Thief who stole $125K check from federal defense attorney gets 21 months

A check-stealing thief who targeted a defense lawyer got 21 months behind bars Tuesday — after a Brooklyn judge said she didn’t buy the crook’s statement he only recently realized he didn’t commit a victimless crime.
“I’m not sure why you learned this now,” Brooklyn Judge Ann Donnelly said before sentencing 29-year-old Markel Washington. “You stole this person’s life, her identity. Everything that makes her a person, you took. The toll that this crime takes on people, I don’t know how much attention it gets.”
Washington, of the Bronx, was one of eight defendants indicted in Brooklyn in check-stealing schemes that targeted U.S. Treasury checks sent out to Criminal Justice Act panel lawyers — lawyers appointed by the federal court to represent indigent defendants. His lawyer, Elena Fast, was a CJA panel appointment.
He pleaded guilty to bank fraud earlier this year, and admitted to his role in trying to steal a defense attorney’s $125,386.81 check last year.
Up until this past March, checks to CJA lawyers were required by law to be sent out through snail mail — and the envelopes they arrive in make them easy pickings for sophisticated thieves like Washington and his accomplices. Congress changed the language of that law to allow for direct deposits.
Washington went on the dark web to buy the victim’s personal identifying info, then worked up fake IDs so an accomplice, Ada Tavarez, could pose as the lawyer.
“These materials appeared so legitimate that even the bank believed they were real,” Assistant U.S. Attorney James Simmons said Tuesday.
Though the bank cancelled payment on the check before Washington and company could make off with the money, it still took roughly six months for the victim to finally get her check.
He’s already served 10 months of his sentence in MDC Brooklyn awaiting trial, and his lawyer was hoping for a sentence of a year and a day.
Washington apologized to the victim and his family, telling Donnelly, “I regret what I did, and I feel terrible and extremely sorry for the amount of trouble that I caused.”
The victim, along with a CJA defense lawyer targeted in a different theft, wrote letters to Donnelly asking to sentence Washington to a prison term.
Donnelly called the work of CJA lawyers a “demanding ” job. “It is underpaid and very under-appreciated,” she said. “Our system cannot function without lawyers who are willing to do the work of representing indigent defendants who are convicted of a crime.”
In addition to 21 months — the high end of the sentencing range recommended by federal guidelines — Donnelly also ordered Washington perform 100 hours of community service.
Several lawyers who are appointed to indigent federal defendants through the CJA Panel have told the Daily News that many of their checks had also gone missing or been stolen in recent years.
Still, one CJA panel lawyer, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, bristled at the idea that his fellow defense attorneys would press for prison time.
“I’m a little disappointed in my brethren,” he said. “I happen to think that prison doesn’t fix almost anything … There has to be better societal fixes than the prison system.”
Margulis-Ohnuma said a $72,000 Treasury check written out to him was cashed by a thief, and the feds haven’t made an arrest in the case.
“My take on it is that the hard work has to be done in the investigative stage, and that long prison sentences are not gonna deter anybody,” he said. “Instead of spending all that money on prisons, we should be spending it on making sure that before cashing checks in the five figures, the person knows who they’re giving the money to.”