Fraud, stalking, mystery wire transfers. Why these South Florida lawyers were disciplined
A couple of lawyers doing federal prison time and a couple of lawyers suspended from federal courts are among the nine South Florida attorneys on the most recent Florida Bar list of attorneys disciplined by the state Supreme Court.
One lawyer not on the list: Miami attorney Bruce Jacobs, against whom the Florida Bar tried to get an emergency suspension. Jacobs rails against, as he sees it, judicial robes cloaking the wearers against criticism or question, even in situations involving ethics.
Jacobs, the Bar petition said, “repeatedly attacked the judiciary without an objectively reasonable basis for doing so, filed frivolous pleadings, abused the judicial process, made misrepresentations to the court, and disrupted the tribunal. [Jacobs] was placed on notice, and sanctioned, in the trial and appellate courts multiple times for this misconduct.
“[Jacobs] continuing assaults on the process and the judiciary, both in his public record pleadings and statements, undermine public confidence in the administration of justice,” the petition continued, and “significantly impact scant judicial resources...”
In a rare refusal, the state Supreme Court rejected the Bar’s petition.
Before going into this pack of attorneys, a reminder about disciplinary revocation because it comes up a few times below. An attorney facing a discipline case can file for disciplinary revocation. The discipline case disappears, but so does the attorney, professionally — he or she is, essentially, disbarred.
This has no effect on any criminal or civil matters connected to the actions in the discipline case.
In alphabetical order:
Charles Burns, Tequesta
Burns was admitted to the Bar in 1980 and has decided not to fight the Bar matter pending concerning misappropriating of funds. He applied for disciplinary revocation without a chance at readmission. The Bar matter about misappropriating funds goes away and Burns is gone as a lawyer.
Sandra Coracelin, Miramar
Coracelin agreed to a three-year suspension in 2015 after misappropriating $345,000 of client funds in her trust account while mismanaging an escrow account related to real estate closings, according to the referee’s report by Judge August Bonavita.
Suspensions involve the punished attorney informing everybody even grazed by the attorney’s business, including the banks at which they have their trust accounts. Coracelin was supposed to tell Chase Bank to freeze her trust account, which had just over $2,000.
But one month after Coracelin’s suspension went into effect, about $1,960 surfed from that unfrozen account on a pair of wire transfers to Shelley Norton and Ursula O’Brien. Coracelin claimed she didn’t know them, and she didn’t know about the transfers until a January 2020 deposition. At that deposition, however, she claimed she’d already talked to Chase Bank about the transfers, so Judge Bonavita found that claim lacked credibility.
During her suspension, Coracelin did unsupervised legal work for friend and fellow attorney Verna Popo, to whom Coracelin transferred all her bankruptcy cases in progress at the time of her suspension. When the Bar came sniffing around with a subpoena to see if Coraclin had signed any documents for Popo, Popo found documents Coracelin had signed.
Popo testified to Bonavita that she and Coracelin disagreed about how to handle this. She said Coraclin asked her “Can you not produce that file?” and asked if she could take out the signed pages, sign blank ones and insert them in the file. Popo said she replied, “No, no, no. I’m not messing with the Florida Bar.”
Then, she said, Coracelin blew up at her in a rant that ended, “I should have said no to you, but I wanted to do a favor. ... I shouldn’t have done it. ...You’re messing with my livelihood. ...You’re taking food from my kid’s mouth. ... I barely did any legal work.”
For her part, Coracelin told Bonavita that while she definitely became upset, she “unequivocally denies that she told Popo that she should not cooperate with the Bar’s investigation” and, in a later call, told Popo “that she should comply with the subpoena and provide the Bar with everything that they were requesting.”
Bonavita found there was direct contact with Popo’s clients and tampering by Coracelin in her conversations with Popo: “She sought to convince her friend and attorney to conceal this fact by having her falsify documents in response to the Bar’s subpoena. All of this was done by Coracelin for the selfish purpose of obstructing the Bar in gathering facts necessary to determine whether she should be reinstated.”
Bonavita also found that Coracelin held herself out as an attorney on social media and, in her reinstatement application, concealed other legal work done for attorney Jason Weaver and Haft Legal Services.
Bonavita recommended Coracelin’s reinstatement petition be denied. The state Supreme Court agreed and found her guilty of contempt of the previous suspension.
Coracelin is disbarred.
Maite Diaz, Pembroke Pines
Diaz (admitted to the Bar in 2006) was suspended from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida in 2019 when the court found that she, her consent judgment said, “engaged in a consistent pattern ... of filing unsworn and unverified schedules and statements in over 100 bankruptcy filings since the beginning of 2017.”
To the bankruptcy court, by passing the schedules off as verified or executed when they weren’t, Diaz lied to the court.
Her consent judgment also said “The Court further found respondent’s method of practice to be “grossly incompetent.””
Diaz appealed the suspension. She explained she had her clients sign draft schedules and she’d update them as needed with so the schedules would have the latest numbers. Not having the clients sign the revised schedule did run afoul of bankruptcy court rules, but she wasn’t trying to fool anyone. Clients backed up Diaz as far as the accuracy of the revised schedules.
What was originally a two-year sanction by the bankruptcy court and the U.S. District Court was ended after a total of eight months. That still earned Diaz a public reprimand from the state Supreme Court.
Janet Lucente, Weston
Lucente (admitted in 1997) didn’t respond to a 2019 Bar complaint. That got her suspended. Then, she got suspended for 91 days for not providing an affidavit with the list of people she informed of her suspension.
While serving that suspension, the Bar alleges, she continued to work as an attorney and fibbed to the Bar in an affidavit.
In response to this latest set of charges, Lucente filed for disciplinary revocation. She’s, in effect, disbarred until at least April 29, 2027.
Daniel Markovich, Pembroke Pines and Jonathan Markovich, Surfside
Daniel (admitted to practice in 2017) and Jonathan (admitted in 2013) aren’t twins, but got twin indefinite suspensions from the state Supreme Court after their twin federal court convictions on conspiracy to commit healthcare and wire fraud; healthcare fraud; conspiracy to pay and receive kickbacks; and payment and offer of kickbacks in exchange for use of services.
READ MORE: Bal Harbour brothers hit with long prison terms in ‘sober homes’ fraud scheme
The older brother, Jonathan, also was convicted of money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering and bank fraud. As such, he got the bigger prison sentence, 15 years, eight months, to Daniel’s eight years, one month.
Lawrence Newman, Boca Raton
Newman, 75, was admitted to the Bar in 1974. In response to the Bar complaint about misuse of funds, Newman pulled the disciplinary revocation lever, taking him out of the legal business until at least June 11, 2027.
No criminal charges have been filed in the matter. Newman is dealing with a civil suit in Palm Beach County from his former clients, who allege malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty.
Newman’s former clients, who were being sued by a family member over an inheritance, claim they didn’t agree to a settlement of the lawsuit, but Newman accepted a settlement on their behalf. They also claim they had to sell real estate they didn’t want to sell to satisfy the settlement to which they didn’t agree.
Alan Ramer, Miami
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida suspended Ramer (admitted to practice in 1988) for six months after an Ad Hoc Committee found Ramer, in his unsuccessful defense of Chung Wei Wholesale for selling counterfeit Coach merchandise, behaved badly.
According to a referee’s report, Ramer and his clients didn’t show up for a mediation. They didn’t comply with discovery motions, earning $1,000 in sanctions. He didn’t answer phone calls or emails from the plaintiffs about motions and discovery disagreements nor did he file responses to all pleadings that required them.
And, the committee found, this was a pattern in Ramer’s appearances.
“The Ad Hoc Committee issued a Report and Recommendation that found Respondent demonstrated utter disregard for the local rules of court,” the referee’s report said. “The committee also found that Respondent lacked a fundamental knowledge of federal practice.”
The committee said it would ditch the suspension if Ramer completed a continuing legal education general course on federal practice, and, possibly, the local Rules for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida; he got evaluated by the Bar’s Practice Resource Institute; and he appeared before the Ad Hoc Committee before reinstatement.
Ramer hasn’t done that. So, he remains suspended by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District and a 91-day suspension by the Florida Supreme Court begins Sunday.
Grant Sarbinoff, Miami
Sarbinoff’s Florida Bar listing says “Retired,” which might seem strange for someone only 42 years old. But he also got hit with an indefinite suspension that started May 28.
Sarbinoff was sentenced in November to 10 years on probation on two counts of criminal use of personal identification information; one count of unlawful use of a two-way communications device; and sixteen counts of offenses against users of computers.
He committed these crimes against a woman he met via Tinder in November 2015 and dated for a year. Sarbinoff didn’t maintain his equanimity in the post-breakup reality.
READ MORE: Miami lawyer went high-tech to stalk, harass ex-girlfriend
A woman filed a stalking restraining order against him in Broward in May 2014 that’s still in effect.
This story was originally published June 17, 2022 at 8:19 AM.
