Rye Lawyer Attempted To Embezzle Dead Client's Estate: Feds

RYE, NY — A Westchester County lawyer was indicted for trying to embezzle from an estate for which he was the court-appointed administrator. Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Tuesday that a federal grand jury in White Plains charged Guy Parisi, 71, of Rye, with conspiracy, mail fraud and making false statements.

He said Parisi was arrested Monday morning.

Berman said Parisi allegedly embezzled funds from an estate for which he was a court-appointed fiduciary.

“Parisi allegedly shirked his responsibilities to the estate in order to serve his own greed. Now he faces justice in a criminal court,” he said.

According to the allegations contained in the indictment, Parisi was appointed administrator of the estate of a former Mount Vernon resident in April 2017. His duties included collecting the assets of the estate.

He had a duty to the estate and to the decedent’s son, the sole beneficiary of his father’s will, authorities said.

New York law provided for a fee for estate administrators like Parisi based on a percentage of the value of the estate’s assets.

A substantial part of the estate’s assets reverted to the state as abandoned property between 2000 and 2008, when the estate was first presented to the Surrogate’s Court. These assets were held in the custody of the state comptroller.

Around June 2017, Parisi, on behalf of the estate, retained Stokes Asset Recovery Services as the estate’s abandoned property location service in exchange for a fee of 15 percent of the value of the estate’s assets held by the comptroller, which is the maximum fee allowed by New York law.

Parisi did not disclose, and actively concealed, to authorities said that Stokes was owned by a relative and that he and the relative had formed Stokes less than two weeks before he notified the comptroller of his retention of Stokes, as he was required to do under state law.

Parisi and his relative named Stokes after a Southampton street on which Parisi owned a waterfront vacation home.

At the time he retained Stokes, Parisi knew that the estate’s assets held by the comptroller were worth several million dollars.

In November 2017, Parisi was interviewed by a postal inspector. He falsely told the inspector, according to authorities, that he had worked with Stokes in the past and that the fee was 5 percent of the value of the assets held by the comptroller.

The charges that Parisi faces are conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, mail fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and making a false statement, which could bring him a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

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