Just when we'd thought we'd heard the last of Chriss W. Street, the disgraced former Orange County treasurer/tax collector has reappeared on the public scene and, like all Street sightings, this one is bizarre.
Street is blaming his sensational $7 million bankruptcy court loss in 2010 on his own lawyer, Phillip B. Greer, and he's demanding that Greer pay him for alleged lousy, incompetent trial work.
According to a lawsuit filed this week in Orange County Superior Court, Street believes Greer owes him “in excess of $8,800,000” in damages for professional negligence, fraud and violations of California's business and professional codes.
]
Street hired Greer in 2007 to defend his service as a bankruptcy trustee
of a struggling Los Angeles company. While in that job, Street abused
his position by using the company's funds to pay himself a $250,000
salary plus $175,000 in bonuses and $477,000 in personal expenses that
included a European vacation, cosmetic surgery and gym memberships. A
federal judge ruled that Street had breached his duty as a trustee.
But now Street claims that Greer didn't know what he was doing in the
case, botched a session with an expert witness, skipped a critical
pre-trial meeting, hid multiple prior ethical problems and signed (without his permission) a stipulation of
facts that was “false and misleading.”
“Defendant Greer failed to exercise the skill and care of a reasonably
careful bankruptcy litigation attorney would have used in similar
circumstances,” Street wrote in his 11-page, Oct. 3 complaint.
Greer's work was, according to Street, “fraudulent dishonesty.”
Greer has not yet filed a response in court.
Street is representing himself in this case.
The matter has been assigned to Superior Court Judge Jamoa Moberly, but no hearings have been scheduled.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.