LOS ANGELES (CN) — The longtime accountant at disgraced plaintiff law firm Girardi Keese was sentenced to 10 years and one month in federal prison on Friday for helping the firm’s co-founder Thomas Girardi embezzle millions of dollars from his clients.
Christopher Kamon, 51, was also ordered to pay $8.9 million in restitution at his sentencing hearing in downtown Los Angeles, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office in LA.
“This defendant played a key role in a long-running scheme led by Tom Girardi,” U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said in a statement. “For nearly 20 years, Kamon enabled Girardi’s scheme to defraud vulnerable clients of the law firm. Ironically, it was Kamon’s own lies that accelerated the law firm’s demise. We hope the sentence imposed today brings a measure of justice to his victims.”
Kamon has been in custody since his arrest on Nov. 5, 2022, at the airport in Baltimore when he returned from the Bahamas. Prosecutors said Kamon planned to leave the county, change his name and hide.
The former CFO of Girardi Keese pleaded guilty last October to helping Girardi embezzle money from the firm’s clients as well as to embezzling money from the firm himself in a “side fraud.”
He admitted that from 2013 to the end of 2020, he used bogus vendors to bill the firm for goods and services that didn’t exist and pocketed the money himself. Among other things, he used the funds for construction projects at his homes in Palos Verdes and Encino, California.
His ex-fiancee testified at Girardi’s trial last year that Kamon paid her a $20,000 monthly allowance and had more than 10 side businesses, including one renting out portable stripper poles. She testified that the accountant fled the country to the Bahamas because he thought he would be blamed for the Girardi scandal.
Kamon’s attorney had asked for a sentence of time served or 30 months at the most.
“I am not the criminal fraudster the prosecutors and Mr. Girardi’s lawyers have tried to portray me as,” Kamon said in a letter to the judge. “I am simply a 51 year old man who made a mistake, and I say this not to make light of what I have done, but with the hope that I might be forgiven.”
He also said in the letter that “contrary to the lies my ex-fiance told, and contrary to the accusations of the FBI, prosecution’s and Mr. Girardi’s counsel, I was not fleeing.”
Girardi, who has said he suffers from dementia, was found guilty at trial in August.
Federal prosecutors accused Girardi of running a Ponzi scheme to steal money from his former clients, using money from new settlements to pay off clients whose money was past due, all the while lying to the newer clients in an effort to keep them at bay.
But much of the money also went to fund his lavish lifestyle, one replete with private jets and exclusive country clubs, to say nothing of his wife Erika Jayne’s entertainment career. Eventually, his firm collapsed under the weight of all those creditors.
He’s expected to be sentenced in the coming months.