A disbarred Irvine attorney, who was looking at up to 15 years in prison for defrauding clients who'd hired him for traffic crash-related civil litigation, got a year in jail and five years probation after pleading guilty Thursday.
Tuan Thanh Tran, 43, admitted that he settled claims with insurance companies and kept more than $150,000 in payouts to five clients without informing them.
Tran is really a piece of work because by the time he'd pleaded guilty he'd already been disbarred by the loathe-to-disbar California State Bar for misdeeds involving totally different clients.
He pleaded guilty to 10 felony counts of embezzlement by fiduciary of trust and admitted 10 sentencing enhancement allegations of theft exceeding $150,000.
Tuan Thanh Tran, Former Attorney, Accused of Stealing $150k from Former Clients
Eleven felony counts of forgery were dismissed, City News Service reports.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.