Miami lawyer called 17 Gables area homes a lover’s gift. Judge called her a schemer
Over four years after a Miami-Dade judge called her a schemer who tried to take advantage of a lover 29 years her senior, a longtime Miami tax attorney starts a two-year suspension.
Coral Gables resident Suzanne DeWitt agreed to the professional timeout that begins Saturday.
Though admitting misconduct in her professional discipline case, DeWitt said she always thought of affluent Belgian Marc Moerbeke as her lover, not her client. She claimed her breaking things off with Moerbeke ignited his lawsuit against her regarding 17 homes in and around Coral Gables, properties she once claimed were gifts via the LLCs that owned them.
DeWitt’s “wrongful conduct resulted from personal issues relating to her long-term romantic relationship with Mr. Van Moerbeke,” the guilty plea for consent judgment said. DeWitt “was 36 when she met Mr. Van Moerbeke and during their relationship, they shared a home together. Mr. Van Moerbeke’s promise to marry her in the future was never fulfilled and attempts to conceive a child through medical IVF procedures failed.
“The misconduct occurred during the contentious dissolution of this relationship.”
The guilty plea says the 17 properties were acquired because the two were together.
“She truly believed that any advice she gave him was as his intimate partner and confidante, not as an attorney,” the guilty plea said. “However, she concedes that, in her business dealings with Mr. Van Moerbeke regarding the 17 Miami properties, as an attorney, she should have done better.”
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While DeWitt’s guilty plea painted her as what becomes of the broken hearted, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Michael Hanzman’s 26-page final judgment excoriation of DeWitt in Van Moerbeke’s 2020 lawsuit painted her as trying to steal a goldmine and leave him with the shaft.
Hanzman wrote: “Relying on the advanced age, the foreign residence, and the abiding trust of Van Moerbeke, DeWitt embarked on an audacious scheme to defraud him by undertaking a calculated series of surreptitious deceptions intended to give her direct ownership of all of the LLCs, and thus indirect ownership of all the real estate owned by those LLCs, without having to invest a penny.”
By ditching her fiduciary duty as Van Moerbeke’s lawyer, Hanzman ruled, DeWitt sucked $2,246,489 from the LLCs “to which she had no entitlement and which was spent on her legal fees, personal expenses, including clothing, meals, entertainment and things completely unrelated to the business of the LLCs.”
Before the suspension, DeWitt owned a clean discipline record since joining the Florida Bar in 1999 after graduating from the University of Miami School of Law.
Lawyer, lover or schemer?
In his ruling, Hanzman said DeWitt met Van Moerbeke “by chance” at New York’s Waldorf Astoria on unrelated business trips in February 2008.
The 65-year-old Van Moerbeke let drop that he was in town to meet with a potential buyer for one of his companies. The 36-year-old DeWitt, in New York to do a presentation for Bessemer Trust, let drop that she owned expertise in international taxation and investment structuring. He took her up on her offer to review the sale agreement.
When Van Moerbeke met with the potential buyer the next day, Hanzman wrote, “DeWitt was identified as Van Moerbeke’s counsel” and she learned of his robust financial health.
Hanzman said DeWitt grew their attorney-client relationship and worked on warming up Van Moerbeke’s feelings for her by offering her expertise, reviewing sale documents, but refusing to accept payment for her services, and using “highly personal salutations.”
One email opened, “Hello, darling!” and, Hanzman wrote, DeWitt “later routinely signed off her emails with the acronym ILY (I love you), and led Van Moerbeke to believe that she had romantic feelings for him and that she could be trusted.”
By late 2011, Van Moerbeke and DeWitt were a couple and he’d come up with a plan — use one of his companies to buy homes around Coral Gables for renovation and renting. He also offered DeWitt the chance to be an investor and manager of the properties.
“In other words, Van Moerbeke offered DeWitt the opportunity to benefit from a significant upside in the appreciation of property without assuming any downside risk,” Hanzman wrote. “Rather than accept that proposal, DeWitt, acting as counsel to Van Moerbeke, and without complying (or even attempting to comply) with any of the Rules Regulating the Florida Bar, put in motion a scheme to secure these assets for herself.”
Paper and the houses
For each home bought, DeWitt ordered a third party to create a Delaware-based LLC, a limited liability company, to own the home. Van Moerbeke’s company, Perceval, which would later become Agorive, owned each of the LLCs.
“What Van Moerbeke did not know was that DeWitt was also, at the same time, preparing membership certificates indicating that she was the sole member of these LLCs and that her mother was the manager,” Hanzman wrote. “DeWitt never disclosed to Van Moerbeke that she had done so.”
Eventually, Van Moerbeke began asking DeWitt for documents for Agorive’s investments, then, in December 2017, demanding he see something from DeWitt as far as records. When she didn’t satisfy him, Van Moerbeke hired a third party who sent a June 4, 2018, letter demanding records, books and all information about the LLCs.
DeWitt responded on June 14, 2018, Hanzman said, with a claim that “Agorive’s investments belonged to her and she claimed them to be personal gifts made to her by Van Moerbeke.”
Hanzman pointed out this would be a gift worth about $13.5 million that a two-decade tax attorney “never memorialized for tax purposes” nor that had been mentioned in any communication between DeWitt and Van Moerbeke or DeWitt and her accountants.
“This case turns on a single factual dispute: namely,whether Van Moerbeke gifted 17 parcels of real estate and the improvements thereon (i.e., houses) — currently valued well in excess of $15,000,000 — to his romantic partner/attorney DeWitt,” Hanzman wrote. “The evidence overwhelmingly confirms that the answer is no. In fact, not a shred of credible evidence supports DeWitt’s claim that Van Moerbeke bestowed upon her such largesse.”
Hanzman also noted that Van Moerbeke had to fight for almost two years and three months in court because DeWitt funded her defense with $1 million from rent on the houses — money that belonged to Van Moerbeke.
This story was originally published January 10, 2025 at 9:47 AM.
