Vanishing lawyers

The lawyer who just … disappeared
Dan Horn
March 22, 2010
Cincinnati.com
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20100322/NEWS010702/3210380/The+lawye
Allen Schwartz came home early from work one summer day in 2001 and told his wife of 40 years that they needed to talk.

“I’m in trouble,” he said. “I’m going to leave.”

Schwartz was 71 at the time and had spent almost five decades building a successful Cincinnati law practice. Colleagues considered him a “gentleman lawyer” and his wife, Alice, expected to spend retirement with him in the Clifton home where they raised their three children.

So when Schwartz told his wife she would never see him again, and that he was leaving behind everyone and everything he ever cared about, she couldn’t believe he really meant it.

But he did.

She hasn’t seen him since. And neither have friends, relatives, neighbors or the prosecutors who later charged him with stealing more than $300,000 from clients.

Schwartz, who will turn 80 this year if he’s still alive, remains one of the city’s most enduring and unlikely mysteries, a man who was accused of betraying his family and his profession and then, seemingly, vanished into thin air.

“It was pretty dramatic,” said Mark Combs, a former administrator in Hamilton County Probate Court who had known Schwartz for years. “He just, literally, disappeared. He may be our local version of Jimmy Hoffa.”

About 5,000 lawyers nationwide are charged with crimes or disciplined each year for misconduct, and sometimes those lawyers run to escape justice.

Rarely, however, has a lawyer stayed on the run as long as Schwartz.

His case baffled Hamilton County prosecutors, the sheriff’s fugitive task force, his former clients, the Probate Court and just about anyone else who knew him – or thought they knew him – in the years before his disappearance.

“It was out of the dark,” said his wife, who authorities say did not know about or benefit from the stolen money. “I had no idea anything was wrong. All of a sudden, he told me he was going to leave, and he did.”

Schwartz’s name has occasionally popped up over the years, as it did when his law license was formally revoked in 2003 or when the state’s Clients’ Security Fund paid nine former clients a total of $374,000 in theft compensation a few years later.

But authorities say they have never received a tip or a solid lead about Schwartz’s whereabouts. There was plenty of speculation after he left – maybe he stashed the money in off-shore accounts; maybe he fled the country – but evidence has proven as elusive as Schwartz himself.

Schwartz refused to tell his family where he might go and left a letter that revealed nothing about his plans. “I won’t return of my own volition,” he wrote.

Relatives told authorities they have heard nothing from him since that day in 2001 when he broke the news to his wife. Law enforcement officials say his case remains the coldest of cold cases.

“There’s absolutely nothing,” said Andrew Berghausen, an assistant Hamilton County prosecutor. “We do encounter cases where attorneys steal money from their clients. But in terms of them disappearing?

“No. We don’t see that every day.”

No answers

Although Schwartz’s fate remains a mystery, his reasons for leaving have become clearer in the years since he vanished.

As he told his wife in 2001, he was in trouble. Most of that trouble swirled around Schwartz’s legal work in Probate Court, where he was supposed to protect the interests of clients who bequeathed money to relatives, friends or charities.

Investigators found evidence in Schwartz’s files that he may have been illegally tapping those clients’ funds as far back as 1967, when he handled the estate of a family friend who died in a plane crash. That case alone may have involved the misuse of more than $1 million.

Some of the most incriminating evidence came from the letter Schwartz left a colleague the day he disappeared. The four-page, handwritten note describes money he took from several estates, totaling tens of thousands of dollars.

Under a separate heading, labeled “good news,” he listed four estates from which he did not steal.

The letter is matter-of-fact and unemotional. He blames a gambling problem for the disappearance of so much money, but he doesn’t say whether any was left and offers no apology for taking it.

“I’m sick physically and mentally,” he wrote. “However, saying I’m sorry won’t help.”

The letter also states that not only was his wife unaware of his misdeeds, she was a victim of them.

Schwartz said he used more than $100,000 from their shared accounts to make partial payments to some of his clients’ beneficiaries, hoping to keep them from becoming suspicious.

He said his wife should move on with her life in his absence.

“She’ll file for divorce if she’s smart,” he wrote.

Schwartz’s letter was a starting point for criminal investigators and for Colleen Laux, the probate lawyer who took over his cases and tried to recover as much money as possible for his clients.

“He laid everything out,” she said. “He gave us a road map of what he did and what he took.”

But he didn’t tell anyone where to find the money, or whether there was even any money left.

‘He’s a thief’

Investigators from the Cincinnati Bar Association began reviewing Schwartz’s files in 2002 and concluded he had been taking money from clients for years.

The earliest case dates to 1967, when Schwartz handled the estate for Dr. Frederick Wolf, the family friend who died in a plane crash. Wolf’s wife, Paula, was hurt in the accident and Schwartz maintained control of her assets for years.

According to investigators, Wolf’s relatives never questioned Schwartz’s handling of the estate because he was a family friend and had been sending checks to Paula Wolf every month for years.

Those payments stopped, however, in March 2001. When Wolf’s son Scott asked Schwartz for an explanation, he said he’d made some bad investments and the money was gone.

In another case, a client allowed Schwartz to invest about $50,000 on her behalf in 1971 after she sold a house during a divorce. He never gave her a formal accounting of the assets and instead sent her a handwritten promissory note when she asked for the money in 1999.

Schwartz was gone before she could collect.

The cases that finally got the attention of law enforcement involved the estates of two deceased Cincinnati women, Helen Seretha Rainey and Helen Cecelia White. Investigators believe Schwartz took a total of more than $300,000 from those estates.

Bernice Dalton, a longtime friend of Rainey’s, received about $10,000 from her estate. She said that figure would have been much higher if Schwartz had not taken Rainey’s money.

She said her friend trusted Schwartz, who often visited her at home to help her with her estate planning.

“She thought he was something else. She just liked him so much,” Dalton said. “Isn’t it awful to do somebody like that? He’s a thief.”

Schwartz’s colleagues were as stunned by the misconduct accusations as they were by his disappearance. They said no one suspected the polite, hard-working attorney might be stealing from his clients.

“Typically, if there was a problem, it would not be uncommon to get a call or letter from a client,” said Combs, the former Probate Court administrator. “But I never heard anything from any of his clients. I never heard people say anything ill about him.”

A cold trail

Law enforcement officials say they haven’t given up on finding Schwartz, but they admit they have little to go on.

If he traveled out of the country, they could find no record of it. If he hid the money, they haven’t been able to trace it.

They are as surprised as anyone that a 71-year-old man, who now is approaching 80, could so completely cast aside his life and start over somewhere else.

“He cut off all contact,” said sheriff’s spokesman Steve Barnett. “No one’s heard anything from him.”

His wife eventually followed her husband’s advice and divorced him.

But the life she had been living, the life she had expected to continue, is over.

“It was extremely difficult for me, and I guess for him, too,” she said.

“It took me a long time to get over it, the shock of it.”

She said she tries not to spend much time thinking about what may have become of her ex-husband.

“I have no idea where he is,” she said. “And, frankly, I don’t want to know.”