," Mr. Gottlieb said. "Our investigator, without any difficulty whatsoever, reached and spoke to each and every victim, and each and every victim told our investigator that Jennie was not involved."

The only potentially damning evidence, Mr. Gottlieb said, were checks purportedly bearing Ms. Dellaria's signature. Those signatures, however, were fake, according to both a handwriting expert and Mr. Levine, who admitted personally forging them.

A spokesman for the district attorney's office declined to discuss the case or the evidence against Ms. Dellaria, saying the file had been sealed when the charges were dismissed.

Ms. Dellaria said she spent "hundreds of thousands of dollars" on her case and is now supporting herself and her daughter through the slow trickle of fees she receives from old cases.

At some point in the near future, Ms. Dellaria said she intends to petition the Second Department for reinstatement.

"I hope that the grievance committee understands all this, and hopefully one day I'll be able to pursue a civil rights practice," Ms. Dellaria said. "The way I've been treated unjustly, I'd like to represent people who have been treated unjustly too."

Assistant District Attorney Theresa Smith appeared on behalf of the Queens prosecutor's office.

@|Mark Fass can be contacted at mfass@alm.com.

Attorney Joseph Levine Arrested for Stealing from Clients
LINK

Joseph Levine, a 59-year-old recently disbarred attorney from Hewlett, Nassau County, New York is under arrest and has been charged with stealing in excess of $300,000 from two clients who he was supposed to be representing over the course of the past year. The charges against him are Second and Third Degree Grand Larceny and two counts of Second Degree Criminal Possession of a Forged Document

In evidence in the complaint states that in December of 2006, the defendant advised a resident of the Nassau County Village of Rockville Center to settle for $300,000 in relation to a personal injury lawsuit. Then on December 25, he visited the office of the insurance company in Pennsylvania and pressured them to issue a check because, according to him, the client had a daughter who needed the money to pay for heart surgery. They issued the check to the defendant in the name of his client. He then forged the signatures of both the client and her husband and proceeded to deposit the check into his bank account. The bank's records show that he did deposit $300,000 on December 28,2006.

By the time March rolled around, his bank account stood at -$139.44 and the clients never received any of their settlement money. The Nassau County's District Attorney's Office was notified on March 19, 2007.

Also, in May of 2007 a woman from the town of Elmont in Nassau County was buying a house and the real estate agent gave her a list of attorneys to select from and she choose Levine. She gave him $10,000 to hold as a down payment on the house, but the sale did not go through and she asked for the return of her money. Levine said he wanted to hold on to the money just in case he could resurrect the deal, She continued to keep in contact with him throughout the summer, but as of yet has not received a refund. The District Attorney received a complaint on September 12, 2007.

Levine filed an affidavit of resignation form the Bar on April 6, 2007 and he was disbarred on June 26,2007. If he is convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 15 years.

Source: Nassau County DA http://www.nassaucountyny.gov/

Commentary: Levine had already quit as a lawyer in the face of allegations against him of theft, but kept acting as an attorney and stealing. He couldn’t have thought for even a second that he would get away with this. The whole story of why he did this remains to be told. Let him tell it from a prison cell, during a long incarceration.

From: Gary E. Rosenberg (personal injury and accident attorney and lawyer; serving Brooklyn Queens Bronx)
Gary E. Rosenberg (personal injury and accident attorney and lawyer; serving Brooklyn Queens Bronx)

Posted by Gary E. Rosenberg on December 15, 2007