Kevin Fine, a former state district
judge who was arrested in a sting operation for felony
attempted drug possession.
Fine had been sober for 10 years when he won
election to Harris County’s 177th District Court in 2008. He’d won the job by
campaigning on promises that he would help other addicts get sober and get out
of the court system and later resigned from the bench in 2012 to return to
private practice. But Fine was later arrested for the second time in two years
on May 1 when he was caught by police in a drug sting in central Texas.
According to court records, a woman who hired Fine to represent her against
drug charges told a Kerr County Sheriff’s investigator that the lawyer would
take payment in cash or trade sex and drugs for his services. Fine was
arrested after police watched him discuss a meth deal with the woman. Fine
later resigned his law license as a condition of a plea deal in one of the
felony drug cases he faced.
Perry Don Cortese, a Little River
lawyer who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for an
international money laundering scheme that ripped off law firms.
Cortese had a good thing going in Texas with his
business partner Priscilla Ann Ellis. They would incorporate shell companies,
open bank accounts for those fake companies and then contact lawyers and law
firms for transactional work for their bogus business ventures—merely as a way
to gain access to the attorney and law firms legal trust accounts. They would
eventually end up taking $8.8 million from the lawyers and the law firms in
which they ordered them to move the supposed proceeds of transactional
conclusions to international money launderers between 2012 and 2015 before
Cortese and Ellis were finally caught. In 2016, a Florida federal jury found
both Cortese and Ellis guilty of money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire
fraud. Ellis was sentenced to 40 years for her role in the scheme. And on Oct.
21, U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday of the Middle District of Florida
sentenced Cortese to 25 years in prison for his part in the scam.
......
The article didn't mention that Cortese's co-defendant tried to hire a hitman to kill the witnesses and give them 'Columbian neckties.'
......
On a sadder note, we lost Scott Stehling this year. Scott was a great lawyer, and had he continued in criminal law could have been in the top tier of criminal trial lawyers in the country. In his younger days he practiced criminal law. In the early 1980's he defended one of the degenerates in the Slave Ranch trial (Carlton Caldwell, the ranch foreman), who got a 14 year sentence instead of life in prison. He won an acquittal for a teenage delinquent tried for helping two other young me murder the wealthy heir to old San Antonio family at his ranch in Edwards County. He was also a gentleman, courtly and kind.
