WHITE PLAINS – Former
Orange County lawyer Joseph Scali was found guilty in White Plains federal
court on Thursday of all 10 counts of an indictment following a four-week
trial before Judge Nelson Roman.
Scali, 68, now living in West Hartford, Connecticut, was convicted of
mail fraud, structuring cash transactions, making false statements to
the IRS, obstructing the IRS, tax evasion, obstruction of justice, and
perjury.
When sentenced in June, he could face up to 20 years in federal prison.
It was alleged that Scali, who represented the seller of land and mineral
rights in Pennsylvania, schemed to defraud the prospective purchaser of
the property of the $850,000 he was given to hold in escrow by misappropriating
it from his attorney trust fund.
He also engaged in tax evasion in 2011 and 2012, by among other things,
deliberately withholding from the IRS his attorney trust account records,
which would have revealed the funds in misappropriated.
He was also charged with trying to obstruct the IRS by providing materially
false, incomplete, and misleading information to an IRS officer about
his filing history and income; comingling of client funds and personal
funds in his attorney trust account; paying for personal items directly
out of that account; structuring $32,400 in cash deposits into that account;
and failing to timely file income tax returns for 2006 through 2012.
