Monday, December 06, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

JANE ANN MORRISON: Dads and sons prominent in our corner of corrupt world of fraud, payoffs

Your lawyer forges your signature, takes $350,000 rightfully belonging to you and another client, and blows town, abandoning his wife, his children and you.

Unfortunately, if your lawyer is Lawrence Davidson, this isn't a hypothetical.

After you finish haranguing lawyers in general and Davidson in particular, what can you do?

Actually, the State Bar of Nevada offers hope for the hapless.

The state bar has a fund to pay back people who have been defrauded by their lawyers. From the $350 each lawyer pays to be a member of the state bar, $15 goes into the Client Security Fund, raising $94,500 a year.

A clue that the fund might be underfunded: It tends to pay out almost everything taken in annually, says Las Vegas attorney Vince Consul, president-elect of the state bar.

This year, there were $300,000 worth of claims from people who said their lawyer cheated them or embezzled from them. The fund is set up so that the maximum any client can receive is $15,000 and no more than $25,000 is paid per attorney. Applying those caps, Consul said, this year the bar wants to pay $133,000 back to people who were ripped off by their lawyers.

But there's only $105,000 in the kitty.

That $300,000 in claims doesn't include the nearly $350,000 that Davidson took off with Oct. 15.

On a cheerful note, he wasn't gone long enough to rip through all the money he had stolen. He returned to Las Vegas to enter a prescription drug treatment program Oct. 27 and try to patch his life together again.

Davidson, 38, is in a miserable state. He's been indicted for forging a federal judge's signature, and the case is being handled by the same folks who are prosecuting the ongoing public corruption case, (not a good sign and a hint that there is more to come). His deceptive, dishonorable behavior is likely to break up his marriage, and there's a strong chance the Nevada Supreme Court will disbar the medical malpractice attorney.

The total amount of claims against him from clients hasn't yet been calculated, but Davidson's attorney Steve Stein offered a glimmer of hope to some of the clients.

"He'll be returning a substantial portion," Stein said. "I believe in my heart approximately $250,000 will be returned."

In Davidson's case, he also had malpractice insurance, another source of recovery for his clients, Stein said.

If Davidson returns a large sum, his malpractice insurance covers losses, and the state bar's client security fund has a few dollars left, the people he defrauded might be better off than they feared when I first reported he had skipped with their money.

But one man and his family are in an odd situation: They don't want the money back.

Davidson took $160,000 that rightfully should have gone to Clark Garner and his brothers and sister.

But Garner said his family never agreed to settle the case and even today want to continue the wrongful death lawsuit filed against Valley Hospital after his 69-year-old father died there.

However, the state bar complaint alleged Davidson forged the signatures of Garner and three other family members, swiped a notary seal and used that to obtain the $160,000 settlement from Valley Hospital.

Garner has hired another attorney to see if the dismissal of the case can be reversed.

The malpractice lawsuit filed by Davidson in 2002 on behalf of the Garner family contends Bobby Garner died in 1998 because after he was taken for an MRI at the hospital, he wasn't reconnected to cardiac telemetry equipment when he returned.

"We wouldn't have settled for $160,000," Garner said this past week. "This is about our dad and his wrongful death."

Fathers and sons are a recurring theme in this story.

Garner wants the hospital punished for the death of his dad.

Davidson was released into the custody of his father, Don Davidson, former Triple Five of Nevada vice president, who like his son has been investigated, but not charged, as part of the FBI's corruption probe into developers.

And then there's the now estranged father-and-son duo who started it all -- Jack and Michael Galardi, whose topless clubs drew the attention of the FBI, starting this drawn out investigation into corrupt politicians taking payoffs from the younger Galardi.

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at jane@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0275.