NY lawyer living in South Florida made $1 million from fake ADA lawsuits, feds say

A New York lawyer living in Davie has been charged with pocketing about $1 million in settlements from bogus lawsuits claiming violations of laws protecting disabled Americans in New York and Florida.

Attorney Stuart Finkelstein, 65, was arrested and released on $150,000 bail after an appearance in federal court in Fort Lauderdale Tuesday. He will be formally charged in the Southern District of New York, where prosecutors filed a criminal complaint.

Finkelstein could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

State records show that Finkelstein is not registered as a lawyer in Florida. His criminal case has prompted a Florida Bar investigation into whether Finkelstein was “unlicensed” to practice law in the state, a spokesperson for the association confirmed.

In a news release, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said Finkelstein stole the identities of two individuals to file more than 300 phony lawsuits in New York and Florida. The lawsuits falsely claimed the two individuals were unable to access public establishments because they did not comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to a criminal complaint.

Berman said the two individuals had never retained Finkelstein, were unaware of the ADA lawsuits filed in their names, and had never visited the establishments targeted by the New York lawyer.

Berman said Finkelstein carried out a “galling scheme” that was “as profitable as it was brazen.”

The criminal complaint said Finkelstein made false representations to various establishments before suing them in the Southern District of New York and the Southern District of Florida from October 2013 through last May. The complaint accuses Finkelstein of obstructing judicial proceedings and then settling the fake lawsuits to collect more than $900,000 in attorney’s fees.

While an online federal court system indicates Finkelstein was involved as a lawyer in dozens of ADA cases in New York, his name does not appear on any cases in South Florida. That is because Finkelstein was working for an unnamed Florida attorney behind the scenes in the disability cases filed in South Florida, according to the complaint.

Prosecutors said Finkelstein assisted in 280 ADA cases filed on behalf of one purported victim in South Florida, which generated about $650,000 in attorney’s fees. They said Finkelstein was the lawyer in 30 disability cases filed on behalf of the second purported victim in New York, which produced $270,000 in additional fees.

On Tuesday, Finkelstein was arrested on charges of mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, obstruction of justice and making false declarations to a court. He is expected to be charged by indictment and arraigned in federal court in Manhattan.

In a story published earlier this year, the New York Post reported Finkelstein usually targeted small businesses.

“It’s like the old days, when the Mafia would say, ‘You have to pay us or we’ll break your windows,’ ” Micheline Gaulin, the owner of the Left Bank eatery in Manhattan’s West Village, told the newspaper. The Post said she paid over $18,000 to Finkelstein in what she called “a legal shakedown.”

The Post said Finkelstein was barred from practicing law in New York state in 2007 but was reinstated in 2016 after a probe by the state judiciary’s Committee on Character and Fitness.

After the story published in the Miami Herald, a New York nonprofit group called the Lawsuit Reform Alliance, sent a statement from executive director Tom Stebbins on the case.

“The Americans with Disabilities Act, a law with the most noble intentions, is consistently abused and has become a cash cow for unscrupulous lawyers. Nowhere is this abuse more prevalent than in New York’s federal courts,” Stebbins said. “For years, lawyers have been manufacturing clients, alleging obstacles to access and then recruiting clients, and in this case, filing lawsuits without the named plaintiff’s consent. We are happy to see the US attorney’s office prosecuting this fraud. We have known for a long time that many of these cases are not about ensuring access for the disabled, but about extorting settlements.”

This story was originally published November 20, 2019 at 11:02 AM.