My first post about George Guldi, the real estate lawyer and former county legislator, back in February was decidedly provincial in interest.  A local story about a local lawyer who may have had a finger in some nasty mortgage/real estate business.  As Monty Python would call it, “nasty bits.”  About the only cackles raised were those of Guldi’s very zealous, if somewhat misguided, young attorney, who argued strenuously that I failed to appreciate the seriousness of the seizure of legal files from Guldi’s office.

Suddenly, the story of Guldi has captured  broad interest, even the eye of Bob Ambrogi who has his pick of the litter when it comes to legal stories.  Was it the allegations of widespread use of strawbuyer buyers to scam mortgages?  Nope, that wasn’t it.  Was it the civil suit filed by Wachovia Bank for the alleged theft of $1.8 million, to which Guldi responded that he would have known if he had stolen $1.8 million?  Nope, that wasn’t it either.

One might think that stories about mortgage and real estate scams would be sexy enough on their own to merit some degree of interest.  But the real estate implosion is old news already, and the fact that prosecutors are only now first getting to work on dealing with the pervasive underbelly of the real estate boom, including the role played by lawyers, seems to hold little interest of itself.  Whether the focus is on the nature of real estate scams, the involvement of lawyers or the failure of banks and prosecutors to notice that this was going on for years under their noses, and was painfully flagrant if anyone had bothered to look, no one seems to care.

What made George Guldi into a real story was this:

Three Long Island lawyers stand accused of teaming up with a Manhattan dominatrix and a Manhattan fetish club to run a $50 million mortgage scam.

The fake buyers were recruited from among the clients of Arena Studios, a sexual fetish fantasy business owned by dominatrix Carrie Coakley and her husband, Donald MacPherson, prosecutors charge. The business provides a “beautifully decorated and fully equipped private dungeon” where clients and dominatrixes can meet.

Add a dominatrix to the mix and suddenly we have a story of interest.  Even lawyers can be interesting when there’s a whip and woman in leather and high heels involved.

Lest Guldi’s lawyers have too much free time on their hands, let me state that my repetition of this story is not intended to suggest that George Guldi is guilty of anything.  What’s obvious to the rest of us seems to strain Katherine Huang’s rather tightly strung sensibilities, with her demanding that it be spelled out in painful detail or I will suffer another of her harrangues.  And since I have no reason to suggest otherwise, or desire another round of silly goo popping out of Huang orifices, it’s easy enough to state the obvious and satisfy her simplistic demands.  Besides, I hope that she’s putting all her energies into defending her client, which no doubt demands a challenging use of whatever skills she possesses.

But it’s disturbing that it takes a dominatrix before anyone shows serious interest in what went so very wrong in the real estate market, and the role played by attorneys.  In our little cyber cocoon, lawyers are busily establishing how competent, likable and trustworthy we are.  We are great humanitarians.  Love us.  Respect us.  Trust us. 

Regardless of whether the lawyers in this indictment are guilty as charged, or guilty of anything, the fact remains that some real estate lawyers were deeply, and I mean deeply, engaged in overt, flagrant, outrageous schemes.  It was so easy to do, given the greed of banks and the trust afforded lawyers.  The problem doesn’t begin and end with Marc Dreier raiding his firm’s escrow accounts.  The problem exists with your friendly local real estate lawyer dipping his fat little fingers into the mortgage and housing pool, mustering all the integrity his title affords to obtain reliance that the numbers and names he writes on a closing statement are real. 

Boys and girls, if you want to the public to trust us as lawyers, to have sufficient faith that they can believe what we put on paper, what we represent to others, that there is enough cash in the escrow account to pay out what’s due, then we need to take the lead on recognizing the dirt within our profession and cleanse ourselves of those who use the title “lawyer” as a stick-up weapon. 

We’ve done a horribly poor job of acknowledging that there are members of the bar who are untrustworthy, even criminal, using their law licenses as a license to steal.  If we don’t stand up to our own, then we do not deserve anyone’s trust.  For those of the brethren out there who want to place themselves on the pedestal of integrity, get off your bums and speak out against unethical, untrustworthy, and criminal conduct perpetrated by lawyers.  If you maintain silence, for fear of holding the profession in disrepute or just to avoid the mixed message while you busily hype the crap out of yourself, you are complicit in this conduct. 

It’s past due that the legal profession gets a good whipping, takes its lumps and cleans itself up.  The public deserve integrity from us, and now would be a very good time for all of us to take a stand, even if it mars your marketing campaign.

P.S. Within minutes of finishing this post, I saw that Jonathon Turley has posted about Guldi as well, again with the dominatrix hook.  Why aren’t allegations of dirty lawyers enough to spark concern?