Former CFO at Tom Girardi's law firm admits to helping embezzle millions from clients
The former chief financial officer of Tom Girardi's law firm pleaded guilty Friday to two federal counts of wire fraud, admitting to helping the now-disbarred attorney embezzle tens of millions of dollars from clients.
Christopher Kazuo Kamon, 51, was living in the Bahamas when he was arrested in November 2022 in connection with the embezzlement case of Girardi, once a prominent personal injury lawyer in Los Angeles. Kamon was the head of accounting at Girardi Keese from 2004 to 2011. The firm on Wilshire Boulevard operated for more than 50 years before being dissolved in 2021.
He faces up to 20 years in prison on each count and is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan 31, 2025.
Kamon, a former resident of Encino and Palos Verdes, admitted in a plea agreement to scheming with 85-year-old Girardi to defraud the firm's clients from at least 2010 until December 2020. By that time, Girardi Keese had been forced into bankruptcy proceedings as allegations of stealing from clients mounted.
Kamon helped Girardi misappropriate the clients' funds, using them to pay the firm's credit card bills, payroll and the personal expenses of the two men. The ex-CFO had signatory authority on some banks accounts in the firm's name, prosecutors said.
On Aug. 27, a jury found Girardi guilty of running a Ponzi scheme that stole at least $15 million from his clients. Prosecutors have said he used the millions of dollars to fund a luxurious lifestyle including the music career of his now-estranged wife, Erika Girardi, a pop singer who goes by the name Erika Jayne and stars on Bravo TV's "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills."
In his position, Kamon had a duty to keep accurate accounting records for attorney-client trust accounts, federal prosecutors said.
One of the clients defrauded by the firm had reached a $53 million settlement for a 2010 natural pipeline explosion in Northern California that left him suffering from severe burns all over his body.
However, that deal was negotiated and agreed to without his approval. And under the terms of the settlement, $20 million was invested into an annuity and the remaining $28 million was wired into a trust account for the law firm in January 2013.
Instead of giving the burn victim his share of the money, Girardi — with the assistance of Kamon — embezzled the client's money and used it to pay the firm's own liabilities and expenses. That included payments to other clients whose money had been previously misappropriated, federal prosecutors said.
"To prevent the victim from discovering Girardi's embezzlement, Girardi lied to the client by saying the funds had been transferred into a separate interest-bearing account," the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California said in a statement. "In fact, no such transfers had been made and no such interest-bearing account containing these funds existed."
So-called "interest payments" were sent to the client by Girardi and Kamon from what was supposed to be an interest-bearing account, the U.S. Attorney's Office statement explains. They sent the victim a $2.5 million check in July 2019.
While that was supposed to come from the client's own settlement money, it had actually been taken from other Girardi Keese clients as the former lawyer had already spent the victim's millions of dollars in settlement funds on other things.
As part of the long-running Ponzi scheme, Kamon was also involved in making payments to a person federal prosecutors only describe as a "female companion" — not naming the person or stating what her relationship is or with whom. She received a monthly stipend of $20,000 from the firm's accounts despite never having worked there.
Kamon has been in federal custody since December 2022.
The IRS Criminal Investigation division and the FBI investigated the case.