For several years beginning in about 2008, Orange County attorney/businessman Paul Jeffrey Lucas and his Lucas Law Center ran a mortgage loan modification scam that ripped off numerous consumers between $1,000 to $3,995 each.
From their Aliso Viejo offices, Lucas and his employees promised to perform work, took fees and then did nothing meaningful as unsuspecting homeowners lost their properties, according to government reports.
In Dec. 2010, the State Bar of California disbarred Lucas for incompetence, nabbing unearned fees and failure to cooperate with the agency's investigations.
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“[Lucas] willfully committed acts involving moral turpitude, dishonesty
or corruption,” concluded the agency, which also ordered him to pay
restitution to ripped off consumers.
Officials at the Federal Trade Administration (FTC) also filed a complaint and won injunctive relief for the deceptive practices. Lucas, a graduate of Southwestern University School of Law, filed motions to get U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter to reconsider the case.
But this week a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel rejected his complaints.
“The
district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Lucas' motion
for reconsideration because Lucas failed to show grounds warranting
reconsideration,” concluded judges Kim McLane Wardlaw, Richard Clifton and N. Randy Smith.
And Lucas's other complaints about having a crappy defense lawyer and being a victim of misconduct by the FTC, State Bar and Better Business Bureau?
The appellate judges called those assertions “unpersuasive.”
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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.