Ex-CFO at Tom Girardi’s law firm to plead guilty to wire fraud

The former chief financial officer at Tom Girardi’s law firm agreed on Tuesday to plead guilty to federal fraud charges, acknowledging that he and Girardi worked side-by-side to swindle clients out of millions in settlement money.

In a plea agreement signed and filed Tuesday afternoon, Christopher Kamon, the former CFO, said he would forfeit $3.1 million and plead guilty to two wire fraud charges in exchange for the dismissal of all other charges against him in Los Angeles. He faces a separate indictment in Chicago.

Kamon, 51, is scheduled to enter the guilty plea on Friday in downtown L.A. He has remained in federal custody since his arrest in December 2022. Reached late Tuesday, his attorney, Michael Severo, declined to comment.

The deal comes weeks after a jury found the 85-year-old Girardi, once a superstar plaintiffs’ attorney, guilty of four counts of wire fraud.

Both men were set to go on trial together this summer, but a judge separated their cases after defense attorneys argued that their strategies were in fundamental conflict: each planned to blame the other.

At Girardi’s trial, his attorneys repeatedly sought to shift the blame onto Kamon and said it was the man overseeing the firm’s dozens of bank accounts who had masterminded the large-scale fraud.

As part of the plea deal, Kamon swore to the accuracy of a seven-page statement in which he admitted that he and Girardi worked together to perpetrate a long-running scheme to defraud and mislead clients.

Kamon, who ran the firm’s accounting department from 2004 onward, said that Girardi called him each morning to ask about the law firm’s bank account balances.

“When the Girardi Keese operating accounts were low, defendant Kamon would relay this information to defendant Girardi,” the plea agreement states. Girardi would then instruct Kamon to transfer money from client trust accounts and log the transfer as “attorney fees,” according to the agreement.

Even if attorneys fees had already been withdrawn, “Girardi would instruct defendant Kamon to ‘do it anyways,’” Kamon said in the plea agreement. “This was a common practice at Girardi Keese of which other senior lawyers in the firm were aware.”

Kamon also acknowledged that from 2013 to 2020, he and others devised a so-called “side fraud” in which he embezzled money from Girardi Keese, using sham vendors to generate fraudulent invoices that he billed to the law firm. With money pilfered from the firm, Kamon financed construction projects at his homes in Palos Verdes and Encino, according to the plea agreement.

The charges to which Kamon pleaded guilty carry a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison, along with fines and three years of supervised release. Under the agreement, federal prosecutors will seek a two-level reduction in his sentence and also recommend “the low end” of the prison term specified by federal sentencing guidelines.

The plea agreement does not appear to impact another pending criminal case for Kamon. He and Girardi are facing charges in federal court in Chicago, with prosecutors accusing them of misappropriating $3 million from settlements belonging to widows and orphans of a Boeing 737-Max crash in Indonesia.