NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A former attorney who pleaded guilty to stealing millions of dollars from a prominent New Orleans law firm and a casino operator he once represented was sentenced Wednesday to just over 15 years in prison and ordered to repay about $23 million.
Former Adams and Reese partner James Perdigao, 46, pleaded guilty in October to charges that included fraud and money laundering. He briefly apologized before U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon sentenced him.
Fallon also ordered Perdigao to pay restitution of about $11 million to his former law firm, about $6 million to casino company Pinnacle Entertainment, about $5 million to the Internal Revenue Service and about $768,000 to the Louisiana Department of Revenue.
Fallon scolded Perdigao before he handed down the sentence.
“You let yourself down, you let your family down, you let your profession down, and you let your country down,” the judge said. “It’s not aberrant behavior. For a decade you did this, not just one time.”
Perdigao expressed remorse in a statement filed by U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office on the eve of the sentencing hearing. In the statement, Perdigao said he regrets making “uncorroborated allegations” about Letten and other prosecutors “based entirely on rumor and hearsay.”
Perdigao had accused Letten’s office of failing to act on information he gave them about other criminal activity because his allegations involved a key witness against former Gov. Edwin Edwards, whom Letten prosecuted for corruption.
He also had dropped a lawsuit that accused his former Adams and Reese colleagues of involvement in a wide range of fraud and bribery schemes, including the WorldCom scandal.
“His crimes were reprehensible,” Letten said of Perdigao. “The man abused a position of trust and stole about $30 million from his clients and his law firm.”
Perdigao, who resigned from Adams and Reese in September 2004, was awaiting trial in the fraud case last year when a grand jury indicted him on new charges that he hacked into his former firm’s computer system and stole confidential correspondence between prosecutors and the firm.
“This man’s crimes were about as broad as any economic crimes could be,” Letten said.
