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Lerach in Jail

How the mighty have fallen. From the DC Examiner:

When he was on top of the world, flamboyant class-action plaintiffs lawyer William S. Lerach made more than $100 million during the 1990s for himself and even more for his now-disgraced firm, Milberg Weiss. ... Lerach once called himself “the Willie Horton of securities law.” Bullying, foul-mouthed, he ran roughshod over corporations, fishing for real and imagined malfeasance against shareholders. His courtroom thrashings were aimed at such high-tech giants as Apple Computer, Symantec, Conner Peripherals, Intel Corporation and Seagate Technology. ...

Lerach owns a lavish California mansion in the third-richest ZIP code in the nation, a neighborhood also home at various times to the singers Jewel and Juice Newton, brewer Joseph Coors, McDonald’s heiress Joan Kroc, and golfer Phil Mickelson.

At 12,500 square feet, the Tuscan-style house sits on 12 acres with a lemon grove, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a walk-in aviary with hornbills and toucans. It is filled with American Indian art, modern sculpture, and an eclectic collection of other art from various galleries in the United States and Europe.

Lerach also owns vacation homes in Steamboat Springs, Colo., and in Hawaii, and often flew on a private jet. His immense, 18th-floor office sported a huge tropical fish tank, marble-topped bar and exquisite, panoramic views of the San Diego Harbor.

As a prolific and generous contributor to Democratic office holders, seekers and causes, he enjoyed sleepovers in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and once raised $400,000 at a single fundraiser at his mansion.

Between the years 1993 and 1995, he was the nation’s second-largest political donor, as he and his then-wife, Star Soltan, gave $480,083 to mostly Democratic candidates and causes.

With such prolific contributing, Lerach was able to rub elbows routinely with Hollywood celebrities like Barbara Streisand, Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg who shared his political sympathies.

Now he sleeps in another federally owned bedroom, as federal convict #46683-112. The former star litigator is paid not the thousands of dollars per hour that he often garnered, but between 12 and 40 cents each hour, working about seven and a half hours per day — about half of the daily hours he formerly sometimes worked by choice. He reported May 19 to the low-security federal prison in Lompoc, Calif., to reside in one of the facility’s two military-style barracks shared with 351 other federal inmates.

He’ll be there for two years, having pleaded guilty in February to participating in a massive kickback scheme in which he and three other senior Milberg Weiss partners paid more than $11 million in bribes to plaintiffs in an estimated 150 cases, then lied about it in court filings. Federal officials say the firm got $250 million in tainted fees in the bribery scheme.